Elon Musk has confirmed that Tesla's robotaxi platform that will launch in Austin in June will be a lot like Waymo, instead of wandering about freely with FSD on. The initial batch will include ten pilot vehicles.
Daniel Zlatev, Published
While Waymo boasts that it has completed its ten millionth paid autonomous ride, Tesla's CEO Elon Musk went on record confirming that its homebrew robotaxi platform that will launch in June will be structured a lot like it.
According to Musk, the service will not only start slow with about ten pilot Model Y vehicles, but they will also be restricted to the "safest" from a driving perspective areas in the city of Austin where the pilot program will start. This sounds a lot like geofencing the region where the robotaxis will operate, similar to what Waymo is doing, even though Musk has often been dismissive of Waymo's approach.
At the last quarterly earnings call, he touted Tesla's "generalized" AI solution that can adapt faster to driving scenarios and has no need for mapping of a certain area like other robotaxi companies. It now turns out that Tesla will do pre-mapping and geofencing, after all.
"We are actually going to deploy not to the entire Austin region, but only the parts that are the safest," tipped Musk. "So we will geofence it... It's not going to take intersections unless we are highly confident it will do well," he confirmed.
While the Model Y robotaxis will be driverless, there will be operators sitting on standby in case something goes wrong, too, again something that Waymo is doing. Tesla already started training the Austin police and first responders on how to react to its driverless robotaxis as, from the looks of it, the platform will be rather conventional and will differ little from what others are doing in the field, at least in the beginning.
The main advantage, of course, is that Tesla will be doing it with stock Model Y vehicles which are 20%-25% cheaper per unit than the modified Waymo cars that carry LiDAR and extra sensors, according to Musk.
Waymo's former CEO John Krafcik is of a different opinion, though, saying that the production cost savings for the vehicles that Tesla will be deploying as robotaxis are not worth the risk in terms of safety. Over the long run, he argued, the LiDAR and extra sensors have a "trivial cost-per-mile impact over the useful life of a robotaxi while also providing massive quantifiable safety benefits."
It remains to be seen whose approach will turn out to be the correct one in the long run, though, as Tesla will just be starting its robotaxi journey next month in Austin with a limited number of cars and in a geofenced area.
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Daniel Zlatev - Senior Tech Writer - 1711 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2021
Wooed by tech since the industrial espionage of Apple computers and the times of pixelized Nintendos, Daniel went and opened a gaming club when personal computers and consoles were still an expensive rarity. Nowadays, fascination is not with specs and speed but rather the lifestyle that computers in our pocket, house, and car have shoehorned us in, from the infinite scroll and the privacy hazards to authenticating every bit and move of our existence.
