► Tesla Robotaxi and Robovan revealed
► Fully autonomous EVs for the future
► Robotaxi due from 2027
Tesla has revealed its long-teased Robotaxi and Robovan at a special event. The new vehicles are Tesla’s next steps in terms of autonomy and self-driving technology.
‘You see a lot of sci-fi movies where the future is dark and dismal, it’s not a future you want to be in,’ says Elon Musk during the streamed We, Robot event at a Warner Bros. studio. ‘We want a fun, exciting future.
The new Robotaxi is a two-door, butterfly-doored coupe with enormous wheels and a clean design. Inside there is no steering wheel – just seats and a typically enormous screen.
That’s how far Tesla is pushing its ‘full self-driving’ technology – it’s developing a vehicle without any conventional driver controls. The first step is ensuring its Model 3 and Model Y are approved for ‘unsupervised’ self-driving in 2025, before the Robotaxi arrives in 2027. And, like Tesla’s other models, the Robotaxi and Robovan do without lidar, instead relying on AI and cameras to drive autonomously.
‘When we think of transport today, there’s a lot of pain that we take on that we think is normal,’ he adds, ‘like having to drive around LA in three hours of traffic. But there’s also the fact that cars cost too much and not used that much – on average around 10 hours out of 168 hours per week. But if they were autonomous, they could be used five times more, maybe even 10 times more.’
The Robotaxi is also destined to have wireless charging; ‘Robotaxi has no plug, it just drives over an inductive charger.’
On top of that, the Robovan is designed to be more of a bus and goods transport vehicle. ‘We’re going to make this, and it’ll look like that,’ says Musk.
Musk says that the ‘cost of autonomous transport will be so low that you can think of it like individualised mass transit,’ adding that he wants to ‘change the look of roads’ and reduce the amount of parking lots in the UK.