So we’re here in Austin, Texas. We came down here for the Tesla robotaxi rollout . It started on Sunday. Are you going to have full autonomous on the roads of Austin at the end by the end of June? Yes.
This is not the widespread rollout of Tesla Cybercabs or robotaxis that investors, customers and fans have been promised. That said, there are a lot of people who really do believe in this company and do believe in Elon Musk and think it’s just a matter of time. Here it is. It found me. It came right here.
Perfect. I thought it was extremely smooth. Everything we saw, not just from a safety perspective. Maneuverability was way impressive. I thought, actually, better than even Waymo coming out of the gates.
Dan Ives, a Wedbush analyst and Tesla bull, received an invitation and his team took a ride.
And I think the other thing is that this is just the start, because I think a year from now, 25 to 30 cities, it speaks to this trillion dollar autonomous valuation that we believe will be for Tesla. But the trips weren’t without incident. I showed up and you know, the service launch on Monday was supposed to start at 6 a.m.
and by 6:30, I’d already found it doing dangerous stuff. CNBC reached out to Tesla multiple times to try to get a robotaxi ride or a comment, but we did not hear back.
This is a pretty pivotal moment for Tesla. This is where they demonstrate whether they can transition from being a mass producer of electric vehicles to a company that’s centered around autonomous vehicles and robotics. We came down here to talk to people, to interview some folks, some people who are supportive, some people who are very critical and skeptical, some people wonder whether Tesla can even do what they are attempting to do with technology they have, and the approach that they’re taking.
Where this whole thing gets really troubling is that in a lot of ways, what Elon Musk is doing is, is endangering public roads that are already a very dangerous place, putting half-baked technology in pursuit of something that he’ll never be able to deliver on. I believe in Tesla. I tried different, you know, even in Europe, I tried the Chinese ones. They’re not as safe. They’re smaller.
But I believe in Tesla.
So you’ve tried the autonomous vehicles in China. Oh. Far out. All right.
Okay, cool. And you think that they’ve got a shot at doing this here? That’s not the future. I immediately tried to download a robotaxi app so that I can and find out what the the area was that they were servicing because I want to ride. This rollout is a long time coming.
Elon Musk has been promising for years, close to a decade, that Tesla vehicles will be able to drive themselves, that you would even be able to rent out your Tesla as a robotaxi and collect revenue on the vehicle while you slept.
Of course, none of that has happened yet. In the meantime, Waymo has been going from one city to the next to the next. They’ve been growing their fleet size and their and their geo fences and the number of cities that they’re operating in at a faster and faster and faster rate. So Elon Musk’s whole argument that Waymo’s approach won’t scale is being proven wrong.
Another thing to keep in mind here is that Tesla is taking a very different approach than pretty much everybody else. A lot of other companies are using things like lidar and radar on their cars. Tesla isn’t using any of that.
Tesla’s ultimate aim is to make every single Tesla on the road, everywhere in the world capable of self-driving. And that’s really different from what Waymo and these other companies are doing.
They’re basically starting with, you know, deploying vehicles in very concentrated areas like Austin, Phoenix, San Francisco, and just trying to get that area down as well as they can and then open it up to rideshare. If you’re developing what Tesla says it’s developing, which is a general solution to self-driving, where any of their cars will work anywhere, will self-drive itself safely, anywhere.
That’s very different than what’s happening here in Austin, where we’re seeing sort of Tesla moving towards what Waymo has been doing all along. There’s two admissions here that Tesla is doing that are admitting that what Waymo is doing and Zoox and others is the right approach. Number one is they’re constraining the geofence.
They have a tiny little geofence, right. It’s only in South Austin. They’re doing that so they can have the statistical certainty that it’s safe.
But they’re also using lidar because they know that the camera system alone doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. It doesn’t know always when it’s safe and when it’s not.
So to get a better idea of how a lot of people here in Austin feel about this rollout and about autonomous vehicles in general, we went to a pretty iconic coffee shop in the city and talked to a few folks. Some people love the idea, some people not so much. I just think it’s amazing what what Elon’s doing with Tesla, as well as the other SpaceX and The Boring Company. All of his companies. I think it’s just amazing and it’s great for this country.
And I think it’s great for for the world. I’m not going to get into a car driven by computer. So no, probably there’s not very much that will change my mind. You’re a purist. I guess so.
Yeah. I don’t know.
Humanist, maybe. Would you ever ride in one of these, like, Waymo’s or Teslas or anything yourself? I haven’t yet, I haven’t had the need to, but.
Yeah. Do you ever want to? Does it seem like some interesting or fun or cool or anything? Not. Not so much.
I think the skepticism might be more tied to the owner of said business, because I have no idea who owns Waymo. No idea who the CEO is. I don’t know what their political leanings are. Whereas like Elon is clearly Tesla. And so if you’re spending money, you’re spending it with Elon as much as you are with the company.
Whereas like again, Waymo, I have no idea who owns it. The rollout actually is really limited to a select group of people. It’s not open to the public. You can’t order a Tesla robotaxi.
Ed Niedermayer is a journalist who’s been covering Tesla for a long time.
He’s been down here. He took us to a depot where we were able to see where the company is staging and deploying some of its vehicles. This is right behind where I’ve been seeing a lot of the test vehicles and the robotaxis both come in and out of. So what I saw specifically was I followed one of the driverless robotaxis from the depot down this road, and on one side of the road there were a number of police vehicles.
They were parked completely off the road, but they had their lights on.
But for like two out of the 5 or 6 police cars, it clearly recognized there was a police car and it just stopped in the middle of the road. I lost the car on footage, you know, because I went past it. It slowed down so much. This should not be happening. If these systems get confused, what they’re supposed to do is go to what’s called a minimal risk condition, which means sort of pull over at the side of the road, pull over to the safest place possible and then stop, and then you get the remote intervention, come in and they sort of get the system up and going and get it on with things.
This was not doing that. This was coming to a stop in the left lane of a 40 mile per hour road. Like this is against the law. And and most importantly, it proves that the system doesn’t know how to interact properly with law enforcement. So this is not the large scale robotaxi rollout that the company has been promising customers and investors for years.
This is really limited invite only, only a small number of vehicles. But a lot is riding on this. They’re testing these cars in public, and this is what a lot of investors say justifies Tesla’s current stock price. There are some investors and analysts who say that it could as much as double Tesla’s market cap..
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