.jpg)
The message went out on April 5.
“Tesla Robotaxi unveiled on 8/8,” Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk Written on Xformerly Twitter, the social networking site he owns.
RELATED: Elon Musk’s Fourth Major Plan Sparks Tesla Stock Analysts’ Speculation
“I chose it partly because 8/8 is a lucky number in China!” Musk said in a Follow the post“Also, it’s my triplets’ birthday, who are now seventeen.”
The number eight is actually considered a lucky number in Chinese numerology, because it sounds similar to the verb meaning “to get rich”, so the more eights, the better.
Musk has been talking about a robotaxi service for years. During a call with investors in 2019, Musk said Tesla expects to have a million vehicles on the road that can operate as robotaxi.
Now, it seems so something That is expected to happen in August, although NBC News noted in April that regulators in California, Arizona and Nevada had not heard from the company about its plans.
Andrey Sokolov/Image Alliance via Getty Images
Robotaxi Day is a ‘significant historical moment’, analysts say
Earlier this month, after shareholders approved a long-awaited compensation package for Musk, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who has an outperform rating on the electric automaker’s shares with a $275 price target, said, “We think August 8 will be… Automated taxis will be a key historical moment for the Tesla story that we see as a near-term catalyst.”
“We expect Tesla to showcase a robotaxi concept on August 8 and perhaps a companion app, and to reveal more about its expected business model,” JPMorgan analyst Ryan Brinkman said earlier this month. quartz. “But we do not expect to generate material revenue potential for years to come.”
RELATED: Analysts Reset Tesla Stock Price Target Ahead of Elon Musk’s ‘Plan 4’
Tesla’s technology path is primarily based on visual perception, while other companies use a multi-sensor fusion approach.
While this is expected to lower the cost of the self-driving system and increase the potential for mass production, JPMorgan Chase said relying solely on visual perception and abandoning sensors such as LiDAR may not fully guarantee the system’s reliability and safety, which would impact robotaxi development and regulatory approval.
Elon Musk’s Tesla isn’t the only company looking to cut into the robotaxi business.
In China, Pony.ai and WeRide will start charging for rides using their self-driving taxi fleets between Beijing Daxing International Airport and Yizhuang District.
Closer to home, there’s Alphabet’s (Google) Waymo.
The Mountain View company, formerly known as Google’s self-driving car project, said on June 25 that its self-driving passenger transportation service, Waymo One, is now available to everyone in San Francisco, nearly four years after a similar move in Phoenix, Arizona.
Waymo said about 300,000 people have signed up to ride with Waymo since the waitlist first opened in the city.
Before Waymo Driver begins operating in a new area, Waymo maps the area “in incredible detail, from lane markings to stop signs to sidewalks and crosswalks,” the company said on its website.
Rather than relying solely on external data like GPS, which can lose signal strength, the Waymo Driver app uses its own detailed custom maps, which are matched with real-time sensor data, to pinpoint its exact location on the road.
Bloomberg columnist Dave Lee raved about Waymo’s progress. He shared his thoughts in January in a column titled “Slow and steady Waymo wins the self-driving race“
“Waymo is certainly a reminder that when dealing with extremely powerful technology, patience is a virtue — not just for the people dealing with it, but also for the long-term success of the company,” he wrote.
Waymo, he noted, “has consistently acted more slowly despite significant pressure from outside investors who wonder why, with all its financial power, it wasn’t running rings around these competitors.”
The robotaxi business is a new field for companies, and it has proven to be wild and unpredictable.
General Motors’ (General Motors) Cruise’s self-driving vehicle unit announced on June 25 that former Amazon and Microsoft executive Mark Whitten is its new CEO, effective July 16.
Regulators are increasing pressure on bots
Whitten was a founding engineer at Xbox and Xbox Live, and joined the team about nine months after one of Cruise’s robotaxi vehicles pulled a pedestrian — who had just been hit by a human-driven car — across a San Francisco street before stopping.
Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt stepped down after the incident.
More about Tesla:
- Analysts Recalibrate Tesla Stock Forecasts After Musk Wins $56 Billion
- Katie Wood reveals a surprising price target for Tesla shares
- An analyst expects that Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, may create a company competing with Apple
The incident prompted the California Department of Motor Vehicles to suspend robo-taxi service just two months after another state regulator, the Public Utilities Commission, approved an expansion allowing 24-hour rides throughout San Francisco.
Some members of the public have expressed their displeasure with the presence of automated taxis on their streets.
There have been several attacks on robo-taxis, including an incident on February 10, when a mob near San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood vandalized and set fire to a Waymo-owned Jaguar I-Pace electric SUV, causing It led to the self-driving car burning in the city streets amid Lunar New Year celebrations.
In addition, regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Investigating the safety of various self-driving systems Yet more incidents have been reported involving the technology.
The NHTSA probe is looking at the performance of Waymo’s Autopilot system and its ability to avoid collisions, as well as its ability to detect and respond to traffic safety controls such as cones, traffic lights, and traffic signals.
The agency also concluded its investigation into Tesla and its Automated and Full Self-Driving system, finding that the systems were not designed to keep the driver engaged in the actual task of driving.
NHTSA is also investigating an Amazon-owned company. (I am sad) Zoox after two of its vehicles were involved in separate crashes involving motorcycles, as well as BlueCruise, the hands-free semi-autonomous driver assistance system found in a variety of Ford vehicles (F) Cars like the Mustang Mach-E electric crossover.
Will robotaxis become the norm anytime soon?
Michael Everett, an assistant professor at Northeastern University with joint appointments in the College of Engineering and the Khuri College of Computer Science, said, North East World News There is still a long way to go before the technology is good enough to reach the mainstream market.
“The technology doesn’t seem to me to be there yet,” says Everett, who leads the Autonomy and Intelligence Lab at Northeastern University. “The reality is that these autonomous vehicles are still very specialized pieces of equipment.”
“Transparency is really important because these are not just self-driving cars on a private test track where nothing can go wrong and everyone has agreed to accept the risk,” Everett added.
Related: Veteran Fund Manager Picks His Favorite Stocks for 2024
