Musk's bets on Tesla: no human drivers this year, robots next
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[January 27, 2022] By
Hyunjoo Jin and Nivedita Balu
(Reuters) - Tesla's most important products
this year and next will not be cars, CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday,
but software that drives them autonomously and a humanoid robot the
company expects to help out in the factory.
The audacious promises by the best-known billionaire in the electric car
industry face major challenges, from technology to regulation. Tesla and
other auto technology companies have missed their targets for
self-driving software for years.
"I love the fact that they're pushing the envelope, but I think they are
too aggressive," said Roth Capital Partners analyst Craig Irwin.
Musk has built a career on defying skeptics with working businesses in
electric cars and rockets. Some Tesla drivers buy $12,000 self-driving
packages in the expectation that full autonomy is around the corner, and
60,000 Tesla drivers are testing the latest self-driving software, a
scale that other autonomous vehicle software companies can only dream
of.
"I would be shocked if we do not achieve full self-driving safer than
human this year. I would be shocked," Musk said, predicting full
self-driving would become "the most important source of profitability
for Tesla."
"It's nutty good from a financial standpoint," he said, saying robotaxis
would boost the utility of a vehicle by five times, as owners can send
their cars out to work when not needed.
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Tesla uses cameras and artificial intelligence, avoiding other
technologies such radar and lidar that rivals such as Waymo include.
That approach has drawn fire.
"You have to be able to not only just see a person, like right in front
of you, you have to do so, with 99.999999999% reliability. Even running
over someone once is not an acceptable answer," Austin Russell, CEO of
lidar maker Luminar, told Reuters.
Philip Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been
working on autonomous vehicle safety, said a big problem is that at
scale, unusual cases constantly can crop up.
"Without a human driver to handle safety for novel situations the
machine learning hasn't been taught already, it's very difficult to
ensure safety in a completely automated vehicle," he said.
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![](../images/012722pics/busine33.jpg)
The interior of a Tesla Model S is shown in autopilot mode in San
Francisco, California, U.S., April 7, 2016. REUTERS/Alexandria
Sage/File Photo
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REGULATION
Even if the technology works, Tesla would come under more rigorous scrutiny from
regulators before deploying fleets of free-roaming robotaxis. U.S. auto safety
regulators opened a safety investigation into Tesla's advanced driver assistant
system after crashes involving the vehicles and parked emergency vehicles.
Federal vehicle safety regulators have issued guidelines to states, but not
comprehensive standards governing self-driving cars.
There are some states whose laws will require approval for a fully autonomous
vehicle, Koopman said.
Just a year ago, Musk said during an earnings call he was "highly confident the
car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year."
Tesla's autopilot engineer at the time, CJ Moore, last year told the California
regulator that Musk's tweet on self-driving technology "does not match
engineering reality."
Musk also said engineers are working to launch a humanoid robot next year,
called Optimus, that could eventually address global shortages of labor, and in
the short term might be able to carry items around a factory.
"For performing dangerous and repetitive tasks, using a humanoid robot is
exactly the wrong approach," said Raj Rajkumar, professor of electrical and
computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
Musk, though, says the robot may be more important than a car. "This, I think,
has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time,"
he said.
(Editing By Peter Henderson and Gerry Doyle)
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