Make Way for Robotaxis ?? ?? ?
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Recently, Tesla’s chief Elon Musk announced a design change that delayed its robotaxi launch to October, hinting at a ‘surprise’ that could be revealed, during the upcoming earnings call. Many are speculating that this new update would involve Tesla owners to transform their vehicles into robotaxis, allowing their cars to generate income, much like an ‘Airbnb on wheels.’?
Tesla’s robotaxi vision?
Musk’s robotaxi service aims to make Tesla drivers add their vehicles into the cab fleet, a little different from other autonomous cab providers such as Zoox, Waymo or Baidu.?
“We’ll have a fleet that’s on the order of 7 million that are capable of autonomy. In the years to come it will be over 10 million and 20 million. This is immense,” said Tesla chief Elon Musk.?
“The car is able to operate 24/7 unlike the human drivers,” he said.??
However, Tesla’s concept of robotaxi has been recently questioned by Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi , in a recent interview . “It’s not clear to me that the average person, Tesla owner, or owner of any other car is going to want to have that car be ridden in by a complete stranger,” he added.?
Shared revenue
Similar to your third-party cab provider, such as Uber, Tesla is also looking to have a shared revenue format with the robotaxi owners. Musk highlighted how robotaxi will give the luxury to the users to choose the hours and schedule the hours of operation accordingly, thereby giving robotaxi owners the choice to use it as both a personal and a commercial vehicle.?
Interestingly, Khosrowshahi even questioned the supply angle for this particular format of ride. “It just so happens that probably the times at which you’re going to want your Tesla are probably going to be the same times that ridership is going to be at a peak,” thereby, hinting at how the demand and supply will not be met.
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Furthermore, he is sceptical about the whole autonomous feature in vehicles.? “We’re seeing that when one of our customers is offered an autonomous ride, about half the time they say, yeah that would be really cool, and half the time they say, no thank you, I’d rather have a human I think that’s going to improve over a period of time,” he said.??
Even then, the Uber CEO has not denied a likely partnership with Tesla in the future. “Hopefully, Tesla will be one of those partners. You never know.”?
The era of robotaxis begins?
Driverless car services are witnessing a huge growth. Google’s parent Alphabet, recently announced an investment of $5 billion on its self-driving subsidiary Waymo. Currently, they operate in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles and they will soon test them on the freeways of the San Francisco Bay Area . It was reported that Waymo is currently delivering 50,000 paid rides per week.?
Zoox , a subsidiary of Amazon, is also developing autonomous vehicles and is operational in certain cities in the US.?
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Baidu’s autonomous fleet which is already running 6000 driverless rides per day in Wuhan (China) adopts a mix of technologies. As of April 2024, the cumulative test mileage of Apollo L4 has exceeded 100 million kilometres.
L5, when? “I think we are all at L4 today; and with the government regulation, it’s not possible to do L5. Another thing is that, I think, all of us providing this technology haven’t been tested in all the scenarios. We wouldn’t have this confidence to claim that we have the L5 capability,” said Helen K. Pan , general manager and board of directors for Baidu Apollo, California, in an earlier interaction with AIM.
While Waymo and Baidu are at L4 level of autonomous capability, Tesla is still between L2 and L3.?
The robotaxi unveiling event is currently planned for October 10. Musk is also positive of expanding Tesla’s self-driving technology to a wide market in the US and internationally.
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Open Source is the Future of AI
Recently, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue took up the fight for open-source AI in his post on LinkedIn saying that open-source AI may lag in some areas due to ethical transparency, but it’s ultimately safer and more sustainable.
Although, this comes at a cost, Delangue said. “Since open-source projects must be transparent, developers are forced to make responsible decisions a priority, which occasionally means sacrificing performance,” and saying “Long-term, open-source = safer, more ethical AI!”
Check out the full story here .?
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