Nothing new from Tesla. But thank you for...

There was absolutely nothing truly new presented at Tesla’s “We.Robot” event. Shareholders have rightly punished Elon for his lack of substance - shares dropped over 10% in the aftermath, and every tech reporter on the planet has posted their take. And yet, his publicity of certain elements of the reveal can be considered helpful.

First, the facts. As an OEM, Tesla has lost its edge.

Its vehicles are no longer as innovative as those from China; it lacks successors to its best-selling products, its part-time CEO is a borderline liability (to the company and to democracy , as even the FT suggests), and the share-price pummelling was – by most analyst accounts – deserved. (Anticipation of the event had driven prices up, so the drop was simply a reversion to the three-year trendline. Barron’s Assessment: “C Minus ”.)

Elon needed to show a future for Tesla. What he showed, was a future imagined a decade ago, already being delivered on by others.

Elon: Repeating well-known facts

Yes, cars are parked over 90% of the time, and drivers spend a disproportionate time looking for parking.? This has been studied and repeated ad nauseum – including by the RAC Foundation multiple times, plus countless urbanists and campaigners . It has also been the justification for pleas to reduce inner-city parking spaces or go fully car-free, even by the WEF .? Thanks for the echo, Elon.

Yes, “autonomous vehicles will be safer than a human”. Nothing new: it’s also been discussed for a decade, and Waymo – together with Swiss Re – have already proven this.?

Yes, there are better uses of time than driving (but this has already been solved for, too).

Yes, price-per-mile can drop down. The estimates are nothing new, albeit as yet unproven. ?In 2015, ever-optimistic Ark Research had suggested $0.25 per mile, vs. $0.76 for personal vehicles would be possible in the robotaxi scenario.

The secret sauce here, however, is that the vehicles are assumed to be constantly in motion, sometimes deadheading. There’s also an element of induced demand here; if mobility costs per mile drop, then demand will increase. This isn’t necessarily bad – increased mobility means greater social contact, just as it may mean increased congestion. ?As such, single-occupancy vehicles dominating the streets will be self-regulating; when that short journey (“Take a half-mile ride instead of walk to get an ice-cream?? Sure.”) takes 20 minutes due to traffic, walking and micromobility wins every time.

Finally yes, autonomous mobility can change cities. As Elon suggests, we need to “Take the -ing lot out of parking lot”, and “create green space in the cities that we live in”.? (see from minute 3’45 , or read any of my books…). Nothing new, but we appreciate the focus.? Here, it comes from a notorious public-transport hater , however, so transit proponents will see it with cynicism and investors should see it with a healthy dose of scepticism.

For more on parking and urban space allocation: look to several decades worth of work by Professor Donald Shoup , check out the Parking Podcast , or simply follow our work at the Urban Places Lab .

A sordid relationship with transit, with cities, and with safety

Elon called the Robotaxi “individualised mass transit ”.? Neither Elon nor Tesla has a record of believing in, developing for, or delivering on credible transit programs (see the Vegas “Loop ”).? Elon’s view of transporting the mass public is not aligned with most cities – or for that matter, safety or accessibility concerns. And the days of simply “launch it, and regulations will be made around it” ended after Uber under Travis .

Therefore, it’s safe to say that most cities (of significance) will take their time enabling Tesla to deploy autonomous technology without reasonable proof of safety and redundancies, and insurers will take even more time in providing cover for them.

Tesla’s credibility for fully-autonomous mobility is still lacking. The Robotoys presented appear to still be based on a vision-only approach (central to a battle of beliefs in autonomous development).? Ideally, lidar, radar, cameras, mapping, or even V2V connectivity work in harmony to provide datasets for the robot to drive; at a bare minimum, two systems are required to provide redundancy and safety.? In spite of a claim to “full self-driving”, Tesla vehicles simply can’t. ?(For more, listen to Edward Niedermeyer 's podcast , Ride.ai)

After many years of preaching that a vision-only approach is sufficient, it’s curious then, that Tesla has placed a significant order of lidar sensors from Luminar - paradoxically around the same time that Mobileye ended its R&D on lidar.

Business model: “Managing your flock of cars”

A business based on buying and managing autonomous, on-demand vehicles – as was suggested – is also not true innovation. Shared, autonomous mobility is simply an extension of peer-to-peer carsharing.? Elon is right to assume that this is more likely to be a nice, lifestyle-business model, where fleet-owners contribute and manage 10 or so vehicles to a pool. ?Turo has more small fleets than individual owners, just as AirBnB has professionalised from spare-bedroom renters to managers of multiple apartments.? It's intriguing to think that your neighbour might become a mini-fleet-manager – having leased (not purchased) the vehicles from Tesla.?But even assuming Tesla can prove its vehicles are safe, businesses based on this concept are unlikely to emerge before the end of this decade (i.e. longer than most investors should have patience with Tesla).

How big can this business model be, someday?? This depends on margins influencing a willingness to rent (again, see Turo), finding insurance to support small autonomous fleet operators, the availability of fleet management and maintenance, as well as the response from rental-car, carsharing and ridehailing competitors.? Peter Ramsay, of EV In Focus does an excellent assessment here .

What was slightly intriguing, however, was the robotic vehicle cleaner, shown briefly. We’ve consistently said that a key element of fleets of autonomous vehicles is, well, fleet management.? Cleaning is one part of this, and it’s good to see a modicum of thought being put into this.

Finally: who will own the customer?? Could it be that the world’s (currently) pre-eminent mobility-as-a-service company, Uber , simply integrates yet another mode and supplier onto their platform – just as they have done with Waymo , scooters , bikes , buses, trains, helicopters, ferries , and flights ? Will we see the autonomous mobility become available on other superapps? ?Or will Tesla try to spend Billions on user-acquisition for an app of its own?

Purpose-built Robotaxis: Failure to learn from experience

Waymo's former CEO John Krafcik said Tesla's design looked "more playful than serious,” and anyone who has designed purpose-built vehicles for on-demand transportation agrees. Decades of experience has yielded a taxi design that accommodates luggage, is accessible for the disabled, and allows for an entire family to join the ride - not just Elon.

The vehicle shown was not a suitable, purpose-built vehicle for taxi purposes – no more than a Prius is today. That is to say – it can be deployed, and there may be good reasons to do so, but a clean-sheet design of a taxi for autonomous mobility would look more like, well, Waymo’s vehicle by Zeekr , or perhaps a Zoox .

(For more on purpose-built vehicles, see several of my previous articles – going back over a decade here , and with a short history here .)

A slight hope for investors is that the new vehicle (but with a steering wheel) is a hint of what the long-overdue Model 2 might look like.?

Given exorbitant costs to produce - and to buy - any car in the US (as Barron’s and Bank of America highlighted ), this is a glimmer of hope for competitiveness against the likes of BYD’s Seagull – which comes in at a mere $10,000 albeit plus tariffs.? But Elon’s promise (“2026," but, “I tend to be a little optimistic with time frames ”) likely refers more to pre-order timelines; experience with previous model launches tells us we shouldn’t expect to see any version of this vehicle in garages before 2028.

Robovan: Back to yesterday’s future

The idea of a shuttle-sized autonomous vehicle certainly wasn’t new, and neither was the name , which is owned by WeRide . The Robovan (and Elon’s silly pronunciation of it) is a poor copy of countless other autonomous shuttles – many of which are already roaming the streets. ?Surely, the amazing teams (and former teams) at Navya, EasyMile , Aurrigo , May Mobility , BENTELER Group (Holon), Autonomous Everything @ ZF , WeRide , Baidu , Sensible 4 and others will have felt a face-palm moment to see their work, ahem, interpreted.?

Above ground, there are decades-worth of learnings that have gone into passenger-optimised mass-transport solutions, that cannot be reimagined by a team with no experience riding public transport, let alone designing and optimising for it.?

Below-ground, if the Robovan were to be deployed in series inside the Vegas Loop underground tunnels, Elon would simply have “invented”… a slower-speed, lower-capacity, fixed-line subway.?

Jalopnik summarised, “Elon Musk Invented A Worse City Bus ”, adding succinctly, “Elon is so focused on pumping the company’s share price… that he’ll announce two brand new self-driving vehicles before figuring out how to deliver the hundreds of Semis or Roadsters customers have already put money down on.”

Wireless Charging: Hope for a standard?

Finally, Tesla has acknowledged the transformative power of inductive charging. It has previously teased it (image below), but never delivered on it (while BMW had already enabled it for some of its EVs from 2018). ?

Witricity , founded in 2007 shares its vision for charging autonomous vehicles of all types to its website, as does Plugless Power – so again, nothing new to see here.? In logistics, it’s becoming common practice thanks to Wiferion , Resonant Link , Magment , and others.

I’ve been a patient fan of the technology for over a decade (“Giga-What?” ). It's a brilliant technology in search of early adopters. If Tesla makes a roll-out and a standard of it - such as has happened with NACS - then the industry will thank him (and likely, pay license revenues).

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Innovation ≠ Invention. Sometimes, it’s enough to just whet the appetite.

Nothing new was invented by Tesla for this event. But “Nothing new” is not tragic.

Sometimes it’s enough to simply popularise an existing technology. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone or the MP3 player, but it did popularise them. ?In this sense, we can applaud Tesla for whetting the world’s appetite for shared, autonomous mobility– just as they’ve introduced so many drivers to electric vehicles.?

What’s more, Tesla’s hype and efforts here may be sufficient for the US mass market – but this is a low bar. Dominated by ICE pickup-trucks and SUVs, most American vehicles simply have no appeal anymore to audiences on the other continents, and most North American cities lack credible public transit. ?In China, Europe, or even growth markets such as India and the sub-Saharan Africa, Tesla will lose steam (except when a promise of a new factory is in the mix), and this event will not have moved the needle.

The real winners are likely to be those who are already further along.

Lukas is Managing Director of Neckermann Strategic Advisors , a boutique consultancy founded in 2013 with a unique focus on #mobility and #smartcities . He is an advisor to multiple investors and scale-up companies across mobility, a lecturer at Technische Universit?t Berlin , Co-Founder of intermobility , PAVE Europe , and the Urban Places Lab . He is (co-)author of several books and countless research studies on the #mobilityrevolution .?

Article has been edited to correct for one typo and one redundant sentence.