Tesla postpones Robot Taxi event to October 10.
Tesla will delay the launch of its autonomous vehicle Robotaxi from August 8 to October 10, CEO Elon Musk confirmed during his Q2 earnings call Tuesday.
Musk first mentioned Robotaxi in 2022 and announced an August release date this past April. However, Bloomberg had already reported earlier this month that the unveiling of the vehicle, which is expected to be a self-driving car for ride-sharing services, would be delayed to give engineers more time to work on the prototype.
Musk also did not answer questions during the earnings call about whether Robotaxi would have a steering wheel and pedals, The Verge reported. General Motors just confirmed this week that its self-driving technology company, Cruise, will not use Origin, an EV designed without manual controls, for its planned cab service and will instead use a modified version of the next-generation Chevrolet Bolt EV.
Before Musk consistently discussed purpose-designed autonomous vehicles, the executive repeatedly promised that Tesla owners would one day be able to rent out their cars as cabs through a service called the Tesla Network.
Musk announced the idea in 2016 and said that in 2019 Tesla would provide the infrastructure and support, taking 25% to 30% of the revenue in return. He said at the time that owners could use their cars to give free rides to friends and family, but anyone using the car to generate revenue would have to do so within the Tesla network.
All of this is dependent on Tesla developing an autonomous driving system that can replace human drivers. Tesla's current full self-driving system is a driver assistance system that ranks at Level 2 in SAE's automated driving capability rating. This misleading name and performance issue has come under intense scrutiny from regulators. Now, Tesla may be complicating matters further by designing an entirely new vehicle around this technology.