There are five things to know about the planned unveil of a car tonight by the electric car maker

The Tesla Value of Autonomous Driving: A Key Account of Musk’s Unpopularity with Robotists and Humanoid Robots

A billionaire goes on stage with a humanoid robot by his side to show off a futuristic technology that he claims will transform the world.

No one is sure if theTeslarobotaxi will do that steep task. Despite Musk having a reputation for bucking the odds, and his company being aggressive in pushing for Level 2 advanced driver assist systems, many experts have questioned the company’s approach to the technology.

Musk insisted that autonomy and robotics were at the center of the mission of the company, a move that reassured some people who feared that the company was losing its EV edge. Musk said this summer that the value of the company is autonomy. He also encouraged non-believers to sell their Tesla stock.

Tesla plans to launch fully autonomous driving in Texas and California next year, with the Cybercab production by 2026 — although he said it could be as late as 2027. Additionally, Tesla is developing the Optimus robot, which could be available for $20,000-$30,000, and is capable of performing various tasks.

When fully automated, Musk has maintained that demand for the software would be much higher because it would allow people to make money off their personal vehicles by lending them out.

It’s hard to believe that a fully electric fleet has a huge value. he told investors in 2021. That will be one of the most valuable things done in the history of civilization.

There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the tech company, but there is one man who has a history of proving skeptics wrong.

Some people don’t seem to understand how much has changed since Musk first promised Full Self-Driving was two years away. Many seem to be stuck in an old mentality that self-driving cars will take over the world and that it’s not a hard problem to solve.

Even for those companies, robotaxis aren’t profitable yet. People who have ridden in robotaxis generally like the experience, but according to J. D. Power, they don’t find the taxis practical. The service will remain a novelty until they are cheaper and cover more ground, according to the pollsters.

Other companies use radar and expensive high-tech sensors but Musk only used cheap cameras to build his system. Musk also has embraced “end-to-end learning,” where the artificial intelligence “learns” how to drive from raw data; other companies add human-designed rules and guardrails to their AI systems.

In a speech, the Aurora CFO said that there is a method of fixing a problem called a “train and pray” approach. It’s problematic in a safety-critical industry where you need confidence and proof you’ve fixed it.

Anderson used to work at Tesla, where he helped launch Tesla’s Autopilot software, its first partial-automation system, the Aurora email notes. The company just got another ex-Tesla executive for it’s team.

Self-Driving and the State-and-Constraints of Regulating Robot Axi’s: The Role of Regulatory Perturbations

The United States still has no federal laws governing self-driving, so a patchwork of state and city regulators set the boundaries of what companies can and cannot do.

Musk has always acknowledged that achieving full self-driving is not just a matter of technological innovation; if regulators aren’t convinced a robotaxi fleet is safe, it isn’t going anywhere.

That has implications for the physical design of vehicles. Cruise was planning on introducing a futuristic robot taxi that had no steering wheel but instead used a conventional design to reduce the risk of getting into trouble with regulators.

Software can also be affected by governmental concerns. Gianarikas says regulators who dig into the coding of a system built by “end-to-end” deep learning might not like what they find.

You can imagine a situation in which regulators just kind of have this moment. There are no hard-coded software rules. he says. “‘How do you control it?’”

We, Robot: The Future is Now: Self-Driving Vehicles as a Time-Saver for the Humanoid Robot

The event’s name — “We, Robot” — is a nod to a classic Isaac Asimov short story collection exploring the ethical and psychological implications of building increasingly human-like robots. It’s also the title of a very vaguely related Will Smith action movie.

That hints at the possibility that, in addition to a robotaxi, the reveal could feature Optimus, the humanoid robot Tesla has been developing as an autonomous laborer capable of doing repetitive tasks.

A long-time bull by the name of Dan Ives will be in attendance at the event. He’s less interested in androids and more in whether Musk can demonstrate a fully autonomous vehicle that actually works.

Musk said that he wanted to create a time-saver with the idea of self-driving cars. “Think about the cumulative time that people spend in a car,” he said, “and the time they will get back that they can now spend on their books or watching a movie or doing work or whatever.”

But Musk has a track record of coming from behind to pull off impossible victories. The Model 3 production and the early success of the Cybertruck are two recent examples of Musk defying expectations.

Musk said that autonomous cars are expected to be 10-20 times safer than human-driven vehicles and could cost as low as $0.20 per mile, compared to the $1 per mile for city buses.

“Prototype hardware that works in a limited demo is cool, interesting, and fine to comment on,” Phil Koopman, an AV expert from Carnegie Mellon, wrote in his newsletter this morning. Hardware isn’t the limit to self-drive vehicles. Software is the long pole in the tent.”

What did Tesla (Dark MAGA) do after the Supergravity Collision? Dan Ives’s “Down” Comment on “The Tesla Cybercab”

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who was in attendance, dismissed any stock decline in the aftermath of the event — Tesla was trading down by nearly 9 points in early trading Friday — as a “knee-jerk reaction” that would eventually correct itself. He wrote that they did not agree with the notion of last night being a disappointment and that they would argue that the opposite was true.

The interest rates have gone up and the amount of venture capital funding has dried up, all of which have caused the major players working on this technology to change their timelines. Even Waymo, which is far and away the leader in the space, is taking things real slowly, one city at a time. The company is trying to figure out highways.

His pitch was utopian last night as images of parking lots were transformed into verdant gardens on the giant screens above him. This is called “reverse Joni Mitchell-ing.”

“We want to have a fun, exciting future,” he said, “that if you could look in a crystal ball and see that future, you’d be like, ‘Yes, I wish I could be there now.’”

It was kind of nice to hear Mr. “Dark MAGA” articulate a brighter vision for the future, but after the event, it’s even less clear how we’ll get there. We got no details about how he will overcome the enormous obstacles in his path. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the issues that went unresolved:

Source: The Tesla Cybercab is a cool-looking prototype that needed to be much more than that

A Conversation with Kyle Vogt on the Challenges of Fully Autonomous Vehicles: Why FSD is Difficult after all?

This is just scratching the surface. Kyle Vogt, the ex-CEO of Cruise, posted on X a pretty thorough list of his own questions for Tesla, most of which went completely unanswered. And this coming from a guy who was pushed out of his own company for screwing up the response to one of those hard-to-predict edge cases (a human driver struck a pedestrian, sending her flying into the path of one of Cruise’s robotaxis).

It seems unlikely that Musk will meet a similar fate as Vogt, despite fumbling the ball so badly. We’ve already seen the kinds of death and destruction that have resulted from his company’s aggressive push into autonomous technology. And so far, he’s been successful in avoiding those consequences.

But he didn’t do anything. Instead, he put on what arguably looked like a great show, complete with fake movie posters, a ton of delicious-looking food, and robot bartenders. And he fell back on the same old, tired promises of a fully autonomous vehicle that was “just two years away.”

The Cybercab could have had more detail on its technology stack, including its sensors, vision system and onboard processing power. He could surprise the industry by embracing lidar, the laser sensor that serves as a crucial redundant system for every other self drive vehicle on Earth.

He could have announced that the Cybercab, a sleek little two-seater with butterfly-wing doors, would be a geofenced, Level 4, fleet-owned vehicle, operating in a few select markets with impressive-looking margins.

He could have released comprehensive safety data for the company’s Full Self-Driving feature that showed real progress for the driver-assist feature, contradicting all the crowdsourced data that’s out there making FSD look truly awful.

Tesla Cybercab: a two-door self-driving taxi in the shadows of an autonomous industry? An interview with Musk at the Los Alamos

The event comes at a critical time for Tesla, which faces increased competition in electric vehicles not only from legacy automakers, but upstart firms in China, which are exporting inexpensive vehicles overseas like never before. Tesla deliveries are down globally this year, and the automaker last quarter underperformed compared to analysts’ expectations. The automaker laid off some 14,000 employees earlier this year, many working on the core competencies of electric vehicle production, including batteries and charging infrastructure. Several top executives of the automaker have left in the past few weeks.

Later, in front of an audience of excited Tesla fans and shareholders, Musk referred to the entire setup as a “set”—far from the messy, busy streets where an eventual autonomous vehicle might one day be challenged to drive.

Almost an hour after Tesla had said the debut event would begin, Musk was escorted by a man dressed as an astronaut to the butterfly doors of the silver prototype. He took a quick, seemingly driverless jaunt through the dark, ghostly streets of the Warner Bros. Studios in Southern California, before emerging from the car to take the stage.

Movie studios are where Hollywood spins fantastical worlds out of fancy camera angles and special effects. So where can I find an appointment to show off the Cybercab, a two-door self-driving taxi that Musk says will be in production in just three years?