Elon Musk has built a career challenging skeptics with his electric car and rocket business. (File)
CEO Elon Musk said Tesla’s most important products this year and next won’t be cars, but software that drives them autonomously and a humanoid robot the company hopes will help in the future. factory.
The bold promises of the electric car industry’s most famous billionaire face huge challenges, from technology to regulation. Tesla and other auto tech companies have missed their goal of developing self-driving software for years.
“I like how they push the movement, but I think they are too aggressive,” said Roth Capital Partners analyst Craig Irwin.
Musk has built a career challenging skeptics with his electric car and rocket business. Some Tesla drivers buy a $12,000 self-driving package with the expectation that full autonomy is coming, and 60,000 Tesla drivers are testing the latest self-driving software, a scale at which vehicle software companies Other self-driving can only dream.
“I’ll be shocked if we don’t get completely safer than humans this year. I’ll be shocked,” Musk said, predicting full self-driving would become “an important source of profit. most important to Tesla.”
“It’s very good from a financial point of view, and says the robot will increase the utility of a car fivefold, since the owner can send the car to work when it is not needed,” he said.
Tesla uses cameras and artificial intelligence, avoiding other technologies like radar and lidar that competitors like Waymo include. That approach caused a fire.
“You have to be able to not just see a person, like right in front of you, you have to, with 99.999999999% confidence. Even glancing at someone once is not an answer. acceptable,” Austin Russell, CEO of lidar maker Luminar, told Reuters.
Philip Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies self-driving car safety, said a big problem is that at scale, persistent anomalies can occur.
“Without a driver to safely handle new, untrained machine learning situations, it is very difficult to ensure safety in a fully autonomous vehicle,” he said.
Regulations
Even if the technology does work, Tesla will be subject to closer scrutiny from regulators before deploying fleets of free-roaming robots. US auto safety regulators have opened a safety investigation into Tesla’s advanced driver assistant system following collisions involving parked emergency vehicles and vehicles.
Federal vehicle safety regulators have issued guidelines for states, but not comprehensive standards governing self-driving cars.
There are a number of states that require approval for a fully autonomous vehicle, Koopman said.
Just a year ago, Musk said during an earnings press conference that he was “very confident that the car will be able to drive itself with a reliability that far exceeds that of a human this year.”
Tesla’s autonomous driving engineer at the time, CJ Moore, last year told the California regulator that Musk’s tweets about self-driving technology “didn’t match technical reality.”
Musk also said engineers are working to launch a humanoid robot next year, named Optimus, that could eventually solve the global labor shortage and in the short term be able to carry objects around. around a factory.
“To perform dangerous and repetitive tasks, using a humanoid robot is precisely the wrong approach,” said Raj Rajkumar, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
However, Musk says that a robot could be more important than a car. “This, in my opinion, is potentially more important than the vehicle business over time,” he said.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
