An image of a Cybertruck-inspired Tesla robotaxi concept was revealed in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, which was released on Tuesday.
The two-door, two-seater, “Cybertruck-like” compact vehicle is complete with angular edges and what appears to be a fingerprinting stainless steel finish. And while it’s unclear if this will ever be built – the world is still waiting for the real Cybertruck – the photo confirms that engineers have been influenced by the wedge-shaped design.
A second image in the book shows Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s chief designer, standing next to an “early robotaxi”. It’s little more than a cardboard cut-out, again showing two seats and space for luggage behind them. It’s not clear how early the design was, but the photo appears in a section of the book that introduces Autopilot (Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance system) and Musk’s life between 2014 and 2016.
Isaacson has been leaking excerpts and information from his biography of Musk in recent weeks to build hype for the book. The biographer, who has been embedded in Musk’s life for years, also revealed that Tesla will build its first next-generation electric vehicles – including a $25,000 car and a robotaxi – in Texas rather than at the upcoming Gigafactory Mexico, according to an exclusive from Axios. The factory will use Tesla’s “unboxed process”, revealed at the carmaker’s 2023 Investor Day in March, which allows factory workers to work on separate sections of the vehicle and bring them together at the end for final assembly.
Both vehicles will have a futuristic design similar to that of the Cybertruck.
“When one of these comes around the corner, people will think they’re seeing something from the future,” Musk said during a secret meeting in September 2022, according to Axios.
The robot taxi will be built from the ground up without pedals or a steering wheel, despite objections from engineers who pushed for a safer design concept on the grounds that Tesla’s “full self-driving” (FSD) software wasn’t ready yet, according to excerpts from the book. FSD is Tesla’s upgraded Advanced Driver Assistance System, which can automate some driving tasks in city and highway environments, but is not yet a fully autonomous system. It relies only on cameras, rather than a suite of sensors including lidar and radar, to gather information about its surroundings, as well as Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer to make quick decisions.
Musk has apparently stuck to his guns. At a meeting in August 2022, he told his designers, “Let me be clear. This vehicle has to be designed as a clean robot taxi. We’re going to take that risk. If it fucks up, it’s my fault. But we’re not going to design some kind of amphibian frog that’s a halfway decent car. We are all about autonomy.
Current federal safety standards prohibit the mass production of vehicles without steering wheels or pedals, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to announce a new rule on this in September.
Other companies are coming to market with purpose-built autonomous vehicles, such as GM’s Cruise and Amazon’s Zoox. These vehicles are built to be big and boxy, with plenty of space inside and four to six seats. Tesla’s robotaxi, on the other hand, could only seat two people, which could exclude Tesla from the mass market.
Mass production by 2024?
In April 2022, Musk shared plans to bring a dedicated robotaxi, with no steering wheel or pedals, to market by 2024. That would mean Tesla would have to develop, test, verify, mass produce and commercially launch a robotaxi service within two years. In California, where there’s been the most regulation and AV activity, Tesla has a permit to test driverless vehicles with a driver in the front seat, but not without one.
Of course, Tesla could decide to launch its robot taxi service in its new home state of Texas, where AV deployment laws are much more lax.
But Tesla hasn’t been very clear about how it plans to bring the robotaxis to market. Musk has been promising for years to turn the Tesla cars people own today into their own robotaxis via his FSD software. Musk has described the potential service as something like Airbnb for cars, where owners could potentially earn extra income by sending their cars out to give rides to others.
FSD, and Tesla’s earlier ADAS version called Autopilot, have come under fire from Tesla owners, safety regulators and federal authorities for a number of issues, including false advertising and promoting vehicle capabilities that don’t yet exist. Musk recently demonstrated the software in a live video, during which he had to take over the wheel to stop his car from lurching into an intersection at a red light.
