Your ultimate authority for daily Elon Musk news. Exploring the world's biggest ideas with your host Will Walden. There's something new every day. The future of. Tesla is going to be interesting. Elon Musk. Plans to change Tesla's. Future by. Pushing it toward artificial intelligence and robotics. And that raises a. Question Can Tesla? Really transform from a car company, a great car company, into a leader in autonomous systems.
Now Tesla. Started 22 years ago with a simple plan that didn't depend on breakthroughs and battery technology the founders believed they could create. EVs by. Combining proven components in new ways, they relied on lithium ion. Batteries similar to. Those used in laptops and built battery packs from. Thousands of small cells. Now, this approach allowed Tesla to succeed. Where traditional automakers had failed with heavy and.
Inefficient lead acid. Batteries now Elon Musk now wants to. Take Tesla. In a different path, he no longer focuses primarily on making EVs driven by people. Instead, he wants Tesla to become a robotics company that builds driverless cars and humanoid robots. He believes this move will help Tesla stay. Valued like a technology company rather than an automaker. Musk expects. To launch public robo taxi services very soon on June. 22nd with a small fleet in Austin, TX they set this.
Possible launch date of the 20. 2nd but Musk. Recently warmed that they. May delay this. Timeline if safety concerns arise and Tesla's early success came from using software and engineering to make lithium ion battery pack safe and reliable gave the company a strong lead before competitors recognize the potential of these batteries now. Musk hopes Tesla can use its. Manufacturing expertise to integrate artificial intelligence more so. Into the vehicles.
And unlike the company's earlier strategy of using existing parts creatively, Tesla has spent years building its own AI systems for self driving tech. Now Tesla's FSD. System and autopilot features show how far the. Company has come. However, Tesla admits that these. Systems are not fully, truly autonomous, and drivers remain legally responsible for their vehicles. And Elon Musk argues that Tesla holds an advantage over competitors. Because its fleet. Provides valuable real world
data. The data helps the company improve its AI systems. Faster than rivals? And companies like Waymo and GM. Have also worked. On driverless technology, but their efforts are kind of limited. GM stopped its robo. Taxi plans because of high costs. And Waymo operates a modest fleet of around 1500 to 2000 vehicles. Number is similar to GM's failed EV1 program from over 25 years ago, which helped inspire Tesla's creation in the first place. And now? Tesla's robust.
Taxis project. Depends heavily on turning its production values. Into autonomous taxis. Musk claims that every Tesla rolling off the line today is capable of unsupervised self driving. He shared footage of a Tesla Model Y driving without anyone in the front seat during tests in Austin Now. Despite these demonstrations. Musk remains. Cautious, he said. Tesla's initial. Launch will be small. Possibly with about. 10 robotaxis operating in the 1st. Week he expects to scale this up
to thousands. Of vehicles within months and aims to have hundreds of thousands or even a million on the road by the end of 2026 now. Musk's public statements about Tesla safety priorities. Reflect the difficulties of delivering. Autonomous vehicles at scale, he said. The company is super paranoid. About safety, Which? Means that the robotaxi launch could face further delays. Tesla's competitors, including Waymo and. Zooks. Have already demonstrated cars on public roads without drivers
behind the wheel. With. 10s of thousands of rides for Waymo and in some surveys people prefer an autonomous Waymo to an Uber where some person is driving now. Zooks and Waymo have already demonstrated cars on public roads without drivers behind the wheel, but their technology remains complex and far from widespread. Even Waymo's limited fleet has not come close to the commercial. Success of Google score business
but. Test The shift toward AI marks a major change from its founding principles. The company originally succeeded by rethinking how to combine. The existing technologies. But now they're creating their own technologies, they're creating their own AI and they're relying on large scale deployment of self driving cars. But now we haven't seen Tesla make self driving into a major
part of its business. Elon. Musk's confidence in Tesla's. AI technology rests on the company's production scale and data advantage, but challenges and safety regulation and public acceptance remain. Now, the future of Tesla. Now depends on whether. Musk's AI vision can deliver real results. Remember a few years ago when? Zuckerberg was. Talking about the metaverse and then where is the metaverse? We were never in the metaverse. All the. 3D headsets all the. Virtual. Reality, that was.
Top of the line for a few years and now it's bottom of the barrel. Nobody really uses it in a real world application other than engineers and you know, it kind of niche things. It's a fun thing to play around with, but. Zuckerberg was talking. About how everybody was going to have a headset and we're all going to live and work in the metaverse and Apple made a headset and. Elon Musk doesn't. Want to be that he. Knows that his.
AI Vision can deliver. Real results, that's what he believes The company's focus has moved. From making. EVs accessible to. Building a network of driverless cars. All of their manufacturers have some sort of EV in the pipeline if they don't already have some on the road, and this took them a decade or two. To figure this out so. If Elon keeps making these moves with Tesla and moving forward with. Tesla. They're also going to be 20 years behind by the time.
All of this happens so. Somebody like Ford or GM? Who is? Barely making. EVs at this. Point they don't have an AI division. They don't have anything to compete with Musk right now. As. XAI, he has x.com or X if you want to call it that, and both of them have an AI component and now all of that is being rolled. Into Tesla. Tesla has the. Data from all of the driving from other people. They have some sensors they. Don't have Lidar, which Waymo has and in. Tests as we've.
Seen if you look around on YouTube you'll find. A Tesla versus. Lidar. Just look that up and you can see for yourself how Tesla has failed against. Lidar in numerous circumstances and their. Videos of Tesla's. Just running through. Dummies and mannequins on the side of school buses. Things like that. And it's, you know. Part of it is that some of the. Sensors in Tesla don't match up to the way that Waymo's sensors
work, and that's. What Elon Musk is talking about when he's talking about Tesla being cautious. He wants them to be. Extremely cautious. Because if. Anything happens right away. With these Austin tests, that's why they're starting small. He's saying something like a dozen. Cars on the road, robo taxis in the first week. Which is a. Totally. Fine test set. But he wants to upgrade. This to thousands of vehicles within. Months so you. Don't just start off with. 10
operational robo taxis. In a week. And then within months you get to. Thousands of vehicles. Usually it would go from like 10 robo taxis in Austin to 20, 30-40 within months. Plus there's also regulatory hurdles, so if you're good in. Austin it doesn't. Mean you're going to be good in Arkansas, so to speak, or you're not going to get robo taxis in New York City. Thousands of robo taxis in New York City, or. San Francisco, OR. LA OR. Small cities like Buffalo, or.
Someplace like Orlando, you're not going to get. Robo taxis there because there. Are different regulatory? Hurdles per state and also per city. So if he wants to have. Thousands of robo taxis. In Austin that. Seems like it would be less of a. Hurdle than trying. To go to these different States and different cities so he also. Wants to have hundreds of thousands or even 1,000,000 by the end of next year. A million vehicles on the road.
Now, if he's talking about. Robotaxi capable vehicles. Where a. Current vehicle could. Be set up with software to. Become a robotaxi and the owner of that vehicle. Which he stated in the past, he stated. This for years that everybody that. Owns a Tesla when it's. When you're not driving it, you can loan it out and you can make it into a robotaxi and you can make money while. It just sits there. He said it's going to free up so. Many Teslas to.
Do other things instead of sitting in a driveway or sitting in a parking lot and wasting away. Instead it could be on the road doing work for you, making you money autonomously. But that. Also is. Full of regulatory. Hurdles so hundreds of. Thousands of vehicles or even 1,000,000 by the end of next year. Sure, they. Might be capable. But will the regulatory statutes allow them to drive on the roads? That's. To be seen and. We don't know what's going on.
Behind the scenes with Tesla. And. In the cities. And States and towns throughout the country. So it could take. Maybe not months to do this. It could possibly take them years. Waymo. Is only in a. Few cities right now. I think they're in five cities and it took them years to get there and they have proven technology. SpaceX or not SpaceX, Tesla has. Proven data from drivers, but they don't have proven robotaxi rides.
Yet so. The fact that that hasn't happened yet and the fact that Elon is saying. Hundreds of. Thousands, possibly a million vehicles on the road being robotaxis. I don't think that's going to happen in one year. Look, I'm. Call me skeptic. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with that. But Elon Musk has promised things in the. Past that haven't happened at the scale. That he wants them to happen Like when he was officially and originally starting the Starship program he was saying somewhere
around the 20/24/2020. 6:00-ish Twenty. 28 launch to Mars and from start with Starship and he was saying absolutely, we're going to do this now. It looks like he's. Still saying this in during his last talk he was saying that they're going to make it there. Starship really hasn't made it past Earth, hasn't made it to orbit yet, hasn't done a full orbit yet. We're in 2025 and he has. To launch this by 2026, he. Wants to launch it to Mars. There's a possibility. But he doesn't have to.
Worry about the hurdles from the government, the red tape from every city, every town, every municipality, every highway department. Every state that. He wants to get these robo taxis in the The scale that he wants is unfathomable. Can he? Do it. Yeah, maybe he'd have a couple 100, but. Hundreds of thousands of vehicles on the road. That seems like a huge stretch. If you're on a podcast platform that has comments, let me know in the comments what you think about this.
I think it's. A great idea to have a million. Vehicles that you can just. Hop into. I wouldn't need a car anymore. I could just call a Tesla. And have it pick me up and take me wherever I want to go. Drive around for a little while. That would be great. Maybe I go to the beach. Maybe I go downtown. You know, same thing. With the Uber. Also if you're. Interested in driving for Uber? You can make a good amount of money. We're driving for Uber if you're yeah, if you have a vehicle and
you also just. Need need some. Spare cash Like if you want some spare money to go out to dinner to drive Uber on the. Weekends make a. Couple 100 bucks make. 50 bucks, whatever. Drive for a couple hours on the. Weekends make a. Make a little side scratch. There's a link in the description or the show notes and that'll get you into the program and you get a little kickback. I get a little bit of money for that too. Not a lot, but. It does help out the show.
So if you can sign up, if you're thinking about it, I've done it in the past and I'll tell you what, man, it's fun. Get to be some really interesting people and all you're doing is driving. It's like if you're if you just want something. To to do to pass some time. And you don't don't really want to think driving Uber. Is definitely the way to. Go. It's really fun. So Elon is right. On the precipice. Of doing something amazing if this all works out. And his public statements about
Tesla's safety. Priorities show that. There's difficulties of. Delivering Autonomous. Vehicles at scale. He's been saying that. He's super paranoid about safety. Which means. That the Robo taxi launch could. Face further delays. Because when they do these. 10 test vehicles. They're. Going to gather some real world data and it's going to be in a small part of Austin too. It's not going to be over the whole city, not going to be on the highways. It's going. To be on.
A loop of streets that they know that they have the data for already so they're. Going to be. Gathering data from these robo taxis and they're going to have to scale. This. To a point where. It's unheard of to scale this fast. Can they scale this fast? There's a possibility, but. There's always he has to work with the towns and the cities and that's the part that's going to hold him back. You know, Zooks way, MO.
They've already demonstrated cars on public roads without drivers behind the wheel, but their technology is very complex. We MO's limited fleet is, you know they're making money, but they're also they're. Also. Not producing. The types of rides. That will make. The sorry the. Scale of rides that will make them billions of dollars which they need to do it in order to keep this program going. But the thing. Is. Google owns Waymo. Google does this. So Google has it as a sort of
like a side project. They want to make this work, but the. Other thing is. They're going to make sure that they use. This data. From these rides. To license this technology. To other car manufacturers in the. Future SO. Lidar, the radars, things like that, the data that they gather from this, they're not going to keep to themselves. They're going. To use it. With manufacturers GM, Ford, etcetera and Audi I've heard plans of maybe. Porsches influence.
There with Waymo and their technologies and. We'll see what happens though, because Tesla is. Just going to keep it in Tesla. They're going to keep all the money to themselves. They're not going to license anything as far as we know. Elon said he's open to it, but he needs to. Have the lead first. He has to have a crazy lead before. He actually licenses. Anything to anybody else, but you know, future of Tesla really does depend.
On. The AI vision that Musk is portraying with these driverless cars. Companies focus has. Moved from building electric. Vehicles, which is amazing. And, you know, one of the one of the biggest breakthroughs in technology in the last 20 years, but now they're going to be building a network of driverless cars. The success or the failure of the strategy? Will shape. Tesla's future, but also it'll shape. Robotics. It'll shape other companies that
build parts for robotics. It'll shape industries as a whole, and also shape. Cities of the future. Which will become manufacturing hubs like Austin is for robotics and AI. Now they're proving the artificial intelligence can move beyond just the lab, beyond hackers, making AIA more viable product for everybody. Beyond. The lab tests. And make it into everyday life. At a scale. That no one else has ever achieved. Henry Ford built the automobile into a massive business.
Elon Musk has built EVs. Into a massive business. And he's. Planning on building. Driverless cars. Into an even bigger business and I for one really excited about the future of driverless vehicles. Hey, thank you. So much for listening today, I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on. Right. Now I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll.
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