During a presentation, Elon Musk predicted that next year they will have Robotaxi fleets on the streets of the cities of the world.
The Robotaxi could be defined as a self-driven taxi or a driverless taxi in an autonomous automobile and operated under the system of on-demand calls, such as the services of Uber and Cabify.
During the last few years, there have been few pioneers who want to start this service, among which are Ford, General Motors and Lyft, Volkswagen, BMW and Fiat that partnered with Intel, Google that was with Waymo and Didi Chuxing. But now one more competitor came to the track and has high pretensions – Tesla.
In a presentation on the day of Tesla’s autonomy, Elon Musk said he hopes to have this system ready by 2020.
I am very confident in predicting that there will be an autonomous Robotaxis of Tesla next year, not in all jurisdictions because we will not have regulatory approval everywhere.
How would this system work?
Tesla will allow owners to add their properly equipped vehicles to their own shared-travel application, and just as Uber will be able to pick up passengers based on shared trips.
For this, autonomous vehicles have since 2016 a built-in chip that meets the hardware requirements for Robotaxi function, that is, radars and sensors capable of avoiding obstacles and achieving optimal driving.
Tesla will take 25 to 30 percent of the income from those trips, Musk said. In places where there are not enough people to share their cars, Tesla would provide a dedicated fleet of Robotaxis.
Now Musk announced that they will work on the application software.
From our point of view, if you go one year, maybe one year and three months, but next year for sure, we’ll have more than one million Robotaxis on the road. The fleet wakes up with an update by air, that’s all that is needed – CEO of Tesla
The big challenge experts say is how these Robotaxis will recharge their energy autonomously to do all the trips they have scheduled in a day.
