Elon Musk: Tesla Robotaxi Still Looking Good For This Year

Elon Musk announced the advent of Tesla Robotaxi in 2020! Musk said that they only needed to improve the software on the company’s existing cars.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that in 2020, a million robotaxi cars would appear on the roads. Musk mentioned this during his speech in California, April 22, a year ago: “I’m sure that autonomous robots from Tesla will appear in 2020!” 

He also added that, most likely, “robotaxis will not appear everywhere since we will not be able to get approval from all regulatory at once.” But despite this, Musk believes that by 2020, the company will receive approval from at least several regulators.

Besides, the CEO said that at that moment all Tesla cars already had the necessary equipment for autopilot: “All we need to do is improve the software,” concluded Musk.

He also shared his plans that Tesla would begin to produce cars without a steering wheel and pedals just in a year. Yeah, Elon Musk noted that his predictions were not always fulfilled on time, but he was constantly working on it.

Today, Tesla’s CEO says that he still believes in Tesla’s ability to deliver on the functionality of the robotaxi fleet by the end of the year:

“Functionality still looking good for this year. Regulatory approval is a big unknown,”

said Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on April 12, 2020

Elon Musk Introduced Robotaxi and the “Best Computer”

All Tesla electric cars currently manufactured are equipped with the new FSD (Full Self-Driving) processor, which makes them ready for fully unmanned mode. Moreover, the new processor can be installed instead of the standard one in all the cars produced by the company after 2016. So, they can become full drones too! This was announced by the head of the company, Elon Musk, at the Autonomy Day presentation.

The peculiarity of Robotaxi is that Tesla owners can earn on it. Usually, according to Musk, cars are idle most of the time, so why don’t the owners “rent their cars”? Having connected to the service, Tesla drivers will be able to provide their vehicles as unmanned taxis, while they do not need to go anywhere. Tesla will take 25-30% of the money earned by Robotaxi, the rest will go to the owner of the car. In those places where there are not enough people who want to take their electric car under a taxi, Musk promised to provide transport from the company’s own fleet.

Although the media, first of all, drew attention to Robotaxi Elon Musk Tesla, the presentation of the new processor that makes unmanned vehicles of the “5th level” reality can be considered the core of the performance.

The new chip, which Musk called the “best computer in the world,” was created by Tesla engineers after it was discovered that there are no processors in the world that can solve problems in real-time within the framework of self-learning neural networks.

A 14 mm long chip fits 6 billion parts, and there are two of these chips in the new Tesla computer. They work in parallel and independently of each other, even power is supplied to them via separate wires. At the same time, processors constantly “check” each other to avoid errors, and the system makes a final decision only when both “brains” give the same results.

But the chip is only half the battle! The “best computer in the world” is useless without the appropriate software. Here, Tesla also demonstrated a new approach, which hardly anyone will be able to repeat in the near future.

The software for complex autonomous vehicles is built on neural networks, on systems capable of independently analyzing incoming information and making decisions all by itself. The system needs to be trained to show all the elements that it must distinguish. As a rule, such training is the most complex and laborious process. Moreover, the quantity and variety of information that the system is “taught” is of decisive importance.

The computer is shown pictures and explained what is shown on them. The more pictures and the more diverse they are, the better the computer will be “trained”. But in real life, the number of variations of the same situation is infinite. And here Tesla found a unique approach, using the advantage originally inherent in their cars ‒ the ability to communicate with each car over the network.

As you know, Tesla was the first car that could automatically “over the air” update their software or carry out diagnostics. Communication with the car has always been two-way, and Tesla engineers used this advantage to collect information.

Now the total number of Tesla electric vehicles has already exceeded half a million. 425 thousand were involved in the collection of information for training the neural network. Data was transmitted anonymously and automatically, without interfering with the daily operation of the car.

Thus, Tesla engineers were able to get a huge array of unique information, and information about real situations on the roads, rather than simulating such situations. This, according to Mask, allowed them to create the most advanced and reliable autopilot system. It can be classified as “4th level”, but it’s not completely independent, and the head of the company believes that the “fifth level” is achievable in the next two years.