Initially scheduled for August 8 this year, the premiere of the revolutionary unmanned Tesla Robotaxi has been postponed to a later date, as changes need to be made to its design some “important changes.”
Delays in the launch of new models have long become an unpleasant tradition at Tesla: for example, the second-generation Tesla Roadster sports car, announced in 2017, has not yet entered the market.
The imminent premiere of the driverless Tesla Robotaxi was announced by the company's CEO Elon Musk in April of this year after a scandalous Reuters publication, which reported, citing insiders, that Tesla had scrapped the project of a cheap electric car for $25,000 and was preparing a revolutionary, fully driverless model instead. Tesla Robotaxi is the unofficial name of this new product; its commercial name has not yet been disclosed.
Robotaxi is, in fact, the original concept of Tesla's budget model, which the company later abandoned due to difficulties in developing an autopilot and which it returned to at the instigation of Elon Musk, who decided that a traditional budget electric car with a steering wheel and pedals would not be very successful because -due to strong competition in the market from Chinese automakers.
Elon Musk has long been obsessed with the idea of a self-driving car: Tesla released the first release of its autopilot back in 2015 — then it was just an advanced highway adaptive cruise control. In 2022, Tesla launched commercial operation of the “full autopilot” FSD (Full Self-Driving), capable of independently driving a route of almost any complexity, while from a legal point of view, FSD is just a second-level autopilot according to the SAE classification, in which the driver must Keep your eyes on the road at all times. Tesla is not yet able to certify FSD at a higher level, but nevertheless has taken aim at a full-fledged Robotaxi, which will probably not have a steering wheel or pedals.
Last week, Bloomberg, citing insiders, reported that the premiere of Tesla Robotaxi was postponed from August 8 to a later date — approximately in October. This week, Elon Musk confirmed on social network X that Tesla Robotaxi needs improvements, but did not provide details and did not give a new premiere date. Most likely, this year, in one form or another, Tesla Robotaxi will still appear before the public in the status of a prototype, and when mass production will begin, Elon Musk himself is unlikely to know today, since legalizing a full-fledged unmanned car without a steering wheel and pedals at the moment impossible due to insoluble ethical and legal contradictions. The maximum that the modern auto industry can offer in terms of unmanned vehicles is the third level according to the SAE classification, and even then with a lot of reservations and restrictions.
Against the backdrop of a global slowdown in demand for electric vehicles, Tesla sales continue to decline: in the second quarter this year, the company, according to its official report, sold 443,956 cars, which is 4.6% less than sales in the second quarter of 2023. The announcement of Tesla Robotaxi inspired many investors and allowed the company to correct its stock price after the fall in the spring, but the real commercial prospects for an unmanned taxi still remain vague.
We would like to add that leading Chinese automakers today offer their own analogues of the Tesla FSD autopilot, but all of them are certified at the second level according to the SAE classification — even the third level has not yet been mastered by Chinese legislation.