CyberCab / Tesla Robotaxi Discussion

[texas_star_TM3]

Unofficial:
View attachment 1046374

wing doors on a robo taxi? yeah... talking about high maintenance, wear/tear and needless complexity on a vehicle which needs to be as low maintenance as possible and will look like an uncleaned subway after a few weeks...

 

[Buckminster]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1790115772024697028

Front seats stowing away like this could work for RT

 

[Buckminster]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1790854093868515359

 

[ThomasD]

Tesla can't get Smart Summon to work correctly most of the time, yet they are going to put out a level 4-5 Car soon.

 

[Buckminster]

Tesla can't get Smart Summon to work correctly most of the time, yet they are going to put out a level 4-5 Car soon.

Did you get the memo from Elon regarding 12.4 and 12.5?

 

[texas_star_TM3]

Did you get the memo from Elon regarding 12.4 and 12.5?

which memo? the one before or after Roadster 2 / Plaid+ with 500 miles of range / Cybertruck with 500 miles of range / optimus assembling Teslas ?

 

[Buckminster]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1792558874706231519

 

[Buckminster]

Hey look at that


View attachment 1048830

Seems like there is a 80% likelihood that Cybercab will be 2 seats

 

[Buckminster]

This picture was in the Shareholder vote video released recently. Possibly the Cybercab? Looks like they may use the same process as Cybertruck for the panels as it is completely angular with no curves. Probably why Elon referred to it as the Cybercab.

Speculating, but I could imagine lower grade stainless, all angular to save on tooling and painting, bolted to a single piece casting if this is a 2 seater. Perfect billboard for some advertising revenue as well with printed wraps.


View attachment 1048990

https://twitter.com/x/status/1792697814079943079

Looks like scissor doors by the dude's glasses. Bench seat saves money but cooling between the pads? Consistent with the mockup.

 

[jeewee3000]

Just watched the shareholder meeting video frame by frame. They indeed teased the Cybercab and the robotaxi-app. I do believe these pics are officially the robotaxi we will see on 8/8.

Two seater is 99% confirmed. They are mixing it up with the seats (a bench with armrest that can fold down, a bit like a backseat) but I get the reasoning. If couples get in the cybercab, it's nice for them to huddle up watching Netflix during their autonomous drive. (I'm not implying the birds and the bees (although this will of course happen and these users can get a 1 star rating for making a mess), just literally that I don't have an armrest between me and my wife when watching TV together at home.)

I was surprised by one screen instead of two (one for each passenger), since I imagine many of times two people will want to do something different. Like on an airplane, one passenger watches a movie and the other plays a video game.

But then again, the best part is no part and if 90% of the time one screen is enough then it might be too expensive to install two screens. People have phones so they can always resort to that. And many robotaxi rides will be for only one passenger.

Another thought is that the seats seem pretty low. For the elderly this might prove difficult to get in and out of. But the Cybercab seems geared more towards people under 60-70 if you ask me. (18-40 most of all)

 

[Buckminster]

Squint and you can see the RT.

View attachment 1049144

External wheels like this?

Scissor doors also, Cybercab is looking a lot like a bigger Renault Twizzy.

 

[willow_hiller]

Walter Isaacson posted an excerpt from his book that contained some interesting details I had not read elsewhere. I have OCR'd it for you all so you can read it too without squinting at book screenshots:

We are all in on autonomy

Self-driving cars, Musk believed, would do more than merely free folks from the drudgery of driving. They would, to a large extent, eliminate the need for people to own cars. The future would belong to the Robotaxi: a driverless vehicle that would appear when you summoned it, take you to your destination, then ride off to the next passenger. Some might be owned by individuals, but most would be owned by fleet companies or Tesla itself.

That November, Musk gathered his top five lieutenants in Austin to brainstorm this future over an informal dinner at the half-furnished house of Omead Afshar, who hired a private chef to cook super-thick aged ribeye steaks. Present were Franz von Holzhausen, Drew Baglino, Lars Moravy, and Zach Kirkhorn. They decided that the Robotaxi would be a smaller, less expensive, less speedy car than the Model 3. "Our main focus has to be volume," Musk said. "There is no amount that we could possibly build that will be enough. Some- day we want to be at twenty million a year."

A central challenge was figuring out how to design a car with no steering wheel or pedals that could meet government safety standards and handle special situations. Week after week, Musk weighed in on every detail. "What if someone forgets to shut the door of the Robo- taxi when they get out?" he asked. "We have to make sure it can shut its own doors." How would a Robotaxi get into a gated community or parking garage? "Maybe it needs an arm that can punch a button or take a ticket," he said. But that seemed like a nightmare. "Perhaps we just exclude it from places that you can't easily drive into," he decided. At times the conversations were so earnest and detailed they belied how wild the entire concept was.

By the end of the summer of 2022, Musk and his team realized they had to make a final decision on the issue they had wrestled with for a year. Should they play it safe and build in a steering wheel, pedals, side mirrors, and other things that were currently required by regulation? Or should they build it to be truly autonomous?

Most of his engineers were still pushing for the safer alternative. They had a more realistic outlook on how long it would take for Full Self-Driving (FSD) to be ready. At a fateful and dramatic meeting August 18, they gathered to hash the issue out.

"We want to make sure we are assessing the risk with you," von Holzhausen told Musk. "If we go down a path of having no steering wheel, and FSD is not ready, we won't be able to put them on the road." He suggested that they make a car that had and pedals that could be easily removed. "Basically our proposal is to bake them in right now but remove them when we are allowed to." Musk just shook his head. The future would not get here fast enough unless they forced it.

"Small ones," von Holzhausen persisted, "which we can remove pretty easily and design around."

"No." Musk said. "No. No There was a long pause. "No mirrors no pedals, no steering wheel. This is me taking responsibility forors, decision."

The executives sitting around the table hesitated. "Uh, we will come back to you on that," one said.

Musk got into one of his very cold moods. "Let me be clear," he said slowly. "This vehicle must be designed as a clean Robotaxi. We're going to take that risk. It's my fault if it f**** up. But we are not going to design some sort of amphibian frog that's a halfway car. We are all in on autonomy."

A few weeks later, he was still jazzed about the decision. On his plane flying from dropping Griffin off at college, he joined the weekly Robotaxi meeting by phone. As always, he tried to instill a sense of urgency. "This will be a historically mega-revolutionary product," he said. "It will transform everything. This is the product that makes Tesla a ten-trillion company. People will be talking about this moment in a hundred years."

The $25,000 car

As the Robotaxi discussions showed, Musk could be fiercely stubborn. He had a reality-distorting willfulness and a readiness to run roughshod over naysayers. This steeliness may have been one of the superpowers that produced his successes, along with his flameouts.

But here's a lesser-known trait: he could change his mind. He could take in arguments that he seemed to be rejecting and recalibrate his risk calculations. And that is what happened with the steering wheels.

At the end of the summer of 2022, after Musk made his pronouncements about being "all in" on a Robotaxi with no steering wheel, von Holzhausen and Moravy set about persuading him to cover his bet. They knew how to do it in a nonchallenging way. "We brought him new information that maybe he wasn't fully digesting In the summer," Moravy says. Even if self-driving vehicles were approved by regulators in the U.S., he argued, it would be years before prove were approved internationally. So it made sense to build a ver sion of the car with a steering wheel and pedals.

For years they had talked about what should be Tesla's next- generation offering: a small, inexpensive, mass-market car selling for around $25,000. Musk himself had teased the possibility in 2020, but then he put a hold on those plans, and over the next two years he repeatedly vetoed the idea, saying that the Robotaxi would make the other car unnecessary. Nevertheless, von Holzhausen had quietly kept it alive as a shadow project in his design studio.

Late on a Wednesday evening during his September 2022 trip to launch Optimus, Musk ensconced himself in his longtime haunt, the windowless Jupiter conference room of the Fremont factory. Moravy and von Holzhausen led a few top members of the Tesla team in for a secretive meeting. They presented data showing that in order for Tesla to grow at 50 percent a year, it needed to have an inexpensive small car. The global market for such a car was huge. By 2030, there might be up to 700 million of them, almost twice as many as for the Model 3/Y category. Then they showed that the same vehicle platform and the same assembly lines could be used to make both the $25,000 car and the Robotaxi. "We convinced him that if we build these factories and we have this platform, we could churn out both Robotaxis and a $25,000 car, all on the same vehicle architecture," von Holzhausen says. After the meeting, Musk and I sat alone in the conference room, and it was clear that he was unenthusiastic about the $25,000 car.

"It's really not that exciting of a product," he said. His heart was in design transforming transportation through Robotaxis. But over the next few months, he got increasingly more enthusiastic. At a view session one afternoon in February 2023, von Holzhausen put models of the Robotaxi and the $25,000 car next to each other in the studio. Both had a Cybertruck futuristic feel. Musk loved the de- signs. "When one of these comes around a corner," he said, "people will think they are seeing something from the future."

The new mass-market vehicle, both with a steering wheel and as a Robotaxi, became known as "the next generation platform." Musk initially decided that Tesla would build a new factory in northern Mexico, four hundred miles south of Austin, designed from the ground up to build such cars. It would use a completely new manufacturing method that was highly automated.

But a problem soon arose in his mind: He had always believed that Tesla's design engineers needed to be located right next to the assembly line, rather than allowing manufacturing to be done at a remote location. That way, engineers could get instant feedback on how to design innovations that would both improve the car and make it easier to manufacture. This was particularly true for a completely new car and manufacturing process. But he realized he would have trouble getting his top engineers to relocate to the new factory. "Tesla engineering will need to be on the line to make it successful, and getting everyone to move to Mexico is never going to happen," he told me.

So in May 2023, he decided to change the initial build location for the next-generation cars and Robotaxis to Austin, where his own workspace and that of his top engineers would be right next to the new high-speed ultra-automated assembly line. Throughout the summer of 2023, he spent hours each week working with his team to design each station on the line, finding ways to shave milliseconds off each step and process.

 

[EvilNuff]

The sheer idiocy of even *considering* a vehicle with no controls absolutely boggles the mind. Tesla isn't even the leader in autonomous driving and Waymo's still require controls for some tasks. When you throw on top the fact that their vision only plan simply cannot ever work for full level 5 autonomy it becomes even more clear that Musk (for all his genius) is equally idiotic.