Tesla CEO claims driverless robotaxis will be real by 2024

Electric car-maker Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has claimed that the company’s long awaited robotaxi will hit the markets overseas by 2024. Musk was speaking at the company’s first quarter earnings call held late on April 20. He added that the robotaxis will be “a massive driver” for the company in future.

The vehicles are supposed to drive by themselves, with no assistance from humans. Musk reiterated that the robotaxis will neither have steering wheels, nor pedals.

To be sure, this isn’t the first time that Musk has claimed that robotaxis will be on roads soon. In an investor call in 2019, he claimed that a million of these vehicles will be on the road by 2020. 

He noted that full self-driving will require companies to “solve real-world artificial intelligene, which nobody has solved”. “The whole road system is made for biological neural nets and eyes. And so actually, when you think about it, in order to solve driving, we have to solve neural nets and cameras to a degree of capability that is on par with, or really exceeds humans. And I think we will achieve that this year,” he said.

Further, Musk claimed that the cost per mile for a robotaxi ride will be lower than what consumers “have ever experienced”. He compared the same to the cost of bus and subway tickets.

Tesla posted earnings of $3.32 billion from January to March this year, which is seven times more than the company’s revenues during the same period last year. The company attributed this growth to high demand, despite facing supply chain constraints due to pandemic-driven lockdowns in China and elsewhere.