Tesla's Robo Taxi Event: Innovations and Skepticism Unveiled

Tesla's Robo taxi event showcased ambitious tech, but left doubts about its feasibility and transparency.

### Tesla's Robo Taxi Event: Promises, Confusion, and Futuristic Concepts
* 🚗 The Tesla Robo taxi unveiling event showcased a fully self-driving vehicle resembling a mini Cybertruck, featuring a **unique design with no steering wheel or pedals** and a **spacious interior**.
* 🔍 Despite the striking visuals, details about the vehicle were scarce, with key highlights being its capability for **fully unsupervised driving**, a target price of **under $30,000**, and the introduction of **wireless charging**.
* 📉 Concerns arose about the feasibility of these promises, especially given Tesla's history of **delayed timelines and inflated pricing**, with skepticism regarding their ability to **deliver on such ambitious goals by 2027**.
* 🤖 The event also introduced a futuristic robo van designed for group transport, but many attendees questioned its **practicality and likelihood of production**, drawing parallels to similar concepts seen at tech trade shows.
* 👥 Another highlight was the Optimus humanoid robot, which performed tasks and interacted with attendees, but doubts emerged regarding the **authenticity of its AI capabilities** and the **extent of human control behind the scenes**.
* 🤔 Overall, the event painted an **optimistic yet confusing picture** of the future, leaving many to wonder about the **reality behind Tesla's grand promises** and the **true timeline for these innovations**.
* 🌟 While the potential for a **more efficient and technologically advanced future** is inspiring, the uncertainty surrounding the **actualization of these concepts** remains a significant concern for observers.
* 📊 Ultimately, Tesla's unique position in the tech industry gives it a **better chance of success**, but the skepticism about its ability to **deliver on its promises** persists.

[Music] okay, so the Tesla Robo taxi unveiling event was a couple of days ago, and it might be the weirdest tech event I've ever been to. Um, you might have seen some clips from it at this point. I was there. I rode in the self-driving Robo taxi. I explored the insane-looking Robo van, and I talked to the Optimus robot. And then I left feeling kind of confused. It was just a weird event. So here are the three main big reasons why. So first of all, the Robo cab. This was the main thing that we knew we were going to see, this full unveiling of a fully self-driving Tesla. And we saw it, and it looked like this, very, very much like a mini Cybertruck. Like, you've got the light bar on the front, the light bar on the back, the complete lack of rear visibility. Then, of course, you can see it's a two-door, two-seater passenger car. People wondering, like, what a full self-driving Robo cab or Cyber taxi.

whatever we're calling it would actually look like whether it looks dramatically different from a normal car like a Model 3 or even a whmo. And there are some things that are significantly different about this thing they rolled out. I mean, on the outside, it's light gold. Every single one is this like silvery gold color. Although there was never any mention of actual materials, pretty small footprint. You can see there's no exterior door handles or mirrors or anything like that. And then since they don't need any steering wheel or pedals, they can sort of push the seating position way back into this more like loungy seating position, kind of near the middle of the car. There's a center armrest and there's a massive 21-inch touchscreen in the center. And yes, the doors go up as if Tesla hasn't learned from their lessons of the Model X. They're making another crazy set of doors, which honestly is definitely a hit visually. It's a striking feature of this car alongside the wheels, which at first

just look like these huge gold discs, but then when you take a closer look, they're actually just normal 21in low rolling resistance Continental Tires, but they've painted half of the sidewall gold to match the caps in the middle. So, it makes it look like a super thin low-profile tire with a huge wheel, but it's not. It's just paint. But either way, no idea how much of this is going to make it to any sort of final production. But after waiting in line for a bit, I got to ride in this thing for a few minutes. So, I got in, the screen told me to buckle my seat belt, and once I did, the door automatically closed. Pretty smart. Then I just selected the destination, which was on this screen along this route, which I assume was prepped, and then it just started rolling, just started going. Now, I've been in a self-driving Tesla before, but this one is just a little bit more nervy since there's people everywhere and there's no steering wheel in.

front of me, but once you get over the eeriness of basically being trapped in this driverless car with no manual override, I started looking around and noticing a few other things. You know, you sit pretty low to the road, similar to a Model 3, but with more legroom since the seating position is further back. And then there's even fewer physical controls than ever before in this car, like I basically only found that the window switches were in the middle next to the cup holders. I didn't even see any door latches; like the doors only opened with a button on this enormous touchscreen. So again, like a Tesla, it's going to control everything in the car on the screen, including just watching movies while the car is driving, because why not? So you can watch the entire trip that I took uncut on the autofocus channel if you want. I'll link that below. But then the thing is, that's kind of all we got; like there were shockingly few details about the actual car actually explained at this event other than basically like

the three main pillars which are going to be in all the headlines. Which are number one that it will be fully unsupervised self-driving capable. Number two that it will be able to be purchased for under $30,000. All right but then number three that it would actually also charge by inductive wireless charging. So it pulls up over this wireless charging pad on the ground and it would charge that way. Not something we've seen shipping in very many cars especially not ones with large batteries. But that was it no no other numbers no other specs just look at this thing. There's just concepts of a plan. I just had so many other questions from after seeing that like what is going on here. I did at the event walk around after the announcement and bump into some Tesla engineers and people who have been working on these things. And so I just ended up kind of grilling them like I asked them a whole bunch of questions. So I'm going to tell you guys what I learned from them and I guess we can take their word for it. So first of

all there is no steering wheel or pedals, as you can see. So, my first question was, All right, let's say I see an accident coming, or there's something happening on the road in front of me, and the car isn't reacting in time. Is there a manual override? And their answer I got was, Uh, sure, there will be some sort of minimal onscreen controls available, but the goal is that you never have to override, which is a noble goal for sure. I just, I mean, it's hard to imagine we live in a world where that's impossible basically right now. But um, I mean, if you even with the wireless charger picture, you want to like drive over the top of it and line it up perfectly because if it's off a little bit, that's just a giant waste of power. But if I can't adjust it, like that would be terrible. But speaking of wireless charging, you might be wondering why they would try to do this. The main answer again is because they want it to be totally autonomous.

They want people to just be able to own several, like a fleet of these things, and they all just drive around and charge themselves overnight. And the whole cable plugging in charging thing requires a human, so that's one less human required. It'll just line up on the notoriously inefficient wireless charger. But my question again was, Okay, is there at least a charge port, so if I want to supercharge or charge quickly, I can do that? And the answer was no. There is no charge port on this vehicle, so it is not even capable of hitting a Tesla Supercharger or doing any sort of road trips or anything like that. It's purely a taxi. I'm told there's no plans for a front trunk, there's just the rear trunk that they showed in this presentation, and there's no planned range or stated battery size. But what they did say is they're simply aiming for this vehicle to be as efficient as possible. That's their main goal. Between the aerodynamics and the low rolling resistance tires, they think they can aim for about 5.5

miles per kilowatt hour. Some of the most efficient electric cars we see today are getting around 3 to 4 miles per kilowatt hour. So, this would be like an A+ efficiency if they achieve this. And that's what will let them use a smaller overall size battery for the lighter weight of the vehicle. So, it would be nice, they're saying, to clear 200 miles of total range. And that would put this at maybe a 40 kWh battery pack instead of the typical 70 to 130. So, drivetrain-wise, that logic does check out. If you want to make the cheapest, most efficient electric car of all time, you got to hit those things. But then again, you're also telling us this while doing a car with scissor doors and wireless charging. So, that's you. You're going to have some challenges there for sure. Really, I think the obvious red flag, the biggest red flag to me, is the timeline stuff. That, I mean, this is notorious Elon stuff. He gets on stage, he says, We're going to

have this vehicle out for $30,000 before 2027. No, they're not. There's just no way that they're actually going to be able to do that. I mean, if they do, let's say they do, I will shave my head on camera because I'm that confident they won't do it. Like, I want to be optimistic, but there's just too much stacked up against it because in order to ship this at all with no steering wheel and everything, they have to get all the regulatory approval for the full self-driving and all that and get all the prices down in spite of inflation and ship something with scissor doors and all this stuff in the next two years. I just, there's just no way. Tesla's been promising full unsupervised self-driving for years, over and over and over again, and consistently keeps pushing it back. But then also just price-wise, I get the goal, but Tesla promised a $35,000 Model 3, and years later, I think they briefly actually shipped that car for that price for a

little bit before discontinuing it cyber truck. I don't know if you remember the do you remember the base price of what they said the Cyber truck would cost at the cheapest version when it came out $39,000. And that was about what like four or 5 years ago. Do you know what the cheapest cyber Tru is right now $95,000. So you can see where my skepticism is coming from. But even after all that you know there's kind of a philosophical question too which is what is the difference between this Robo taxi thing and a model 3. Because Tesla has been promising for years that the car that people are driving and buying today is going to be capable of full unsupervised self-driving like the model 3 and the model Y. And it's actually not clear if there's that many differences. I mean obviously okay one's going to have a steering wheel and four doors and four seats and the whole thing and maybe be a bit more expensive but like

Yeah, what if my car is going to be able to do all that stuff? I think I want the one that can plug into superchargers and do all sorts of carrying things. Maybe this will be an old-fashioned way of thinking sometime in the future, like every car on the road is autonomous, and it's like an old-school thing to want the one with the steering wheel that you can drive sometimes. Maybe, um, I think the main advantage of the robo-taxi, if it has the exact same capabilities as a Model 3, is it'll be cheaper and smaller and easier to operate in a fleet situation. That will probably be the main difference as far as actually buying these things, because they've been selling people the dream of the car that you buy and own today. You'll drive it to work, and then when you're at work, it'll go drive people around as an Uber for 10 hours or however long, and then you drive it home when you need it, and then when you're sleeping, it'll continue to drive an Uber.

people around, and so it has all these amazing capabilities. It'll do all this great stuff, but will it though? There's actually a moment I had to rewatch The Event because I was there, and people are like yelling out the whole time, like stuff at Elon on stage. And at this point in the presentation, he goes like, Oh yeah, Model 3 and Model Y will also do full self-driving. And then someone goes like, What about the Cybertruck? And then he says, Oh yeah, don't worry, Cybertruck 2. So, and it's Cybertruck 2. Yes, of course. Sorry, I don't want to be getet. Yes, yes, all our cars basically. Um, so yeah, okay, all our vehicles. Great. But then it's kind of quiet, but then someone else yells out, What about Hardware 3? Which is basically, if you don't know, a reference to older Model 3s. And his response, So's, let's not get Nuance here. Um, all right, next slide. So yeah, not let's not get to Nuance, let's just get

All our cars will have it, except maybe some of the old ones. All our cars will be able to self-drive, though totally. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, how about that? But here's a bridge that I don't think we'll ever actually get to cross, which is the second thing that was insane that was announced at this event, which is the robo van. So, somewhere about halfway through this presentation, they roll out this one-of-one super futuristic-looking massive van thing. Kind of looked like a... it looked like the military vehicles from I, Robot, to be honest, which that's probably not a good thing. But yeah, it rolls out, and they give us, again, very, very few details. This is going to be a robo van that can hold like up to 20ish people and, again, be fully electric and fully autonomous and take groups or teams of people from point A to point B, no manual override necessary. Great. Have you ever been to CES? Have you ever heard of... have you ever watched videos from CES every year in

January, there's this trade show. It's really fun in Vegas, and uh, if you ever go, you'll notice in the South Hall, there's a section with all the cars, the mobility section, and you'll find about 50 of these every year. There's just like a van with no steering wheel and a bunch of seats that all face the middle, and it's like the future of Mobility concept. There's tons of those, none of them ever ship, of course, because there are rules, but I guess there's not to me a whole lot that differentiates that brief concept we saw at the Tesla event with the dozens of other vaporware versions of this that I've seen before. That's all I'm saying. I mean, the fact that this one comes from Tesla is the main differentiator. This is the company that could maybe theoretically make it happen, but like I said, there's almost no details about this thing, and I have almost no faith that that thing that they showed with its minimal clearance and its glass everywhere and just lack

of numbers or anything. I don't think that we'll ever actually see that thing. I could eat my words, but like, that seems crazy. But then, last but not least, Tesla decided to bring back. They decided to remind us that they're also an AI company, not just a car company, by bringing back out the Optimus humanoid robot again. So, they had these things all over this event, this time dancing, doing these pre-rehearsed demos, but also they were just kind of out and about. They were serving drinks and snacks, and they were walking around and interacting with and entertaining people, just like hanging out amongst everyone at this event. Now, I already have my thoughts that I've talked about, you know, humanoid before. I made a whole video about it. If you want to watch it, I'll leave a link below the like button. I've talked about Tesla's Optimus, but even just what we saw with that would have been a huge step forward from what we've ever seen. Like, this would have been one of the most impressive things ever. But then

they decided to take it further. They also decided to have these robots talking to people, and it was just, I mean, it was way too fast to be an LLM. Like, it's just, I'll have just watch this, watch this clip. Would I some chocolates right on? What's your name? Vanessa. Vanessa, yes. Vanessa, pleasure to meet you, Vanessa. Thank you. Like, it's just, it's just a person. It's a person talking through a speaker. It even like stutters and makes occasional like human mistakes. If you watch a bunch of videos from the event, a bunch of different robots all have slightly different voices. Yeah, it was a person for sure. And it's weird because Tesla at no point, at least as of the time of recording, has not acknowledged this at all. They haven't said that or confirmed that, but people there at the event have heard various things from various engineers. I talked to two engineers who only would tell me, uh, yes, all of the LLMs do run totally on device, uh, but like, yeah, I don't, that no.

I don't think so. So, this kind of became like the talking point of the whole event, like how now we don't know how much of this event was real or not so real, like how much of what these robots are doing is human-controlled or AI. You know, there were all kinds of hand-waving and gestures and movements. I played charades with one of them. You know what it reminds me of? Remember that video I did at Disney's Imagineering Labs where they had these bipedal robots that were controlled by a Steam Deck controller? They did all kinds of walking around and stringing animations together to entertain people at the parks. There's just a bunch of button presses and controllers to make that happen, and sure, there's some AI to blend that stuff, but you could never deny that there's basically entirely human control happening here. And that's basically what I think is happening at this Tesla event: lots of impressive and entertaining things in the form of a super advanced articulating robot stringing animations together, but there's just not

totally ready to do this stuff on its own. We've never seen anything quite like it, even from Boston Dynamics. But we got to be real about the human-assisted part. But the thing is, the dream that they are selling people with this specific robot is that this thing will live with you basically. It will be your humanized friend. Actually, they said that it would be your friend. It would do chores for you. It would live around you and be able to do all these sorts of tasks on its own using the AI and the vision-based system. That's, I think, that's a really far-off dream. AI is really, really quickly improving, but I still think that's a far-off dream. So, you know, to their credit, this event, it was insane. Like, they did a lot of things that could have gone wrong. And if you told me in 2024 that a company would do a bunch of self-driving car demos around tons of people just loose in the road, and they would have bipedal human-like robots roaming around performing tasks.

and entertaining people at the same event. And that they would have a drone show like that is just a lot of stuff in a row that is super high-tech that could go wrong but somehow didn't. And it represented, I think, a very optimistic view of the future, even though it's very much still like concepts. It's a future that is potentially way more efficient, potentially way safer, and more impressive in general technologically than the world we live in today. So that by itself, I think, is honorable. The things that they were hoping to be real would be amazing and inspirational and honorable if they actually happened. But since they're also a public tech company, they felt the need to do demos and give all these big promises. And that's where it felt weird because it's really hard to make promises about when we're going to deliver this future and for what price we're going to deliver this future when it just feels very unlikely. And then doing the like robots talking, it's just

like now the whole is in question, like how much of it is real, how much of it is fake, and now we're focusing on that instead of how cool the future could someday actually be. That's where I'm at, but hey, if there is one company that has the best chance of bringing this all to life, if there's, if you made me bet money on one company that I think has the best odds to get there eventually, then yeah, it would be the one with the massive data-gathering advantage, with stuff out there in the real world today. It would be Tesla, so I'll believe it when I see it. Thanks for watching, catch you guys in the next one, peace.

The Tesla Robotaxi is Confusing...

Marques Brownlee

Tesla's Robo Taxi Unveiling: A Weird Experience

The Tesla Robo taxi event featured a self-driving car that resembled a mini Cybertruck, with a unique silvery gold color and a loungy seating position.

The car's design included no exterior door handles or mirrors, a massive 21-inch touchscreen, and strikingly designed wheels.

The ride in the Robo taxi was eerie, with no manual override and minimal physical controls, while the event itself lacked detailed explanations about the car's features.

Tesla's Revolutionary Self-Driving Car Concept

Tesla's new car concept aims to be fully unsupervised self-driving, priced under $30,000, and utilizing inductive wireless charging.

The vehicle will have no steering wheel or pedals, with minimal on-screen controls for manual override.

It is designed to be purely autonomous, with no charge port for quick charging, and aims for an efficient 5.

5 miles per kilowatt hour to achieve a 200-mile range with a smaller battery pack.

Skepticism About Tesla's $30,000 Vehicle by 2027

The speaker doubts Tesla's ability to deliver a vehicle for $30,000 by 2027, citing regulatory approvals and inflation as major obstacles.

They highlight Tesla's history of pushing back promises for full self-driving and the increasing prices of the Cybertruck.

The speaker questions the difference between the proposed Robo Taxi and the Model 3, suggesting that the main advantage of the Robo Taxi would be its cheaper and smaller operation in a fleet.

Tesla's Ambitious Self-Driving and Robo Van Plans

Tesla's event featured Elon Musk announcing that the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck will all have full self-driving capabilities.

The presentation also revealed a futuristic robo van, designed to be fully electric and autonomous, with the ability to hold up to 20 people.

While Tesla's involvement adds credibility, the lack of details and the commonality of such concepts raise doubts about the van's successful launch.

Tesla showcased its Optimus humanoid robot at an event, with the robots dancing, serving drinks, and interacting with attendees.

The robots also appeared to be talking to people, raising questions about whether they were human-controlled or using AI.

The event sparked debate about the authenticity of the robots' actions and the extent of human involvement in their performance.

The Ambitious Vision of a Humanized Robot

A new robot is being marketed as a humanized friend that will live with you and perform tasks using AI and a vision-based system, but the speaker believes this dream is still far-off.

The event showcasing the robot's capabilities was impressive and represented an optimistic view of the future, but the company's big promises felt unrealistic.

Despite the skepticism, the speaker acknowledges Tesla's potential to bring this vision to life, given its data-gathering advantage and real-world presence.