Tesla is reportedly planning to delay the unveiling of its so-called “Robotaxi” driverless vehicle by a few months.
For the last few years, Tesla has been working on a vehicle designed from the ground up to be a self-driving vehicle. The company has been referring to it as ‘Robotaxi’.
CEO Elon Musk insists that Tesla is still dedicated to delivering its promised self-driving capability to existing vehicles delivered since 2016 through software update, but it also decided to build a new vehicle designed entirely around the fact that it will be driverless.
Not much is known about the vehicle other than hints that it won’t have a steering wheel or pedals, and that it will be “Cybertruck-like” in terms of design. We might have also seen a glimpse of the interior in a video that Tesla released.
In April, Musk said that Tesla would unveil the vehicle on August 8th.
However, Bloomberg now reports that the unveiling is going to be delayed to October:
Tesla Inc. is delaying its planned robotaxi unveiling to October, from August, to allow teams working on the project more time to build additional vehicle prototypes, according to people familiar with the decision.
Electrek previously reported that Tesla planned to match the unveiling with the coming online of a new supercluster computing platform at Gigafactory Texas to train its robotaxi, but that Tesla insiders believed the project, which was accelerated as part of a restructuring earlier this year, could be delayed.
Electrek’s Take
It wouldn’t be the first time that Tesla delayed an unveiling. However, this one is particularly interesting because Tesla is likely going to unveil a vehicle that simply wouldn’t work yet since it has yet to solve self-driving.
I don’t think solving self-driving will be done by October, but Tesla can use every bit of time.
Maybe, they can announce a geofenced service in a specific city by October. We will see.