Tesla aims at selfdriving cars next year
PALO ALTO: Tesla chief executive Elon Musk expects to start converting the company’s electric cars into fully selfdriving vehicles next year, as part of an audacious plan to create a network of robotic taxis to compete against Uber and other ridehailing services.
The vision sketched out yesterday, at an event at Tesla’s Silicon Valley headquarters, requires several leaps of faith — something that the zealous investors and consumers who view Mr Musk as a technological genius often are willing to take.
But selfdriving car experts fear Mr Musk is shirking public safety in an effort to boost Tesla’s stock and sell more of the company’s electric cars. This is amid lingering questions about whether the 15yearold automaker can consistently make money.
‘‘It sounds like a pipe dream that he’s selling people,’’ Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said.
‘‘I think it’s basically overpromising, which is typical of Elon Musk.’’
To prove his sceptics wrong, Mr Musk will have to persuade regulators that Tesla’s technology for transforming potentially hundreds of thousands of electric cars into selfdriving vehicles will produce robots that are safer and more reliable than humans.
And to do that, he will have to be correct in his bet that Tesla has come up with a better way to produce selfdriving cars than virtually every other of the more than 60 companies in the United States working towards the same goal.
Some of those companies are aiming to have their fully autonomous cars begin carrying passengers in small geographic areas as early as this year, but many experts do not believe they will be in widespread use for a decade or more.
Unlike most of those other companies, Tesla’s cars will not come with the light beam sensors called Lidar that many industry experts consider to be essential equipment for robotic vehicles to navigate the road.
Mr Musk trashed Lidar as a ‘‘fool’s errand’’, in a putdown of companies such as Google spinoff Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise Automation that are including the light beam sensors in their systems.
‘‘They are going to dump Lidar,’’ he assured investors and analysts.
Mr Musk, widely known for his swagger as much as his smarts, spent much of the time trying to persuade both the investors and consumers that he had figured out a better way to teach robots how to drive.
‘‘It is fundamentally insane to buy anything other than a Tesla,’’ Mr Musk said at one point, arguing that purchasing a vehicle from any other car maker would be like getting a horse.
His quasisales pitch came two days before Tesla is expected to report a disappointing performance for the first three months of the year. Analysts polled by FactSet predict a $US305.5 million $NZ458.4 million) firstquarter net loss, based on disappointing car sales, a setback after Mr Musk pledged heading into the second half of last year that Tesla would be profitable from that point onwards.