Elon Musks Tesla rolls out robotaxis in gamble on black box AI tech amid safety concerns

Tesla aimed to stun investors Thursday night with its long-awaited “robotaxi unveil,” a potential milestone after a decade of Elon Musk’s unfulfilled promises to deliver self-driving vehicles.The automaker unveiled a prototype called the “Cybercab” — which Musk described as capable of “supervised full self-driving” — rather than a road-ready driverless taxi.“There’s no steering wheel or pedals so I hope this goes well,” the founder said as 20 of the cars drove around without any people inside at the event at Warner Brother Studios.“We’ll find out! He said he expects the robotaxis to be rolled out “before 2027” at a cost of under $30,000, he added.

Convincing regulators and passengers of the vehicle’s safety could prove much harder and take much longer — while its main competitors, such as Alphabet’s Waymo, are expanding robotaxi fleets they’re already operating in select cities today.Tesla has to date pursued a different technological path than all of its major self-driving rivals — one with potentially higher rewards but also higher risks to both its business and its passengers, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen executives, consultants and academics specializing in self-driving technology and three former Tesla autonomous-vehicle engineers.Tesla’s strategy relies solely on a combination of “computer vision,” which aims to use cameras the way humans use eyes, with an artificial-intelligence technology called end-to-end machine learning that instantly translates the images into driving decisions.That technology already underpins its “Full Self-Driving” driver-assistance feature that, despite its name, can’t be operated safely without a human driver. Musk has said Tesla is using the same approach to develop fully autonomous robotaxis.Tesla’s competitors — including Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox, General Motors’ Cruise and a host of Chinese firms — use the same technology but typicall...