Tesla pledges one million autonomous ‘robot taxis’ by 2020

Tesla wants to create its own sharing platform where owners can use their Teslas as a robot taxi via an app. They can make money with that. By the end of 2020, a million robot taxis should be driving around. Users can call up the self-driving Tesla taxis via the app.

Elon Musk presented a Tesla plan to start a network of autonomously driving robot taxis starting next year during a presentation to investors called ‘Autonomy Day’. The idea is that the owners can make their Teslas available to the Tesla Network, in which the vehicles can serve as a kind of alternative to, for example, Uber cars.

The taxi service should be made possible by the integration of its own chip, developed by Tesla, in the Tesla cars. From the second quarter of next year, this chip, in combination with updated software, should lead to a situation in which the driver no longer has to focus on driving and there would therefore be fully-fledged autonomously driving cars.

According to Musk, it is “idiotic to buy anything other than a Tesla.” He explains this by pointing out the option for Tesla owners to add their car via the app as a ‘shared car’, so that other app users can call up a Tesla as an autonomous taxi to get from A to B. Musk claims that a Tesla Model 3 as a robot taxi can yield $30,000 a year. This amount is for the end user after Tesla has deducted a percentage of it. Musk expects Tesla to demand between 25 and 30 percent of sales. Once the software has been developed far enough and the cars are fully autonomous, they will be worth about $ 200,000 if they are part of the self-driving network, according to the CEO.

Users of the Tesla robot taxis also benefit from this, according to Musk. He says the average cost of a sharing platform is currently about $2 or $3 per mile, while Tesla’s program is likely to be less than $0.18 per mile. Musk does say that approval from the relevant authorities is required before the sharing platform can be used.