Tesla won't launch robotaxis in June

(My fearless prediction!)

Tesla will launch something in June — just not what it sounds like.

TLDR: Tesla says it will launch a fully autonomous robotaxi service in Austin in June and roll it out to additional cities later this year. Sounds great! But, IMHO, whatever Tesla launches next month won’t be what it sounds like it is.

The vast majority of the value of Tesla’s astonishing stock price is based not on what the company is doing today but what investors expect it to do in the future.

One thing investors expect Tesla to do in the future is launch fully autonomous cars.

The company has been promising to do that for about six years. Starting in 2019, CEO Elon Musk predicted that, within a year, there would be millions of autonomous Teslas on the roads.

Over this period, Elon has also denounced the self-driving technology used by actual robocar companies like Waymo — which includes LIDAR (light-based radar) and maps — and insisted that Tesla’s full autonomy will use only cameras, data, and AI.

And maybe someday it will!

But not yet.

Despite six additional years of development, the best Tesla has been able to offer is a “driver-assist” technology that requires a human driver to sit behind the wheel, pay attention, and be ready to take over at any second.

This technology is cool and helpful. But it’s not fully autonomous.

Meanwhile, Waymo continues to expand its own fully autonomous taxi service (no driver or supervision necessary!) and now offers driverless cabs in four cities and provides more than 250,000 paid rides a week.

Happily for the Tesla Faithful, Tesla’s entry into the “fully autonomous” car market is supposed to finally come next month, when Tesla launches a “fully autonomous” robotaxi service in Austin. On the company’s April conference call, Elon again confirmed that this launch is happening and that the cameras+AI technology will make millions of Teslas fully autonomous by next year:

We’re “currently on track to to be able to do paid rides fully autonomously in Austin in June and and then other cities in the US by the end of this year… I feel confident in predicting large scale autonomy around the middle of next year… There will be millions of Teslas operating fully autonomously in the second half of next year.”

Elon also said Tesla’s cars are already driving themselves around Austin and from their factory assembly lines to car-carriers and that “later this year” the technology will be so good that Model Ys will drive themselves from Tesla’s factories to their customer’s houses.

That all sounds extremely cool!

It also, in the opinion of this analyst, will not happen, at least not in this timeframe with just cameras+AI at any kind of scale…