Elon Musk presents: Taxis

0:00About a week ago, there was a big boom in the United States, but you probably didn't hear it. It went down in a tiny town called Starbase, Texas, population 500 or so, home, though, of Elon Musk's SpaceX. On Wednesday night, the company was testing its starship and things went horribly wrong. Whoa! Whoa! What? No! No!

0:34Oh my god. Luckily, no one was in that spaceship, but there are real humans riding in Musk's Tesla robo-taxis. Those had a relatively more successful launch in Texas on Sunday, But we're going to ask if Tesla's really ready for driverless vehicles on Today Explained.

1:20Up to Opel Grill on Saturday, 24 January, with your Opel partner. More on Opel.de.

1:50this, basically everyone but you, what happened? So yeah, it was a long time coming, but Tesla finally launched its long-promised robo-taxi service. Huge asterisk on that, which is that it was by invite only. A very small group of Tesla influencers were invited to participate in this experiment. So for everyone watching the video, this is my first nighttime ride. Custom Auto Y RoboTaxi. It's riding extremely smoothly, really nicely. Just very quiet, very comfortable. If I wasn't recording, I would have been banging some Metallica right now. It was about maybe 10 or 20 cars. It's not entirely clear how many.

2:41Within a very small area of Austin, Texas. But they did it. We did it, Joe. They actually deployed a RoboTaxi service. Okay, so they deployed a service. It sounds like it was a very small and asterisked deployment, but they did it. We did it, Joe. What do these things look like? Is it an exciting new line of vehicles? No, they're basically just Tesla Model Ys, but they have RoboTaxi branding on the side of the vehicle. And that kind of weird Tesla font that Elon Musk seems to be very much a fan of. It's kind of like cyberpunk-y, graffiti-ish. You would have to look twice to actually read what it says.

3:27But yeah, it says RoboTaxi right there on the side. Okay, richest man in the world launches new line of RoboTaxis with like a goofy decal, basically? Yeah, basically, basically. How much does a ride cost in a Tesla RoboTaxi? It brings me no happiness to report that the rides cost... $4.20. $4.20 flat rate for every ride, no matter where you go. R.I.P. 420 jokes. We're calling it. Stick a fork in them. Tell us more about the expectations here for Tesla and what they've been trying to do with robo-taxis for some time now, I believe. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that the stakes are huge for Tesla in this moment.

4:09But Elon Musk has been promising driverless vehicles since as long as I've been covering the company, which is almost 10 years now. We're probably only a month away from having autonomous driving, at least for highways and for relatively simple roads. And every time he promises it, he says. That's about two years. In 2015. That's about two years. 2016. Two years. It kept being two years away and became kind of like a joke, right, that it was always going to be this two years away thing and never actually delivered. But now they're actually delivering. And I think it's because of sort of all that's been going on with Tesla lately, which if maybe you've been paying attention to the news, you've noticed that brand is not doing so hot.

4:50Tesla reported this morning that sales estimates have dropped 13 percent from last year. For the first time ever, BYD crossed the$100 billion mark, raking in about$10 billion more than Tesla. Competition is up, but also people seem to not like Elon Musk and the things that he's been doing for Donald Trump and Doge. And that's resulted in a huge brand crisis for Tesla, which is also affecting the company's business. So I think what we're seeing right now is a move out of desperation. Tesla needed to deliver something. It couldn't just push this one out for another two years. Okay, and these robo-taxi Teslas have been on the streets of Austin for two days now.

5:31How's it gone in these two days? Yeah, I think it's been a mixed bag. There have been a couple videos that have surfaced showing the Tesla vehicles behaving strangely. One was driving on the wrong side of the road briefly. Yikes. Yeah. Are you kidding me? It's scary as hell. That is a super easy scenario with clear marking, great weather, etc. and the car still made huge mistakes and could have easily caused an accident. This is not a deployment ready system, not even close. If a human taxi driver drove like that, I'd stop them and say, let me out now and report them to the cab company. Another was caught breaking hard in the middle of the street because it caught some stationary police vehicles on the side of the road that weren't directly in its path.

6:18Silly robot. So it clearly like, you know, just within the first couple of days, some incidents are coming up. And, you know, we have to sort of take that into account with the Tesla's history, which is, you know, there have been at least 58 people that have been killed in Tesla vehicles using autopilot. Wow. A couple of deaths involving the full self-driving technology, that same technology that's underpinning these driverless robo taxis. So I think there's a sense from safety advocates and some from some regulators that they'd like Tesla to go a lot slower here in terms of rolling this technology out.

6:48But Elon Musk has said he has no intentions of going slow. If everything goes well, according to him, we could see thousands of Tesla robo taxis on the road within a few months, potentially a million by the end of 2026, as he said. What does the ramp up look like in theory? You're saying this weekend they launched like a dozen or two cars in Austin with like a limited range. What does the step by step process of getting to a million look like just even in theory? So they have to broaden their service area, the geofence that the cars operate in. So that means starting small and then slowly expanding out from there, adding more cars to the fleet, bringing more customers in.

7:28Right now it's just invite only, but they'll eventually have to open that up to the public to let just basically anybody who can download the app use the service. They're going to have to launch in additional cities. And Musk has said he wants to bring this to robo-taxis to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, San Antonio and Texas. The difference there, though, is that California has much more rigid regulations around autonomous vehicles than Texas does. Basically, you just show up with, like, proof of insurance in Texas and you can do whatever you want. In California, you need to apply for a series of permits before you can even begin to test driverlessly or invite passengers in your vehicles.

8:07So that'll be a huge obstacle for them. But if they can get over those obstacles, and then more importantly, if he can convince his BFF, Donald Trump, to pass some sort of national standard that maybe even supersedes a lot of these state-level rules, then he could start rolling out cars without steering wheels, without pedals, like the CyberCab that they introduced last year. That's the real moneymaker for him, because he'll be making the cars, selling them to regular people. They'll be able to add their vehicles to a robo-taxi network. It'll work sort of like Uber slash Airbnb where your car is out picking up people at night while you're at home asleep.

8:41And that would be a huge – that's what he's always promised with this, right? You know, that's not the same thing that they rolled out on Sunday, which was obviously a very limited service. We're talking grand – much grander scale compared to what was rolled out on Sunday. It's not clear that they're going to be able to get there within the next year, two years. I mean, it could be even a decade before they get to that point. OK, funny you bring this back to like Donald Trump and the BFF thing. And obviously Elon Musk started out the year playing like a very prominent role in the U.S. federal government bureaucracy.

9:18How much did that work there and his very controversial tenure? How much does that affect the future of his perhaps most prominent company, at least for the average American consumer? Well, I think he's in effect made himself one of the least popular people in America right now. So I think that that's if anything, you know, no other company that I can think of in my mind is as closely tied to their CEO as Tesla is right. Tesla is Elon Musk. Elon Musk is Tesla. And there's really no daylight between the two. So people who don't like Elon Musk, don't like him sort of tromping through the federal government, firing people, canceling humanitarian aid, canceling science, science contracts, grant research, all these things that Doge has been doing can register their dislike of him by not buying a Tesla, selling their Tesla if they own one, protesting outside of a Tesla dealership.

10:16dealership. You know, there's all of these things that they can do to really kind of like send the signal to the wider world about how angry people are at Elon Musk. And I think that that's been a huge brand crisis for the company. And we've seen it reflected in their revenue, in their sales numbers, their deliveries. It's just, you know, it's clear that that has had an enormous backfire on Tesla. And I think it's probably a pretty prominent reason why Musk decided to very publicly step down from Doge. And perhaps most easily, if you really hate Elon Musk and Tesla, but you still want to ride around in a robo-taxi, you can just take a Waymo.

10:56Exactly. And we can talk to you about that when we're back on Today Explained.

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14:26Today Explained is back with Andrew Hawkins from The Verge. Andrew, Tesla's robo-taxis aren't arriving in a vacuum. That's Dyson's business. We've been covering robo-taxis for a minute now. We spoke to you about them way back in August of 2023. So we've been told, I think, for a number of years that self-driving cars are coming. They're going to take over our roads. We're not going to have any human-powered vehicles at all in the future. But the future happens fast. What's happened since then? And what does the current market look like for robo-taxis? Yeah, it's been really fascinating. Within the last couple years, Waymo has really kind of exploded out of the gate and become the kind of predominant robo-taxi business in America.

15:12This is a company that spun out of Google many years ago, started operating in Phoenix, then expanded to San Francisco and Los Angeles. They recently are now also in Austin, which is where Tesla is obviously banking a lot of hopes for its robo-taxi service. And then they're going to be expanding to a bunch of other cities before the end of the year. They've said that they're going to be launching in Atlanta, Miami, Washington, D.C. I see them all around town, but there's always someone in the front seat. Exactly. So that's the phase that they're in right now. They're in that testing phase. That takes place over a couple months.

15:45Soon they'll be pulling people out of the cars, testing driverlessly. Then they'll invite people to come be sort of early testers for the vehicles. And then it will open to the wider public. And I think that that's sort of like how you can sort of take the two companies and look at them side by side. Waymo, I think, is just years ahead of where Tesla is right now. And how are they doing? I mean, it seems like they're doing great. They've driven over 7 million miles driverlessly, I think, so far over the last few years. They've been very transparent about their safety statistics. They've been sharing data with the public, publishing articles and peer-reviewed journals, sort of holding their technology up against human drivers to show how their vehicles can operate more safely than human-driven ones are.

16:30They're bringing in revenue for Alphabet. Not profitable, I think, at any stretch. But still, that's money that they can put away. They're making partnerships with auto manufacturers to bring the technology to different types of vehicles. So they're going to be rolling out Hyundai, electric Hyundai vehicles pretty soon. That's going to be added to the fleet as well as Zeker, which is a Chinese manufacturer. And so I think it's on all levels. Waymo is really just kind of like checking all the boxes right now. I think that they still have some issues to deal with when it comes to sort of public acceptance and public trust of driverless vehicles.

17:06But you talk to anybody who's ridden in one of these cars. They love it. It honestly, I feel way safer in here than with a stranger in their car. So I'm not mad about it. I'm, I'm a big fan. Let's pop some good music on.

17:26Okay, team has nearly arrived. This was so fun. One more minute left of the journey. Bye Waymo. It's cool. They can post photos of themselves, right? It's interesting. It's novel. I mean, this is like what the future is to people, right? Driving around in a vehicle with no one in the front seat, that's the stuff from Total Recall and Minority Report and all these sci-fi films. Everything else seems like it's burning and collapsing around us, but that does seem to be kind of representative of this imagined future that we all thought we'd have. What are the limitations then at this point? Is there still just the issue that people don't trust these things?

18:03Yeah, I think I've seen a number of surveys that have done that says that most people still don't trust the technology. And I think that's just sort of a reflection of the limited rollout of Waymo, right? Only in four cities right now, possibly five pretty soon. The vast majority of people that you talk to out on the street have never ridden in a Waymo. They're restricted to a geofenced area in the markets that they operate. They don't operate on the highways. They don't go to the airport except in Phoenix. where they've been for a number of years, way longer than they have most of their other markets.

18:36And those are huge, huge limitations. Because if you think about how most people use Uber or Lyft, it's to take a car to the airport, right? It's mostly business travel. And therefore, that's a huge chunk of revenue that Waymo is just not realizing at this moment. I think once they open up the highways, open up to the airports, you're going to start to see a much different service in terms of revenue for this company. Okay, so Waymo is on its way. Why is Tesla so far behind? I think for a couple reasons. First of all, you've got a different approach to the technology, right? So Waymo has multiple sensors on their vehicles.

19:16They have, in addition to cameras, they also use radar and LIDAR sensors, which are lasers that are sent out and create like a 3D map of the immediate environment around the vehicle, which then can be used to make decisions, right? So if someone darts out in front of the vehicle, they'll have an easier time seeing them than if it was just a camera that was detecting that person. Tesla is just camera only. Tesla used to use radar for a long time, but then Elon Musk decided that that was too expensive and that LiDAR is way too expensive. So he wanted to just rely on cameras. LiDAR is lame. But then that means that there's not enough redundancy in the sensor data that Tesla is taking in.

19:57So it's more prone to make mistakes, especially in situations in which cameras aren't well equipped to view the world around them. If, for example, there's sunlight blasting into the camera or it's a low light situation at night, you're not going to be able to see as much as potentially as Waymo's vehicles are. So there's a different technological approach. Also, Waymo is more interested in making partnerships. They have a partnership with Uber. Its vehicles are available exclusively on Uber's app in Austin, for example. Tesla wants to go it alone. They want to build their own app. They want to build their own vehicles.

20:29They want to do all these things vertically integrated, whereas Waymo has shown more of an ability to kind of spread out some of those costs, which I think is why there's just so much far ahead than Tesla is. And, of course, these aren't the only two players in this market. Are there other companies of note here? Yeah. So there's a company called Zoox. Zoox! Zoox! Got Zoox. Ken Zooks I'm tired, Andrew Same, Ben, same So yeah, Zooks is owned by Amazon and they are building their own vehicles without steering wheels, without pedals to operate as a robo-taxi service Those are at work in San Francisco and in Las Vegas and then Volkswagen also is getting into the game, they've got their new electric ID buzz that they're going to be bringing to Los Angeles as part of a robo-taxi service.

21:27The ID Buzz is that van. That one makes me less tired. I think it's cute. Yeah, it's super cute. It's a great car. I really enjoyed it when I got to test it. Okay, so there's some other players here. Changes are afoot. What does regulation look like? How are we ensuring that we do this safely from, like, I don't know, a governmental perspective? Yeah, so it's pretty much a patchwork situation right now. Each state has its own kind of regulatory system. You know, the federal government regulates cars, right? And what's safe about a car, what cars need to have before they can be sold to customers, while the states are relegated to regulating drivers.

22:04Under the Republican government and Congress and Donald Trump, they've talked about wanting to sort of standardize everything, make it easier for states to allow or disallow companies from testing on their streets, but also to, you know, sort of lift regulations on what types of vehicles are allowed to be deployed and to be sold to people. So, you know, right now, if you try to sell a car that doesn't have a steering wheel, you're capped at like a certain number, right? You can get exemptions from the government. The government might not give you those exemptions. But if they do, you can only sell 2 ,500 of those steering wheel-less vehicles.

22:40Under a new system, that cap could rise significantly. Secondly, you could see tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of fully driverless, like level four style vehicles, no steering wheel, no pedals, no way for humans to control it at all. That's kind of like the end point. I still think we're a number of years away from that, but that is something that's potentially in the future. You know, I had a friend who enjoyed like dismantling bird scooters in Los Angeles when they first showed up. We saw Waymos being lit up there a few weekends ago. people are mad that we're inexorably marching towards a new technological era and, you know, they don't feel bought in.

23:19Is that tension going to slow down the inevitability of this robo-taxi takeover? Yeah, I think that there will always be tension, but there does seem to be some element of it that's also inevitable. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Uber first came on the scene and a bunch of like French taxi drivers got together and like burned a bunch of cars on like the highway in France. Yeah. You know, there's always these types of responses, I feel, to new technology. Your friend who's dismantling the scooters, they also were getting thrown into lakes and rivers and set on fire. You know, I think that people have a lot of frustration about the role that tech is playing in society, especially when they are lacking in basic services like health care and food and decent housing.

24:04So there is a sense that, like, why are we being provided these shiny new toys when we still have these like these basic things about daily life that are so hard and such a struggle? So I do think that that's something that the companies certainly need to reckon with. I've seen Waymo say that they're trying to work with community groups to try to sort of soften the blow a little bit when they are introduced into a new market, work with disability rights advocates and other folks that have mobility issues. But I think it's hard for a lot of people to look at these vehicles and say, this is just going to result in lost jobs and displacement and more gentrification and more surveillance and big tech taking over our lives.

24:45That said, I don't know if you can stop the tech. I think it still marches ahead. Tech gonna tech. Tech gonna tech. Andrew Hawkins, The Verge, thank you so much. Thanks, John. Always a pleasure.

25:03Andrew is transportation editor at The Verge. He covers electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, public transit, policy, infrastructure, electric bikes, and the physical act of moving through space and time. I'm Sean Ramos from Devin Schwartz made our show today. Amin Al-Sadi edited. Laura Bullard and Denise Guerra were on Facts. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir were on The Mix. And none of this would have been possible were it not for Breakmaster Cylinder, Noelle King, executive producer Miranda Kennedy, deputy EP Jolie Myers, Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles, Brian, Victoria Chamberlain, Peter, Balanon, Rosen, and Gabrielle Burbay.