- Owners will be able to lend their vehicles to Tesla’s robotaxi fleet while not in use;
- The company’s Full Self-Driving system is not being designed to work in a specific city;
- The billionaire even claimed that the service would even work on an alternative planet Earth.
In a meeting with Tesla shareholders on Thursday (4), Elon Musk said that the company’s fully automated driving service (Full Self-Driving) will work like an Uber and Airbnb combined. According to the richest man in the world, when the technology is fully operational, Tesla owners will have the option of using it or adding their cars to the robotaxi fleet to earn money when they don’t need them.
“See how many cars are parked. There are parking lots full of cars everywhere. Because cars need a driver, so most of the time they don’t do anything,” Musk said.
The development of the robotaxi service proposed by Tesla continues and will work everywhere, even on another Planet. According to Elon Musk, the system is not being designed with a launch city in mind, unlike the way competitors approached the concept.
“Tesla is developing a general solution for autonomous driving,” Musk said. “If you created a randomly generated alternate Earth species, our system would still work.”
Musk added that regulatory hurdles will limit where it can be deployed. But he is confident that the Full Self-Driving system will live up to its name one day.
Autonomous ride-hailing competitors Cruise and Waymo have focused their efforts on unique cities, where constant, hyper-accurate mapping of the environment is critical to the functionality of their systems.
Tesla collects data from owners of its cars running a beta version of the system, a process that has raised the ire of many critics. More than 40 million miles have been driven with the feature enabled, according to Musk, and he expects it to reach 100 million miles soon.
General Motors’ Super Cruise driver aid, which has limited partial automation, also only works on stretches of road that have been validated through scanning and inspection by the company itself. GM announced this week that it is doubling the approved road network to 400,000 miles across North America and said owners have covered 35 million miles using the Super Cruise since its 2017 launch.