An image of a Cybertruck-inspired Tesla robotaxi concept was revealed in Walter Isaacson’s new Elon Musk biography launched on Tuesday.
The two-door, two-seater, “Cybertruck-style” compact vehicle is complete with angular edges and what appears to be a fingerprint-inducing stainless steel finish. And while it’s unclear whether this will ever actually be built – the world is still waiting for the actual Cybertruck – the photo confirms that engineers were influenced by the wedge-shaped design.
A second image in the book shows Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s chief designer, standing next to an “early robotaxi.” It’s little more than a cardboard cutout, again showing two chairs and space behind them for luggage. It’s not clear how early that design was, but the photo appears in a section of the book that introduced Autopilot (Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system) and Musk’s life between 2014 and 2016.
Photos of the robotaxi images in the biography appeared Monday on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, before the book was officially launched.
Isaacson has been leaking excerpts and information from his biography of Musk in recent weeks to stoke the hype for the book. The biographer, who has been entrenched in Musk’s life for years, also revealed that Tesla will build its first next-generation electric vehicles — including both a $25,000 car and a robotaxi — in Texas instead of the upcoming Gigafactory Mexico , according to an exclusive from Axios. The factory will use Tesla’s “unboxed process,” unveiled at the automaker’s Investor Day 2023 in March, which allows factory workers to work on separate parts of the vehicle and bring them together at the end for final assembly.
Both vehicles will have a futuristic design similar to the Cybertruck.
“When something like this comes around the corner, people will think they’re seeing something from the future,” Musk said during a secret meeting in September 2022, according to Axios.
The robotaxi will be built from the ground up without pedals or steering wheel, despite objections from engineers who pushed for a safer design concept based on the fact that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) software was not yet there, according to excerpts from the book. FSD is Tesla’s enhanced advanced driver assistance system that can automate some driving tasks in city and highway environments, but is not yet a fully autonomous system. It relies solely on cameras, rather than an array of sensors including lidar and radar, to gather information about its surroundings, and on Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer to make quick decisions.
Musk apparently stuck to his guns. At a meeting in August 2022, he told his designers: “Let me be clear. This vehicle should be designed as a clean robotaxi. We are going to take that risk. It’s my fault if things go wrong. But we’re not going to design some sort of amphibious frog that’s an intermediate vehicle. We are all concerned with autonomy.”
Current federal safety standards prohibit the mass production of vehicles without steering wheels or pedals, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to announce new rules on the matter in September.
Other companies are entering the market with purpose-built autonomous vehicles, such as GM’s Cruise and Amazon’s Zoox. These vehicles are built to be big and boxy, with plenty of room inside and seating for four to six. Tesla’s robotaxi, on the other hand, may only seat two people, which could cut Tesla off from mass-market appeal.
Mass production in 2024?
In April 2022, Musk shared plans to launch a special robotaxi without a steering wheel or pedals by 2024. That would mean that Tesla would have to develop, test, verify, volume produce and commercially launch a robotaxi service within two years. In California, where most of the regulation and AV activity takes place, Tesla is licensed to test self-driving vehicles with a driver in the front seat, but not without.
Of course, Tesla could decide to launch its robotaxi service in its new home state of Texas, where the laws governing AV deployment are much more lax.
However, Tesla is not exactly clear about how it plans to market robotaxis. Musk has been promising for years to turn Tesla vehicles that people own today into their own robotaxi through his FSD software. Musk has described the potential service as something like Airbnb for cars, where owners could potentially earn extra income by using their cars to give others rides.
FSD and Tesla’s earlier ADAS version, called Autopilot, have come under fire from Tesla owners, safety regulators and federal agencies for a range of issues, including false advertising and promoting vehicle capabilities that don’t yet exist. Musk recently demonstrated the software in a live video, during which time he had to take the wheel to prevent his vehicle from veering into an intersection at a red light.