The Tesla Robotaxi is Confusing...

[Music] okay so the Tesla Robo taxi unveiling event was a couple days ago and it might be the weirdest Tech event I've ever been to um you might have seen some clips from it at this point I was there I rode in the self-driving Robo taxi I explored the insane looking Robo van and I talked to the Optimus robot and then I left feeling kind of confused it was just a it was a weird event so here are the three main big reasons why so first of all the rooc cab this was the the main

thing that we knew we were going to see this this full unveiling of a fully self-driving Tesla and we saw it and it looked like this very very much like a mini cyber Tru like you've got the light bar on the front the light bar on the back the complete lack of rear visibility then of course you can see it's a twodo two-seater passenger car people wondering like what a full self-driving Robo cab or cyber taxi whatever we're calling it would actually look like whether it look dramatically different from a normal car like a model

3 or even a whmo and there are some things that are significantly different about this thing they rolled out I mean on the outside it's uh it's light gold every single one is this like silvery gold color although there was never any mention of actual materials pretty small footprint you can see there's no exterior door handles or mirrors or anything like that and then since they don't need need any steering wheel or pedals they can sort of push the seating position way back into this more like loungy seating position kind of near the middle of

the car there's a center armrest and there's a massive 21in touchcreen in the center and yes the doors go up as if Tesla hasn't learned from their lessons of the model X they're making another crazy set of doors which honestly is definitely a hit visually it's a striking feature of this car alongside the wheels which at first just look like these huge gold discs but then when you take a closer look they're actually just normal 21in low rolling resistance Continental Tires but they've painted half of the sidewall gold to match the caps in the middle

so it makes it look like a super thin lowprofile tire with a huge wheel but it's not it's just paint but either way no idea how much of this is going to make it to any sort of final production but after waiting in line for a bit I got to ride in this thing for a few minutes so I got in the screen told me to buckle my seat belt and once I did the door automatically closed pretty smart then I just selected the destination which was on this screen along this route which I assume

was prepped and then it just started rolling just started going now I've been in a self-driving Tesla before but this one is just a little bit more nervy since there's people everywhere and there's no steer steering wheel in front of me but once you get over the eeriness of basically being trapped in this driverless car with no manual override I started looking around and noticing a few other things you know you sit pretty low to the road similar to a model 3 but with more leg room since the seating position is further back and then

there's even fewer physical controls than ever before in this car like I basically only found that the window switches were in the middle next to the cup holders I didn't even see any door latches like the doors only opened with a button on this enormous touch screen so again like a Tesla it's going to control everything in the car on the screen including just watching movies while the car is driving because why not so you can watch the entire trip that I took uncut on the autofocus Channel if you want I'll link that below but

then the thing is that's kind of all we got like there were shockingly few details about the actual car actually explained at this event other than basically like the three main pillars which are going to be in all the headlines which are number one that it will be fully unsupervised self-driving capable number two that it will be able to be purchased for under $30,000 all right but then number three that it would actually also charge by inductive wireless charging so it pulls up over this wireless charging pad on the ground and it would charge that

way not something we've seen shipping in very many cars especially not ones with large batteries but that was it no no other numbers no other specs just look at this thing there's just concepts of a plan I just had so many other questions from after seeing that like what is going on here I did at the event walk around after the announcement and bump into some Tesla engineers and people who have been working on these things and so I just ended up kind of grilling them like I asked them a whole bunch of questions so

I'm going to tell you guys what I learned from them and I guess we can take their word for it so first of all there is no steering wheel or pedals as you can see so my first question was all right let's say I see an accident coming or there's something happening on the road in front of me and the car isn't reacting in time is there a manual override and their answer I got was uh sure there will be some sort of minimal onscreen controls available but the goal is that you never have to

override which is a noble goal for sure I just I mean it's hard to imagine we live in a world where that's impossible basically right now but um I mean if you even with the wireless charger picture you want to like drive over over the top of it and line it up perfectly because if it's if it's off a little bit that's just a giant waste of power but if I can't adjust it like that would be terrible but speaking of wireless charging you might be wondering why they would try to do this the main

answer again is because they want it to be totally autonomous they want people to just be able to own several like a fleet of these things and they all just drive around and charge themselves overnight and the whole cable plugging in charging thing requires a human so that's one less human required it'll just line up on the notoriously inefficient wireless charger but my question again was okay is there at least a charge port so if I want to supercharge or charge quickly I can do that and the answer was no there is no charge port

on this vehicle so it is not even capable of hitting a Tesla Supercharger or doing any sort of road trips or anything like that it's purely a taxi I'm told there's no plans for a front trunk there's just the rear trunk that they showed in this presentation and there's no planned range or stated battery size but what they did say is they're simply aiming for this vehicle to be as efficient as possible that's their main goal between the aerodynamics and the low rolling resistance tires they think they can aim for about 5.5 miles per kilowatt

hour some of the most efficient electric cars we see today are getting around 3 to 4 m per kilowatt hour so this would be like an A+ efficiency if they achieve this and that's what will let them use a smaller overall size battery for the lighter weight of the vehicle so it would be nice they're saying to clear 200 Mi of total range and that would put this at maybe a 40 Kow battery pack instead of the typical 70 to 130 so drivetrain wise that logic does check out if you want to make the cheapest

most efficient electric car of all time you got to hit those things but then again you're also telling us this while doing a car with scissor doors and wireless charging so that's you you're going to have some challenges there for sure really I think the obvious red flag the biggest red flag to me is the the timeline stuff that I mean this is notorious Elon stuff he gets on stage he says we're going to have this vehicle out for $30,000 before 2027 no they're not there's just no way that they're actually going to be able

to do that I mean if they if they do let's say they do I will shave my head on camera cuz I'm that confident they won't do it like I want to be optimistic but there's just too much stacked up against it because in order to ship this at all with no steering wheel and everything they have to get all the regulatory approval for the full self-driving and all that and get all the prices down in spite of inflation and ship something with scissor doors and all this stuff in the next two years I just

there's just no way Tesla's been promising full unsupervised self-driving for years over and over and over again and consistently keeps pushing it back but then also just pricewise I get the goal but Tesla promised a $35,000 model three and years later I think they briefly actually shipped that car for that price for a little bit before discontinuing it cyber truck I don't know if you remember the do you remember the base price of what they said the Cyber truck would cost at the cheapest version when it came out $39,000 and that was about what like

four or 5 years ago do you know what the cheapest cyber Tru is right now $95,000 so you can see where my skepticism is coming from but even after all that you know there's kind of a philosophical question too which is what is the difference between this this Robo taxi thing and a model 3 because Tesla has been promising for years that the car that people are driving and buying today is going to be capable of full unsupervised self-driving like the model 3 and the model Y and it's actually not clear if there's that many

differences I mean obviously okay one's going to have a steering wheel and four doors and four seats and the whole thing and maybe be a bit more expensive but like yeah what if my car is going to be able to do all that stuff I I think I want the one that can plug into superchargers and do all sorts of carrying things maybe this will be an oldfashioned way of thinking sometime in the future like every every car on the road is autonomous and it's like an old school thing to want the one with the

steering wheel that you can drive sometimes maybe um I think the main advantage of the robo taxi if it has the exact same capabilities as a model 3 is it'll be cheaper and smaller and easier to operate in a fleet situation that will probably be the main difference as far as actually buying these things because they've been selling people the dream of the car that you buy and own today you'll drive it to work and then when you're at work it'll go drive people around as an Uber for 10 hours or however long and then

you drive it home when you need it and then when you're sleeping it'll continue to drive an Uber people around and so it has all these amazing capabilities it'll do all this great stuff but will it though there's actually a moment I had to rewatch The Event because I was there and people are like yelling out the whole time like stuff at Elon on stage and at this point in the presentation he goes like oh yeah model 3 and model y will also do full self driving and then someone goes like what about the Cyber

truck and then he says oh yeah don't worry cyber Truck 2 so and it's cyber Tru 2 yes of course sorry I don't want to be getet yes yes all our cars basically um so yeah okay all our vehicles great but then it's kind of quiet but then someone else yells out what about Hardware 3 which is a basically if you don't know a reference to older model 3s and his response so's let's not get Nuance here um all right next slide so yeah not let's not get to Nuance let's just get all our cars

will have it except maybe some of the old ones all our cars will be able to self-drive though totally we'll cross that bridge when we get to it how about that but here's a bridge that I don't think we'll ever actually get to cross which is the second thing that was insane that was announced at this event which is the robo van so somewhere about halfway through this presentation they roll out this one of one super futuristic looking massive van thing kind of looked like a it looked like the military vehicles from iroot to be

honest which that's probably not a good thing but yeah it rolls out and they give us again very very few details this is going to be a robo van that can hold like up to 20ish people and again be fully electric and fully autonomous and take groups or teams of people from point A to point B no manual override necessary great have you ever been to CES have you ever heard of have you ever watched videos from CES every year in January there's this trade show it's really fun in Vegas and uh if you ever

go you'll notice in the South Hall there's a section with all the cars the the mobility section and you'll find about 50 of these every year there's just like a van with no steering wheel and a bunch of seats that all face the middle and it's like the future of Mobility concept there's tons of those none of them ever ship of course because there are rules but I guess there's not to me a whole lot that differentiates that brief concept we saw at the Tesla event with the dozens of other vaporware versions of this that

I've seen before that's all I'm saying I mean the fact that this one comes from Tesla is the main differentiator this is the company that could maybe theoretically make it happen but like I said there's almost no details about this thing and I have almost no faith that that thing that they showed with its minimal clearance and its glass everywhere and just lack of numbers or anything I don't think that we'll ever actually see that thing I could eat my words but like that seems crazy but then last but not least Tesla decided to bring

back they decided to remind us that they're also an AI company not just just a car company by bringing back out the Optimus humanoid robot again so they had these things all over this event this time dancing doing these pre-rehearsed demos but also they were just kind of out and about they were serving drinks and snacks and they were walking around and interacting with and entertaining people just like hanging out amongst everyone at this event now I already have my thoughts that I've talked about you know humanoid before I made a whole video about it

if you want to watch it I'll leave a link below the like button I've talked about Tesla's Optimus but even just what we saw with that would have been a huge step forward from what we've ever seen like this would have been one of the most impressive things ever but then they decided to take it further they also decided to have these robots talking to people and it was just I mean it was way too fast to be an llm like it's just I'll have just watch this watch this clip would I some chocolates right

on what's your name Vanessa Vanessa yes Vanessa pleasure to meet you Vanessa a thank you like it's just it's just a person it's a person talking through a speaker it it even like stutters and makes occasional like human mistakes if you watch a bunch of videos from the event a bunch of different robots all have slightly different voices yeah it was a person for sure and it's weird because Tesla at no point at least as of the time of recording has not acknowledged this at all they haven't said that or confirmed that but people there

at the event have heard various things from various Engineers I talked to two Engineers who only would tell me uh yes all of the llms Do Run totally on device uh but like yeah I don't that no I don't think so so this kind of became like the talking point of the whole event like how now we don't know how much of this event was real or not so real like how much of what these robots are doing is human controlled or AI you know there were all kinds of hand waving and gestures and movements

I played charades with one of them you know what it reminds me of remember that video I did at Disney's imagineering Labs where they had these these bipedal robots that were controlled by a steam deck controller they did all kinds of walking around and stringing animations together to entertain people at the Parks there's just a bunch of button presses and controllers to make that happen and sure there's some AI to blend that stuff but you could never deny that there's basically entirely human control happening here and that's basically what I think is happening at this

Tesla event lots of impressive and entertaining things in the form of a super Advanced articulating robot stringing animations together but there's it's just not totally ready to do this stuff on its own we've never seen anything quite like it even from Boston Dynamics but we got to be real about the human assisted part but the thing is the dream that they are selling people with this specific robot is that this thing will live with you basically it will be your humanized friend actually they said that it would be your friend it would do chores for

you it would live around you and and be able to do all these sorts of tasks on its own using the AI and the vision based system that's I think that's a really far-off dream AI is really really quickly improving but I still think that's a far off dream so you know to their credit this event it was insane like they did a lot of things that could have gone wrong and if you told me in 2024 that a company would do a bunch of self-driving car demos around tons of people just loose in the

road and they would have bipedal humanite robots roaming around performing tasks and entertaining people at the same event and that they would have a drone show like that is just a lot of stuff in a row that is super Hightech that could go wrong but somehow didn't and it represented I think a very optimistic view of the future even though it's very much still like Concepts it's it's a future that is potentially way more efficient potentially way safer and more impressive in general technologically than the the world we live in today so that by itself

I think is Honorable the the the things that they were hoping to be real would be amazing and inspirational and honorable if they actually happened but since they're also a public tech company they uh they felt the need to do demos and give all these big promises and that's where it felt weird because it's really hard to make promises about when we're going to deliver this future and for what price we're going to deliver this future when it just feels very unlikely and then doing the like robots talking it's just like now the whole is

in question like how much of it is real how much of it is fake and now we're focusing on that instead of how cool the future could someday actually be that's where I'm at but hey if there is one company that has the best chance of bringing this all to life if there's if you made me bet money on one company that I think has the best odds to get there eventually then yeah it would be the one with the massive data Gathering Advantage with stuff out there in the real world today it it would

be Tesla so I'll believe it when I see it thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace