Hours after Elon Musk claimed Reuters was “lying” about plans to ditch the low-cost $25,000 EV and instead focus all of its efforts on a robot taxi, Tesla’s CEO announced to X that would unveil said robotaxi at an event on August 8.
The announcement comes as Tesla EV sales have lagged and profits have fallen, leaving the company and its CEO in search of another product to boost sales — or at least the stock price.
Earlier on Friday, a Reuters report citing three unnamed sources and internal documents said Tesla is abandoning its plan to build a lower-cost EV and will instead focus resources on a planned robotaxi built on the same small EV platform that also supposed to power the lowest cost vehicle.
Musk took to X, the social network he owns, and claimed without evidence that Reuters was “lying.” He did not dispute specific details.
Hours later, Musk posted on X that a “Tesla Robotaxi” will be unveiled on August 8.
Reports have swirled for years that Tesla was working on these two vehicles. But Musk has wavered on whether to prioritize a standard car or one without a steering wheel or pedals, even though he has yet to create a fully autonomous car, according to descriptions in Musk’s biography by Walter Isaacson.
The CEO pushed back in mid-2022 against the insistence of his engineers to report a car with a steering wheel and pedals. And even as it progressed, chief designer Franz von Holzhausen and vice president of engineering Lars Moravy kept the more traditional version of the car alive as a “shadow project,” Isaacson wrote at the time.
Musk has been promising autonomous capabilities in Tesla vehicles for years. In 2016 he said Tesla would drive itself cross-country by the end of 2017 (didn’t happen). In 2019, it promised to launch the company’s first robotaxis as part of a larger vision for an autonomous ride-sharing network in 2020 (that also didn’t happen). A few years later, he said that a dedicated robotaxi without a steering wheel or pedals would be on the market by 2024.
Tesla vehicles come standard with a driver assistance system called Autopilot. For an additional $12,000, owners can purchase “full self-driving,” or FSD — a feature that CEO Elon Musk has promised for years would one day offer full self-driving capabilities. Tesla vehicles are not autonomous. Instead, FSD includes a number of automated driving features that require the driver to be ready to take control at all times, including the Summon parking function, as well as Navigate on Autopilot, an active guidance system that navigates a car from a freeway -ramp to off-ramp, including interchanges and lane changes. The system is also supposed to handle the steering on city streets.
