Tesla’s robotaxi will be like Uber and Airbnb combined, hints Elon Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has hinted that his newest company project, ‘robotaxi’ will act universally like Uber and Airbnb. Musk confirmed this at the annual shareholder's meeting. He further added tha6t the system is not being designed like the other carmakers had conceptualized it for a single city. He also said that Tesla is currently also working on a solution for self-driving.

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New York Post reports that speaking about his robotaxi concept, Musk told the Tesla shareholders that it would end up being some kind of combination of Airbnb and Uber. Also, talking about self-driving cars, Musk he said, “Look at how many cars are parked. There are parking lots full of cars everywhere. Because cars need a driver, so most of the time they’re doing nothing."

Tesla CEO also hinted that the Tesla owners could include their personal vehicles into the robotaxi fleet, which would help the customers in paying off the car loans in the form of secondary earnings. When Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) is fully operational, Musk said Tesla owners would have the choice of using it themselves or adding their cars to the robotaxi fleet to earn money when they do not need them.

Among other players in the robotaxi segment, Cruise and Waymo have focused their efforts on single cities. These companies focus on constant hyper-accurate mapping of the environment as key to the functionality of their systems. Tesla on the other hand gathers data from the owners of its cars who run a beta version of the system. Over 40 million miles have been driven with the feature engaged, according to Musk, and he expects that to reach 100 million miles soon. These data collected from Tesla cars would be used in the development of the robotaxi, Musk has mentioned.