The Impact of Tesla's FSD, Robotaxi and RoboTrucking

Friday - August 4 2023, 23:19 UTC - 1 year ago

Tesla's FSD, Robotaxi and RoboTrucking will change the industry, potentially replacing drivers, increasing production and reducing costs. Their AI can be trained with Youtube videos, and the existing fleet can be rapidly converted to remove the driver for a 4-12 month return on investment.

Tesla will succeed with Full Self Driving and Teslabots. It may still be two or three more years until the full robotaxi level is reached. It could even be five years but the progress is will speed up this year and beyond. Robotaxi could require the system being 10 to 100 times safer than the average human driver The economic impact of a very comfortable drive that is as safe or twice as safe as an average human driver will be very large.

The autopilot and FSD systems already improve the driving experience and improve safety while still requiring the human driver to pay attention and occasionally intervene. However, FSD and Autopilot are driven all over the USA, Canada, Europe and Asia. Autopilot has been used for over ten billion miles of driving and FSD beta has been used for over 320 million miles. Tesla FSD beta is now adding about 50 million miles every month.

Robotaxi could increase the value of car by 3 to 5 times based upon the hours it can be driven. However, many people will choose to continue to drive themselves even if it costs more. People buy luxury cars when they could buy and use an adequate basic economy car. Many people in New York still choose to drive cars despite a very good public transit system and taxis. This is in spite of high costs and difficulties parking.

RoboTrucking .

Robotrucking will be more impactful than Robotaxi in many ways. If truck drivers are replaced for all 30 million large trucks and perhaps another 100 million small and medium sized commercial trucks in the world this will transform the supply chain. The transport costs in the supply chain could eventually be reduced by 80% or more. Driving speed for delivering cargo could increase from 55 mph to 110 mph or more. Also, the robotruck could drive 23 hours a day and only stop for recharging.

Truck fleet owners will not hesitate to replace human drivers once the systems are good enough. 70% of drivers could be replaced once there is a driving system that could safely platoon trucks. As stated before, Tesla’s AI team recently announced that the software can train with Youtube videos of driving. This means the system is independent of camera positions. $150,000 semi trucks can get cameras and self driving computers added for about $20,000 to $30000 or $5,000 per year plus the hardware. This means the existing fleet can be rapidly converted to remove the driver for a 4-12 month return on investment. $5,000 per year made on all 30 million trucks would be $150 billion per year. This would be over ten times the current profits at Tesla.

RoboFactory .

Teslabots are making rapid progress and are leveraging the training data and AI training systems of FSD. Tesla is building the factory to make the custom actuators and mass produce Teslabots. Teslabots have already been shown to walk, move objects and handle tools and wires. If one to four Teslabots help every human factory worker, this could reduce the number of human factory workers. It can mean the ability to shift the human workers and spread 100,000 human factory workers over 8 factories instead of 4 factories. Production would rapidly increase. The safety and regulatory is another hurdle.