Elon Musk’s underlings at Tesla are accustomed to chaos. But even by Tesla standards, this year has been unruly.
at Tesla are accustomed to chaos. It comes with the territory of working for a chief executive who sets exacting targets and often abruptly switches directions — whose biographer describes his more intense moods as “demon mode”.
The idea of creating an autonomous taxi service has been kicking around Tesla for at least eight years, but the company has yet to stand up much of the infrastructure it would need, nor has it secured regulatory approval to test such cars on public roads. For the moment, Musk has put off plans for a $25 000, mass-market vehicle that many Tesla investors — and some insiders — are pushing for and believe is crucial to the car maker’s future.
For those still among Tesla’s ranks after this culling, Musk has radically altered the marching orders. The company is “going balls to the wall for autonomy”, he declared last week. The robo-taxi is now taking precedence over a cheaper car he first teased four years ago, both with respect to setting timelines for prototypes and arranging production capacity, one person familiar with the planning said.
While these people confirmed the robo-taxi is being prioritised, one described the next-generation vehicle project as an effort to wring cost reductions out of components and production methods, then apply those innovations to cheaper iterations of the Model Y and Model 3, the company’s two most popular EVs. Teams are placing particular emphasis on bringing these cost savings to bear with the Model Y, the best-selling vehicle in the world last year.
More recently, GM’s Cruise has spent the last six months working its way back to robo-taxi testing after one of its cars struck and dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco. California also is holding up an expansion by Alphabet’s Waymo after several incidents, including one of its vehicles hitting a cyclist.Musk nevertheless is betting Tesla can make robo-taxis a reality by making FSD available to more consumers and cutting prices.
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