What is Tesla? The simplest answer is that it is an automotive company specializing in electric cars. But the founder and CEO of the company, Elon Musk, has another idea. For him, Tesla will be a software, AI, and robotics company or it will be nothing. And in the past week, the magnate has decided to accelerate towards autonomous driving as a big bet for the future and the first step to distance itself from traditional car manufacturers. “We can generate the greatest value creation in history” if that leap goes well, he ventured.
This Sunday, Musk traveled to China to meet with high-ranking officials of the Beijing government. In less than 24 hours, he reached an agreement to eliminate the restrictions that Xi Jinping had placed on the American company’s cars and to launch his autonomous driving system in the Asian country, in exchange for ensuring that the data collected by the company will remain stored in China. An authorization that has caused its stock to soar by more than 10% in the early stages of Wall Street.
Tesla wants as many people as possible to try its partial autonomous driving system through AI, called FSD (Full Self Driving), and for this, Musk reduced the price of the subscription by half last Friday, to $99 per month. And at the conference following the presentation of its quarterly results, Musk recommended to all investors to try the latest FSD model, which will be the future of the company.
In fact, for the CEO, “in reality, we should be considered an artificial intelligence or robotics company. If you value Tesla as an automotive company, fundamentally, it is the wrong framework,” he stated. The idea is very clear: the cars that Tesla manufactures are nothing more than a shell in which to introduce its AI software, which is what it really wants to sell. In other words, Musk does not want to compete with Ford or Toyota, but against Microsoft or Apple.
Apple didn’t dare
But it has not been even two months since Apple shelved its autonomous car project, a ‘ghost’ whose rumors had appeared over and over again for a decade until, finally, the Cupertino company decided to move the money and workers from that division to innovate in AI. The explanation was very simple: Apple did not believe that full autonomous driving could be achieved in the short term, and did not want to limit itself to selling a ‘traditional’ car, no matter how beautiful or technological it was. Either it launched a fully autonomous one, designed almost like a living room on wheels (and without a steering wheel) in which to work or entertain oneself while the car drove itself, or it preferred not to do so.
However, Musk considers that Tesla’s evolution is a logical path: it began by manufacturing traditional cars, although electric, to start up its factories and solve the initial cost problems before making the leap to its real goal. Thus, by the time fully automatic driving technology is fully operational, it will only be necessary to update the existing models and take the final leap. “We are going to solve autonomous driving. We are going to put the ‘auto’ in ‘automobile’,” he stated.
The problem he faces is that, as with AI, making the transition from a system that works correctly 95% of the time to one that solves 99% of all possible road events is very complicated. And making the leap from 99% to 100% is almost more difficult than going from 1% to 95%. Tesla’s FSD allows for autonomous parking, lane changes, and stable steering on highways, but it does not allow the driver to stop looking at the road and start looking at the phone, for example. And that leap still seems far away. Although Musk is clear about it: “Anyone who does not believe that we are going to solve the problem of autonomous driving should not invest in Tesla,” he stated.
