The Future Fund Managing Partner Gary Black on Sunday said that a majority of Tesla Inc TSLA car owners will likely not want to put their cars into the company’s robotaxi fleet.
What Happened: “What % of Tesla owners would accept a stream of payouts from Tesla for deploying their cars in a TSLA robotaxi network to move people/luggage around every day?” Black posted on social media platform X while opining that over 50% will likely not want to rent their cars to Tesla’s robotaxi fleet.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects his company’s robotaxi fleet to function like a combination of Airbnb and Uber. While a certain portion of the fleet will be owned by Tesla, individual customers can also add or subtract their vehicles to the robotaxi fleet at will for added earnings. As for riders, they can summon a car using the Tesla App, Musk said during the company's second-quarter earnings call in July.
If Tesla charged $1 for every mile on a robotaxi ride and gave a 75% payout to car owners and every car had 25 trips every day with every trip being roughly 6 miles long, car owners could make roughly $40,000 per year by simply renting their car to the fleet, Black said while retaining his pessimism for users not wanting to rent their cars to the company fleet.
Black is not alone in his doubts regarding Musk’s vision for his robotaxi fleet. In August, Uber Technologies Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi expressed doubts about whether a car owner is going to want his car to be ridden in by a complete stranger. Tesla drivers will also likely want their car at the time when ridership is high, creating trouble in meeting demand, he said on an episode of The Logan Bartlett Show.
Building cars and operating a taxi fleet are "very very different" businesses, the Uber CEO then noted. While running a fleet, the company has to match people with their rides, and price the rides economically while also addressing other concerns like people getting sick in a car, losing items, or getting involved in accidents, he said.
Why It Matters: Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during Tesla's third-quarter earnings call that the company expects to start a ride-hail service in Texas and California starting next year, subject to regulatory approval, with self-driving Model 3 and Model Y vehicles equipped with future versions of its full self-driving (FSD) driver assistance technology. While FSD currently requires active driver supervision, Musk and Tesla are hopeful that it can enable autonomous driving with future updates.
However, the vehicles might not all operate as driverless robotaxis initially in California and Texas but with a driver as some states demand it until the company touches certain milestones in terms of miles and hours driven, the company then said.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that Tesla is in early discussions with authorities in the city of Austin, Texas, to roll out its autonomous vehicles for testing as early as 2025.
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Photo courtesy: Tesla
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