Source: Finance Association
Author: Zheng Yuanfang

Musk's recent visit to China sparked the “FSD entering China” conjecture. According to a report by China Daily today, Tesla proposed to launch “driverless taxis” in China. In response to this, the Chinese government may first support its domestic testing and demonstration, but it has yet to fully approve the full implementation of its FSD in China.

As soon as the news came out, Tesla's US stock market was moved by the news. The stock price reversed its decline in the short term, then declined slightly. As of press release, Tesla rose 0.16% in overnight trading, with a turnover of over 17 million US dollars.

A “driverless taxi” is a robotaxi, but this piece of cake Musk “painted for many years” has always “only heard its sound and never saw its car.”

At the beginning of April this year, Musk once again gave a major timeline: Tesla will release Robotaxi products on August 8 this year. Also, according to Bank of America analyst John Murphy, the RoboTaxi event on August 8 will showcase FSD and next-generation platforms.

“An epoch-making revolutionary product”

Musk positions Tesla as “the world's largest robotics company,” and “our cars are robots with wheels” — so to speak, Robotaxi is the embodiment of this idea.

“This will be an epoch-making revolutionary product. It's going to change everything. This product will push Tesla's market value to 10 trillion US dollars. One hundred years from now, people will be talking about this momentous moment.” Musk once portrayed his Robotaxi ambitions like this.

In his plan, Tesla will build a driverless car and continuously optimize it through software updates. At some point in the future, this kind of car can make money for car owners as taxis that run entirely on autonomous driving systems. He has predicted that driverless taxis will be more common than human-driven cars in the future.

This type of car can last up to 11 years, and has a mileage of 1 million miles. The average cost per mile is about $2 to $3, making the owner profit of 30,000 US dollars a year.

With just 3 months until August 8, Robotaxi has probably become Tesla's top priority.

A few days ago, people familiar with the matter said that the reason for Tesla's recent frequent layoffs is not to reduce expenses in some departments, but to shift expenses to Robotaxi. Now that Musk has “completely changed” the way forward, Robotaxi prioritizes the $25,000 low-cost model in terms of prototype manufacturing schedules and production capacity arrangements.

What does a Robotaxi need to get on the road?

Most of what the outside world knows about Tesla Robotaxi probably began in 2019, but in reality, the idea for Robotaxi has been in the works within Tesla for at least 8 years. So why hasn't Robotaxi been implemented yet?

First, the FSD that Robotaxi must rely on, and the test mileage has not met the requirements. Musk previously predicted that Tesla's FSD test mileage would need to reach 6 billion miles to meet the requirements of global regulators. According to data released by Tesla on April 6, the actual test mileage of the FSD was 1 billion miles.

Despite this, Musk still believes Tesla can achieve RoboTaxi by providing FSD to more consumers and lowering prices. Exactly, Tesla has launched a number of initiatives to promote FSD in recent months, such as test drives, 30-day free trials, price cuts, and then price cuts.

Furthermore, reports indicate that Tesla has not yet built most of the infrastructure required for Robotaxi to hit the road, nor has it obtained regulatory permission to test Robotaxi on public roads.

If autonomous driving wants to develop in depth, it requires not only bicycle intelligence, but also infrastructure support, that is, what people often call “'smart' cars and 'smart' roads.”

Open Source Securities reported on April 10 that when the level of road intelligence reaches C4, the level of bicycle intelligence only needs to reach L2+ to achieve autonomous driving. When the level of road intelligence is lower than C4, to achieve autonomous driving, bicycle intelligence must at least reach the L4 level. Under the difficult development situation of L4 bicycle intelligence, speeding up the construction of C4 intelligent roads can help L2+ and L3 autonomous driving rapidly improve their capabilities to achieve L4 or even L5 level results. To reach the C4 level of road intelligence, concerted efforts are needed in ancillary facilities, maps, collaborative sensing, and network communication.

Analysts further pointed out that 2024 is expected to be the year of vehicle-road collaboration.

Notably, there was news at the end of April that Tesla would use the Advanced Assisted Driving Map provided by Baidu for the Chinese version of the FSD. According to the Ministry of Natural Resources's website, in addition to the “Baidu Vehicle Map” (T version) used for vehicle navigation services, Baidu Maps has also recently obtained several “Advanced Assisted Driving Maps” approved by the Ministry of Natural Resources. Among them, the GS (2023) 4634 Advanced Driver Assistance Map for navigation submitted by Baidu Zhitu Technology Co., Ltd. is a drive-level map completed in cooperation between the two parties. This cooperation between Tesla and Baidu Maps is an “exclusive” and in-depth customization.

Editor/Jeffy