The American company Tesla is postponing the planned presentation of the robotaxi to October to give the teams working on the project more time to create additional prototypes.
Bloomberg writes about it, citing sources.
According to the sources, the two-month delay was announced internally. This week, the design team was told to finalize certain elements of the car.
CEO Elon Musk has set the initial presentation date for August 8, and optimism about this has contributed to an 11-day series of share gains that has added more than $257 billion to Tesla’s market capitalization. Shares fell 8.3% after the announcement of the delay.
Five years ago, Musk announced that the company would launch a robotaxi service in 2020. This will allow people to rent their electric cars for travel: Tesla will receive only a portion of the income, and the remaining money will go to the car owner. At the same time, Elon Musk admitted that he did not always have time to implement projects on time.
In general, Musk has been talking about Tesla’s work on autonomous car technology for more than a decade and convincing customers to pay thousands of dollars for a set of features that the company positions as full self-driving, or FSD (Full Self-Driving). The name is a misnomer – FSD requires constant supervision and does not make Tesla autonomous – but Musk and top engineers have increasingly expressed optimism about FSD in recent months as the company’s car sales have slowed.
