Tesla ‘robotaxis’: what they are and how you can make money from them

Tesla boss Elon Musk has announced bold plans to launch one million “robotaxis” on public roads as early as next year.

Addressing crowds at yesterday’s Autonomy Investor Day seminar in Palo Alto, California, the South African-born billionaire confirmed that the electric carmaker would be deploying driverless taxis capable of operating “on any road” by the end of 2020, The New York Times reports.

“I feel very confident in predicting autonomous robotaxis next year”, he told attendees. He also said that in future people would want to outlaw people driving their own cars because conventional vehicles would be seen as unsafe.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

The entrepreneur hopes the autonomous taxis will operate in a similar fashion to Uber or Airbnb. Users would use an app to hail a driverless cab.

If Musk’s plans are given the green light, the world of autonomous technology could be changed forever, spelling the end of driving as we know it.

Not everyone shares the billionaire’s confidence. “His plan sounds like it’s built on accelerated, and possibly unattainable, timeliness”, notes tech news site Mashable.

Driverless car firms are “barely hitting less ambitious benchmarks” for their autonomous taxis, the website says. Waymo, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, is currently trialling a small number of driverless taxis in Phoenix, Arizona, while General Motors won’t begin driverless tests until the end of 2020.

But Musk claims that the current crop of Tesla vehicles are capable of fully-autonomous driving and that self-driving modes would be activated once the technology gets regulatory approval.

What do we know about Tesla’s robotaxis?'

Unlike many of today’s tech firms and carmakers, which are building special driverless-only models, Musk’s so-called robotaxis will be based on Tesla’s most recent models.

According to Autocar, Tesla started delivering cars capable of fully-autonomous driving last month. By the end of the year, the company hopes to activate such systems through a wireless software update.

Once the update has gone live, the company will launch an on-demand taxi service that allows Tesla owners to rent their vehicles out to people in need of a lift.

Most of the robotaxi fleet will consist of customer cars, but the electric car company could add more models to the service if the platform proved to be a hit with users, says Autocar.

How can you make money from them?

In a similar fashion to Airbnb, where property owners rent out their homes to holidaymakers, Tesla drivers would be able to make money by subscribing to the carmaker’s taxi service.

Under the scheme, drivers would be encouraged to temporarily relinquish their vehicles while they picked up passengers and took them to their desired destination, The Daily Telegraph says. As Tesla’s driverless cars wouldn’t require a driver, the vehicle’s owner wouldn’t need to be present when the car was summoned by someone in need of a lift.

Musk says the scheme would be “cashflow neutral” in the early stages and “extremely cashflow positive” once the project had built up a strong user base, the newspaper says. Drivers could make $30,000 (£23,100) per year, with Tesla taking a 25 to 30% cut, he says.

“It’s a seductive prospect”, the paper adds. “Spend $50,000 (£38,600) on a car now, and make it back within two years once the fleet is up and running.”