Tesla loves to put on a show, and Thursday's unveiling of its Robotaxi vehicle might just be the flashiest one yet.
The company will host its long-promised robotaxi vehicle unveiling at the Warner Bros. Discovery movie studio in Burbank, Calif. Doors will open for attendees at 5 p.m. PT and remarks will start at 7 p.m. PT.
Tesla being Tesla, we'd expect it to livestream the "We, Robot" event on its YouTube page and on X, Musk's own platform. We'll add an embed here when Tesla does so.
Musk first teased the Robotaxi event back in April, a date setting it for August 8th. That date Tesla had to push back due to "an important design change to the front."
The Robotaxi reveal has seemingly taken the place of another next-generation $25,000 EV that Musk promised. Just a few weeks after Musk announced the Robotaxi event, he cut more than 10% of Tesla's workforce and said the automaker was going "balls to the wall for autonomy."
For years, Musk has promised autonomous capabilities on Tesla vehicles. The company's advanced driver-assistance system is brazenly named Full Self-Driving, even though it's not fully self-driving and needs a human driver to stay focused and take control when necessary — a point driven home time and again in drive-along videos fans regularly post on social media.
In 2019, when the robotaxi was first floated by Musk, it envisioned that some existing Teslas would be able to act as autonomous robotaxis with only software updates, potentially unlocking an opportunity for Tesla owners to earn something off of their cars when they are not driving them. That plan, which is supposed to have resulted in millions of robotaxis on the road by 2020, has never been implemented. In such areas where there aren't enough people to share their cars, the company noted it will offer a dedicated fleet of robotaxis.
We would expect this roll-out — which we remind you will be at a Hollywood studio — to play up the car itself rather than the autonomous technology. Musk noted when he rolled out the Cybertruck last summer that he wants to create a robotaxi without a steering wheel or pedals, and images of the car appeared in Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk biography, published in 2023, where it appears as a Cybertruck-inspired, two-door, two-seater compact vehicle.
Whatever happens, TechCrunch will liveblog it and bring you news as it happens, so keep an eye out.
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