Yes, tonight’s the night you’ve all been waiting for, provided you’re someone who, perhaps, invests far too much of their self-worth and identity into a for-profit company that cannot and will not love you back, ever. Yes, it’s the Tesla “We, Robot” event, held at Warner Bros Discovery Studios in Burbank, where Tesla’s self-driving Cybercab will be revealed and likely a bunch of other stuff, because that’s how these things go.
Of course, there should be lots of Elon Musk tonight to, so depending on how you feel about this incredibly well-known and controversial figure, prepare accordingly, with either your adoration cushions or vomit buckets at the ready, whatever way you swing. It’s all fine by us here!
The livestream can be viewed here (I’ll embed it below this paragraph, too) so please feel free to watch with us! It’ll start at 10 pm Eastern/7 pm Pacific, and I’ll be liveblogging thoughts and reactions and information as often as I can, or until the pills kick in and I have to bow out.
UPDATE:Â The initial stream we had was not actually Tesla, FYI, just some weird scammers! The future is so much fun.
UPDATE 2: Holy shit, I did like three updates on some AI generated scam to get Etherium or Bitcoin or whatever. Holy crap. They even had fake mockups of the Cybercab that looked like a VW XL1! I’ll show that crap tomorrow.
Want to see what the fake car looked like? It looked like this:
That’s fake, remember. Wow. I wondered why Elon kept trying to get me to give him Bitcoin. Okay, enough AI trickery. Holy crap.
UPDATE 3: It’s late getting started, which is very on-brand. But there’s these cool visualizations:
It’s like living in a city inside a WinAmp visualizer!
UPDATE 4:Â Tesla clearly wants to get this right; one important thing to watch for is whether or not current Teslas will be able to be used as for-money robotaxis, or if it’s just the new Cybercab. Musk has been promising that Tesla owners could pimp their cars for money for years and years now. Also, what about all your private stuff? What about your personal info on your car’s registration? You’re inviting strangers into your car, so I hope they thought through how all of that is going to work, security-wise.
UPDATE 5:Â So, is this a Neural Net?
More visualizations, still no actual word from the event, and it’s been over 20 minutes.
UPDATE 6:Â People at the event are tweeting some goofy stuff that’s been made for the event at the studio, like this:
???? pic.twitter.com/ogYnD1Nwzn
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 11, 2024
Get it? Musk-Mask! One letter off! And that’s the Optimus robot in there! Also, it seems Elon is responding to these tweets?
????
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 11, 2024
This thing is almost a half hour late; shouldn’t you get off your phone and be getting on stage or some shit, Elon?
UPDATE 7: Okay, we’re a half hour late! That means I get to start posting some lies. Like this one: here’s the reveal of the Cybercab! And, it has a leather body and a two-stroke engine!
Man, it’s better than I hoped for!
UPDATE 8: Ahhh here’s what’s going on:
A person in the crowd had a medical emergency. We have taken care of them and will be starting shortly.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 11, 2024
I hope everyone is okay!
UPDATE 9: This visualization needs an X-Wing and then you have a full-on Death Star trench run:
UPDATE 10: It’s starting! With a wall of text!
UPDATE 11: The Cybercab!
No rear window, interesting. The headlights are projectors, it seems, showing images. But why just a two-seater? It’s pretty big for just a two seater. And for a ride-sharing/cab/taxi kind of car, you’d think you’d want more than 2 seats. A family of four going to the airport would need two of these? That hardly makes sense.
It has scissor doors – and there’s 20 of them! Also, the turn indicators and brake lights are strangely low-set, below the taillight bar.
There’s 50 autonomous vehicles on the site, according to Elon, who is also coming out as anti-dystopia, a bold move.
UPDATE 12:Â Elon says private people can buy one of these, for under $30,000.
Do I believe that – under $$30 grand? I’m not so sure. But maybe!
Elon also predicts non-supervised self-driving “before 2027.” And Model 3 and Model Y and Cybertruck he also says – all cars, he clarifies – will have what would be Level 4 or 5 self-drving, too.
UPDATE 13: Elon is saying the autonomous cars will be 20-30 times safer than a human, because “a human can’t live a million lives” which I’m not really sure makes sense, but I am very curious to see an actual demonstration of this self-driving.
The rides around the studio really don’t tell that much, it’s a completely controlled environment.
Inductive charging for the robotaxi! That’s interesting.
UPDATE 14: Looka t this thing! 20-seater Robovan, which Elon pronounces like Robo-VIN.
It looks pretty windowless? And Elon said there would be cargo versions.
What does this thing remind me of? Oh! The Mercury train, by Henry Dreyfuss!
Like that, and this Honda concept car, the Fuya-Jo:
It reminds me a bit of the things the Guild Navigators rolled around in:
Also Elon said the Optimus robot, which he predicts will sell for $20,000 to $30,000, will “just be your friend” and will be the “biggest product of all time.”
They’re playing “What is Love?” and having a robot dance party there now, as things seem to be wrapping up?
So, really, we didn’t actually learn a whole hell of a lot here. We saw the design of the Cybercab, but the area its driving in is far closer to an amusement park ride (as Elon himself noted) than it is a real demonstration of driving autonomy. We don’t actually know much about the car itself, it’s capabilities, specs, range, power, capabilities, and so on.
It only has inductive charging? Does that mean a whole new charging network needs to be built, or at least adapted? Can this use any of the existing Supercharger network?
I have more questions than I had before, I think?
I have yet to see this robo-cowboy-bartender-sexbot actually pour a drink, but it likes waving and throwing the peace sign to people.
What’s in those gift bags? Truffles? Looks good.
Musk also mentioned that the computing power of the cars can be rented out for other use, too. I spoke with a CTO friend of mine, who noted a few issues with this, including the fact that as soon as the car is needed, your job is cancelled, and if your computation problem needs any associated data, that will all have to be downloaded over a slow cell connection and stored…where? On the car? If there’s enough storage? And if you even want your data stored on some random hard drive in some car that’s wherever and owned by whomever?
Seems like a lot still needs to be clarified there.
So it’s a taxi you can’t use if you need a wheelchair, and a taxi you can’t use if you’re with more than one person – say, you’re a family, or are a group of friends having a night on the town. Brilliant.
If you’re going to make a taxi take the Toyota JPN Taxi and iterate on that. It’s not ‘cyber’ but it can carry people – including wheelchair users.
Sorry, I keep misreading the name of this car as “Cybercrab,” and I’m just disappointed because that seems like a much more interesting mode of transportation.
“Datsun 240Z” is the wrong shape for a cab. Is there room for two couples to ride together?
Much ado about Musking.
So, maybe by 2027? That indeed sounds shovel ready.
The last thing I have here is that I really, really dislike not having a rear window. It makes me feel claustrophobic and paranoid that I’m about to get run over by someone on their phone or something. Especially when the car I’m in has to slow/stop suddenly, I’d like to know if the person behind me got the memo.
That’s just where they’re hiding the drivers for now. If they ever have actual autonomy, they can add a window. /s