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: 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: 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: So, is this a Neural Net?
More visualizations, still no actual word from the event, and it’s been over 20 minutes.
UPDATE 6: 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: 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.
Did he just invent a bus? The man is a genius!
He’s like the 10th tech bro that invents the bus. Many they are all so innovative!
Make it for under $30k with a steering wheel and none of the autonomous junk and you may have a deal, because I actually kind of like the look
I like the look too but it looks like a poor size and shape for a taxi. The bus thing actually looks like useful transportation.
I wonder if that was the original plan, the Model 2 was in process, but decided this is somehow better? This doesn’t seem like a taxi, does the back hatch even open for luggage?
He did say the new entry level car platform was scrapped in favor of concentrating on the robotaxi, then partially walked it back by saying they will still develop the entry model and just spin it off the existing Model 3 platform
So the truth is probably in the middle there somewhere, I do think this has something to do with the Model 2 project or some variant of it
It’s almost like the head of the company has some sort of condition that doesn’t allow him to focus on one thing for very long….
And also doesn’t want to run a car company anymore, but insists on remaining CEO of a company that gets 81.1% of its revenue from making and selling cars
Under $30k for the car, but I bet you can’t use it without some hefty subscription fees.
Under $30k, plus a 5 year subscription (price not yet determined).
Lots of ‘um” “I think” and “probably” in this presentation…
Steve Jobs he is not.
Totally failing my 300-level speech class with this presentation.
And it is good when you are as bad at hitting price points and delivery dates as Tesla that the tics are disclaimers. 🙂
Yeah. I can empathize with speech tics. That’s not ideal for someone in a public-facing leadership role, but not everyone is a good speaker.
My bigger issue is that he didn’t say much of anything in the speech. I’ve talked in more detail about farts I had, only people weren’t relying on my farts to keep a major automaker profitable.
Torch, you should do these on YouTube livestream. Then you could react to all our dumb commentary… while watching it live and putting it up on your screen. That would be worth it…
Or discord.
Grown me yelling we love you Elon is embarrassing.
Ohhhh grown *men*, I was like, why are you yelling it if you are embarrassed haha
But yeah that weird simpy behavior for someone as deeply problematic as Elon Musk, or honestly anyone, is so so weird. I don’t shout that I “love you George” when I go to a Cannibal Corpse show.
That is a terrible typo I made there. I have yelled Mike I’m pregnant when my friend’s band was performing and it got quiet between songs.
Yelling “I love you, George!” at Cannibal Corpse would be funny as hell, though.
It is already 12 years late. What does another hour matter?
We know FSD isn’t good enough to be a no-driver taxi at this time. It’s also not really good enough to even have only a safety driver like in the early days of waymo. So Tesla will probably say (1) next hardware revision will get them there (2) it will take a year (3) then they’ll really have it. This time they mean (7th try). And they’ll show a minivan or a delivery vehicle. They have all that extra factory capacity, they have to use it up somehow.
I am no expert, but I don’t know if that is how medical emergencies in public events work…
It looks like The Future is going to be at least 1 hr late…
53 mins late, almost.
> Okay, we’re a half hour late! That means I get to start posting some lies
How did the rules go again? Wait 10 minutes for a professor, 15 if the professor is a doctor, and 30 minutes before posting lies. Right.
After about an hourish in and the speaker gets to go whole-hog in on lies, pure fantasy and absolute nonsense, apparently!
Once upon a time I managed to get 24 different winamp visullisations running in sync on a Quantel system, yep the full on 24 crt screens and the worlds oddest studio mix deck. Jason will know what I am wittering about, 99.999999% of the human race will have both no idea and about the same degree of interest. Ho Hum, I am still taking the tablets before anyone asks.
Oh hell yeah. Now that really whips the llama’s ass.
Thanks, it is mildly concerning that four people on here knew what I was talking about! Also I am now frozen to the middle, 6 am and full on northern lights over Hadrians Wall, the sky really should not do that, I am composing a strong letter of complaint.
Yes ha ha YES BRING IT BACK
There is 13:** left in the quarter. At least start talking more smack Torch, I won’t make it much past the end of the game without some humor…
Cybercab, frame by Morgan.
To me, that Cybercab looks like a quickly slapped together styling mock up.
And a 2 door coupe as a cab? That’s a terrible idea. A compact van would be a much better idea as a cab.
And you know what would be even better? A compact van with a rear air suspension and ramps that could accomodate people in wheelchairs or make it easy to load large/bulky/heavy things.
You know what would cost much more to manufacture, cost much more to operate, make a considerably larger fire when the FSD crashes it into a pole, and not even do a better job of carrying one person home from the airport? A compact van.
Until you factor in all the business that is lost by those travelling in groups of greater than 2 who need a cab and want to travel together.
And when I say ‘compact van’, I’m thinking something the size of the first Transit Connect we got in North America… or the early short wheelbase Chrysler minivans. Basically something that has a footprint not much bigger than this Cybercab.
The main difference is the body is far more square with foldable back seats to increase seating capacity or cargo space as needed.
So I disagree that a small van would really cost that much more than the Cybercab above.
The cybercab event is 6 months away?!
The event announcing the robotaxi is running behind. Fitting.
Elon’s buddy Donald just said he’s going to stop autonomous cars. They’re already eating each other.
Elon is going to be Transportation Secretary. The presidential limo will be an armored CyberTruck. The Smithsonian will have a Tesla showroom on the first floor. US ICBMs will be handed over to SpaceX. The Whitehouse Communications Director will be an Optimus robot (which might be an improvement). And finally, X will buy Truth Social and it will be the official US information agency.
The end of 2001 was this and at the time it was a work of art that blew everyone’s mind. Now it’s ho hum, let’s have AI generate some video for a corporate shill.
I’m just watching the game instead and waiting for your color commentary.
Maybe watch the after hours stock trading as I can see the moment they show the “cab” and Tesla stock jumps more than the value of VW.
Same but Lord of the Rings, haha. I’m guessing this visualization stream runs until just after fusion power is achieved and just before FSD comes out of beta.
Tesla – On time as normal. I really glad they value the time of everyone who decided to tune in.
I’m not sure this is better, think it’s stuck on the winamp visualization.
Robotaxi really whips the llamas ass, apparently
So it seats 2, maybe 4 if you clamber in behind a folded forward seat (and there’s a seat back there), and no cargo space?
You strap your own luggage to the roof if you’re headed to the airport.
It’s hard to believe we are just 24 years away from RoboTaxi.
Finally the return of Chrysler Cordoba sized doors.
i’ll be watching, until the pills kick in.