- Musk makes big admission during recent earnings call
- CEO hints we might see Roadster in “a month or so”
- Tesla is also announcing an upgraded AI4 chip
During the company’s Q1 earnings call, Tesla’s CEO stated that most of the company’s production “long term” will be the two-seat Cybercab, and that anyone thinking about physically taking control of driving duties will have to look toward the long-awaited Roadster model.
“Over time, it will make sense for our entire lineup to be autonomous vehicles of different sizes,” Elon Musk said. “In fact, in the long term, the only manual car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he added.
The vehicle in question has been touted for release since 2017, when the company began taking deposits for an all-new two-seat electric sports car.
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During that time, Tesla’s CEO has claimed that it will be able to tackle the 0-60mph sprint time of 1.9 seconds and hinted that it would use technology derived from SpaceX to “fly” for short periods.
But during this year’s earnings call, Musk pushed back the launch of the Roadster again, claiming the company will be able to debut the car in “a month or so.”
“I think it could be one of the most spectacular demos ever,” he said, despite not giving further details on when we’ll see it or when it’s scheduled to go into production.
Analysis: The goalposts continue to move
Musk’s vision of a fully autonomous future is currently giving the company headaches as a number of Tesla owners have begun taking legal action against the company’s historic Full Self-Driving claims.
During the latest earnings call, Musk finally admitted that “Hardware 3 simply does not have the ability to achieve unattended FSD,” despite earlier promises to customers that it would.
He went on to state that the company is exploring the possibility of building “micro factories or small factories” in major metropolitan areas to upgrade older HW3 cars to HW4. Although there were no further details on how this would work.
However, during the same call, Musk also stated that the AI4 chips will also be quickly replaced by more competent technology.
Since the company’s recently revealed next-gen AI5 chips won’t be entering vehicles anytime soon, instead being channeled into Optimus robots, Tesla is now planning an AI4 Plus upgrade for its self-driving computer that will double the RAM from 16 gigabytes to 32 gigabytes per unit. chip, bringing the total to 64GB with the latest automotive processor.
But read between the lines, and it seems that while the HW4 with the AI4 Plus chip is likely more than enough to continue Supervised Full Self-Driving, it’s not strong enough to make the jump to Unsupervised — a goal Tesla has been working toward for years and the promise that attracted millions of customers in the first place.
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