马斯克又赌了！无人出租车能救特斯拉吗？

Elon Musk announced the long-awaited Robotaxi will be launched on August 8, this news once again ignited Wall Street, with Tesla's stock price soaring nearly 4% after hours on Friday, reversing the downturn of the past week

Tesla has attracted much attention due to its significant breakthrough in Full Self-Driving (FSD), which also suggests that Musk may be betting the company's future on autonomous driving, especially Robotaxi. However, facing numerous regulatory barriers, high costs, and the fact that autonomous driving technology is not yet mature, Robotaxi may not be able to support Tesla's next growth phase.

Why abandon affordable models and focus on developing Robotaxi?

On Friday morning, a report released by the media caused a stir on Wall Street, stating that Tesla had abandoned the development plan for the affordable Model 2 and shifted its focus to developing Robotaxi. This news led to a short-term 5% decline in Tesla's stock price.

In response, Musk quickly denied it, calling it false. However, later on, Musk announced that Robotaxi will be officially launched on August 8, essentially confirming the content of the report.

For a long time, Musk has regarded Robotaxi as Tesla's most important product, believing its potential value could be as high as trillions of dollars. Previously, he agreed to produce affordable electric vehicles to use economies of scale to support the cost of taxis. In addition, if the FSD technology is not mature when the next generation product platform is ready for production, this compact electric car can be sold first.

Therefore, Musk's change of mind is likely due to seeing the breakthrough progress of FSD.

Tesla adopts an end-to-end AI approach in FSD technology, fully transitioning to neural networks, significantly improving its performance.

Especially with the FSD V12.3 version making significant progress, test drivers can drive for several days without taking over. This confirms that the full transition to neural networks is the right move, allowing Tesla to surpass its competitors.

Unlike previous FSD versions that used algorithms to deal with changes in the car's surroundings, the V12 software attempts to "understand" the world. Although it is not perfect now, it can continue to learn, improve its understanding ability, and its learning ability is limitless.

By requiring the software to predict how the environment will change and penalizing incorrect predictions, the FSD software is expected to become as excellent in driving as ChatGPT.

Can Robotaxi bring a new round of growth to Tesla?

**Indeed, if Tesla can overcome the obstacles of autonomous driving technology, it can produce autonomous driving taxis and become the first company in the market to launch such a product However, apart from bringing the honor of being the first mover, this may not have much additional significance.

Firstly, Tesla is not known for pioneering products. Take the Cybertruck for example, it was released as a revolutionary electric pickup truck model in 2019, but it wasn't actually launched in the market until 4 years later, by which time the market competition had become very intense.

In other words, if other competitors catch up later, Tesla may actually suffer losses due to being too ahead of its time.

Secondly, even if Tesla introduces Robotaxi, it does not mean that it can immediately achieve mass production. Whether it can sell enough Robotaxis to cover the high development costs is another matter. In comparison, compact electric vehicles have unparalleled advantages because they have a broad market and the potential to be sold globally immediately, while autonomous driving taxis do not have these advantages.

In the United States, autonomous vehicles are currently only allowed to conduct limited testing in specific areas, with different states having varying regulatory attitudes. The widespread promotion of FSD across the United States and even globally faces many legal and regulatory obstacles, which will significantly reduce its marketability, affecting production capacity and profitability.

Furthermore, autonomous driving taxis actually only serve one customer - Tesla itself, meaning that Robotaxi primarily serves Tesla's own business model and interests, rather than being sold to other customers.

This situation is quite ironic. If operated under the "Transportation as a Service" (TaaS) model, instead of selling cars, Tesla would be better off operating to permanently collect fees. However, this will be constrained by the aforementioned regulatory issues.

However, under the current regulatory environment, autonomous driving taxis are difficult to put into practical use in the United States and even globally, greatly limiting their market potential and thus restricting their production scale. No one is willing to purchase a vehicle that can only be used in limited areas or cannot be driven at all, which is also one of the major reasons why delaying the development plan for compact electric vehicles is a significant mistake.