Barrons news cites a Tesla Robotaxi essay by xTesla Engineer Frank Yashar.
Frank Yashar, a former Tesla engineer, starts his essay by comparing SpaceX to the traditional satellite industry. SpaceX now has more than 7,000 low-cost satellites orbiting the Earth, providing high-speed Wi-Fi speed service to over 5 million customers. The traditional satellite industry didn’t have the cost structure or launch capacity to consider a satellite constellation that size, but SpaceX did it.
The Barrons article mentioned lower Tesla car sales in Q1 2025 but did not mention the switchover in all factories to a new version of the top selling Model Y.
Frank Yashar believes that Tesla will start with remote operators and will scale the number of cars while maintaining the number of remote operators.
We know that Tesla is already having thousands of Tesla drives every day at the Fremont and Austin factory without human drivers. There are tens of thousands of smart summon and dispatch to park of up to 85 meters each way without human drivers. There is no remote operators or very, very few human operators available for these use cases.
I believe the Tesla rollout will be mainly without remote drivers.
Frank is correct in that Tesla vision only with AI approach is the only system that can economically scale to millions of cars. The other Lidar based approaches do not have the scale of robotaxi grade lidar production to scale to more than a few thousand robotaxi cars in 2026 and 2027.
My thoughts on Tesla’s self-driving taxi service that will start soon in Austin, Texas. https://t.co/KUzL4hdXAX
— Frank (@FrankYashar) May 9, 2025
Frank talks about 4 million Tesla cars being available but the current unsupervised system requires hardware 4 which is only in half of the cars. There are reports and rumors that FSD at robotaxi unsupervised level could be solved soon for hardware 3.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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