- Musk makes big admission during latest earnings call
- The CEO hints that we could see the Roadster in “a month or so”
- Tesla also announces updated AI4 chip
During the company’s first-quarter earnings call, Tesla’s CEO stated that the bulk of the company’s production “in the 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 range to be autonomous vehicles of different sizes,” said Elon Musk. “In fact, in the long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he added.
The vehicle in question has been hyped for release since 2017, when the company began accepting deposits for an all-new two-seat electric sports car.
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During that time, the Tesla CEO claimed that it will be able to achieve the 0-60 mph sprint time of 1.9 seconds and hinted that it would use SpaceX-derived technology to “fly” for short periods of time.
But during this year’s earnings conference call, Musk delayed the launch of the Roadster once again, stating that the company will be able to unveil the car in “a month or so.”
“I think it could be one of the most spectacular demos ever seen,” he said, despite not elaborating on when we’ll see it or when it’s scheduled to go into production.
Analysis: The goals keep moving
Musk’s vision of a fully autonomous future is causing headaches for the company, as several Tesla owners have begun taking legal action against the company’s historic full self-driving claims.
During the recent earnings call, Musk finally admitted that “Hardware 3 simply does not have the ability to achieve unattended FSD,” despite previous promises to customers that it would.
He went on to state that the company is exploring the possibility of building “microfactories 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 unveiled next-generation AI5 chips won’t be used in vehicles any time soon but instead will be funneled into Optimus robots, Tesla is now planning an AI4 Plus upgrade for its autonomous computer that doubles RAM from 16 gigabytes to 32 gigabytes per chip, bringing the total to 64GB, which is in line with Nvidia’s latest automotive processors.
But read between the lines and it appears that while the HW4 with the AI4 Plus chip is probably more than enough to continue running supervised full autonomous driving, it’s not powerful enough to make the jump to unsupervised driving, a goal Tesla has been working on for years and the promise that attracted millions of customers in the first place.
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