What if the Robotaxi was just a disguised €20,000 Tesla?

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Tesla Robotaxi

Elon Musk claims that the Tesla Robotaxi will be sold to individuals for less than 30,000 euros. A little ingenuity, and what do we have?

As early as 2016, Tesla launched the major project of the “Tesla Network,” a system allowing Tesla owners to send their cars to work as autonomous taxis when they are not using them. The idea was not to develop a specific model for this purpose, but to enable all cars manufactured by Tesla to participate in the collective effort and allow their owners to finance a part of the purchase and maintenance costs by making them available to other users. In short, you come home in the evening after a good day’s work and park your Model 3 in front of your house. While you have dinner, watch a good movie, and sleep, your car goes back to work until you need it again. Going away for 2 weeks on vacation? No need to pay 150 euros for parking at the airport; instead, you come back richer from your vacation because your car has been working completely autonomously during your time off. Awesome, right?

If the Robotaxi is equipped with this technology, all Tesla models from 3 to Y are potentially equipped as well and offer 5 seats. So why spend so much to build a car that only has 2 seats and doesn’t perform better than the existing ones? And why introduce the Robovan that can do exactly the same as the Robotaxi but with 20 seats? Finally, why does the Robotaxi look so much like a civilian car when it doesn’t need to? The Robovan is fantastic precisely because it doesn’t pretend to be a car. These are some of the questions we are asking and that analysts and investors are asking, who did not hesitate to penalize Tesla on the stock market for these uncertainties.

Elon Musk is anything but a fool, and he certainly did not conceive the Robotaxi with such classic shapes for no reason. What if it could transform into a real car?

It has no steering wheel or pedals? No problem installing them; just draw from the parts of the Cybertruck. The pickup indeed has 100% digital controls with no mechanical link. Tesla is currently selling the FSD autonomous driving feature for 15,000 dollars basically due to the onboard technology. If we remove that, we won’t eliminate the entire amount, but certainly a good portion of it. Finally, if we place a small bench on the flat rear floor, we will have 4 real seats.

Of course, it’s not that simple to drop the price of a car from 30,000 euros to 20,000 euros with a snap of the fingers, but in this case, it doesn’t seem impossible. The arrival of the Robotaxi on the road is not expected before 2026. Until then, Tesla and Elon Musk will certainly keep us in suspense.

ALSO READ: The Tesla Model Y Propulsion slashed to 249 €/month

This page is translated from the original post "Et si le Robotaxi n’était qu’une Tesla à 20 000 € camouflée ?" in French.

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