Why The Tesla Cyber Van Will Be The Tesla Robo Taxi!

Let’s talk about an upcoming and still unknown Tesla vehicle release, The Robo Taxi. This is coming after the Cybertruck and after the Roadster and will be some kind of a brand new vehicle design.

At the Giga Texas opening party, Elon Musk said that a dedicated Robo Taxi vehicle is in the works, and that it would be quite futuristic. And then again on Tesla’s latest earnings call on April 20th, Elon doubled down on the Robo Taxi concept, saying that it will likely be revealed in 2023 and manufactured in 2024.

At the same time we’ve got this supposedly leaked document from supposed industry insiders that appears to show a future production schedule for Tesla vehicles. And according to this document, Tesla has plans to go into production with some kind of a “van” based vehicle in 2024.

Now strap on your tinfoil hats here, because things are about to get freaky. I’m going to propose that Elon’s Robo Taxi and the Tesla Van are actually the same vehicle. So let’s get going.

OK, so I appreciate that this isn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes level power of deduction going on here - it’s a pretty obvious connection to make. But I do think that this is a really interesting concept to talk about.

Because we have always speculated that Tesla would make a passenger van. And we always knew that the company would make some kind of a full autonomous taxi vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals. But this is the first time that I’ve been relatively sure that the two ideas are actually the same idea.

And again, we don’t necessarily trust this spreadsheet as any kind of an official document, so the primary source here is really Elon Musk himself, the Auto Forecast document is just a supporting factor that helps connect some dots.

Let’s get into what Elon Musk just said. On the April 20th earnings call Elon said, quote, “We are also working on a new vehicle that I alluded to at the Giga Texas opening, which is a dedicated robotaxi. It is going to be highly optimized for autonomy – meaning it will not have steering wheel or pedals. There are a number of other innovations around it that I think are quite exciting, but it is fundamentally optimized to achieve the lowest fully considered cost per mile or km when counting everything. I think it will be a very powerful product."

So that’s all just a confirmation of things that we had already been talking about for years now, no surprises. What did come as a bit of a surprise was when Elon said that the design of this Robo Taxi vehicle would be revealed next year, in 2023, and that he was aiming for volume production in 2024.

Following that, Elon said, quote, "I think that really will be a massive driver of Tesla growth. We don't want to jump the gun on an exciting product announcement yet."

Now let’s jump back to our “leaked” spreadsheet document - where under the vehicle platform of the Cybertruck, there is a vehicle program that is just called “Van”, with a nameplate of “Tesla Van”, which will be produced at the Austin Gigafactory, beginning on January 2nd 2024 and ending on December 24th 2030.

Very interesting, right? We were literally having this conversation around the office Wednesday afternoon, before the earnings call, and we were saying that if Tesla did release a van in 2024, then it would have to be an Autonomous Robo Taxi Van. And then hours later, Elon Musk says, “I'm going to release a robo taxi vehicle in 2024.”

And we worked out some pretty compelling reasons why the Tesla Van and the Tesla Robo Taxi will inevitably be the same thing.

For one, it feels very unlikely that Tesla would release a consumer minivan kind of a product. Does anyone even buy minivans anymore? I feel like Chrysler is the only brand that really puts any effort into minivans in this day and age - maybe the Honda Odyssey? It just seems like a really pointless market segment to pour resources into in 2022, it will probably be even less worthwhile by 2024. And on top of that, Tesla is just not a soccer mom brand - it doesn’t feel right at all.

For two, if Tesla’s true mission is sustainability and efficiency, then building a brand new autonomous people mover on the same old 4 door, 5 seat vehicle platform doesn’t really make much sense. Like, I really doubt this is just going to be a Model 3 with the steering wheel ripped out. That’s not first principles thinking - this is the design philosophy that Elon Musk is famous for implementing, you approach every new project from the ground up and build each part specifically for the goal that you are trying to achieve. This is integral to the design of Tesla’s current vehicles. The first Tesla, the Roadster, was not a first principle design, it was just a Lotus Elise with a bunch of laptop batteries and electric stuff crammed into it. The Model S on the other hand was a first principle design, purpose built from the ground up to be a fully electric vehicle.

So if we were designing a new vehicle from the ground up to move as many people as possible, as efficiently as possible, then we would probably want to make it as big as possible - the Cybertruck platform is the biggest one that Tesla has right now, and that’s supposedly the platform that the Van will be built on. Makes sense so far.

As for what the vehicle would really look like or how it would function, that’s still very much up in the air. But if you’ll allow me to theorize for a minute, I have an idea.

So if we want to have maximum efficiency and lowest cost, then we need to maximize passenger density. But we also want to maximize comfort as well, we don’t want this to just be a smaller version of taking the city bus. So I wonder if this big van shaped object could actually have 6 individual doors, 3 per side, and they would be Falcon Wing style doors from the model X that open vertically, so it would be super easy to get in and out, and the door would just open automatically for you when the taxi approaches. And then inside each door would be an individual compartment with two seats side by side, a big screen in front of you and a window to the side, opposite from the window would just be a dividing barrier. And maybe the dividers could retract down for large groups. But individuals or duos would ride the taxi without ever seeing their fellow passengers.

It would be like a weird hybrid of a taxi and a bus. It sounds kind of wonky, I know. But it’s not exactly practical in the long run to have these robo taxis just move one or two people at a time from point a to point b - that doesn’t do much to solve congestion, we would still have a small number of people occupying a large vehicle footprint on the road. It would be more sustainable to maximize the amount of people being moved with the smallest footprint.

It works in applications like school buses and airport shuttles. And I imagine that if there were a very powerful artificial intelligence that was in charge of routing these Taxi Vans, then you could get to wherever you are going very effectively and would hardly even notice that other people are being picked up and dropped off along the way. 

One thing that we do know for sure is that for any of this Robo Taxi stuff to actually work in any form, then the first thing Tesla needs to do is solve Full Self Driving. We would need a fully, completely autonomous vehicle software that never fails - or at least never fails so badly that it crashes or gets stuck. That is a very tall order. That’s the hard part of this whole thing.

We’ve been following the development of FSD Beta very closely, and the program has undoubtedly made gigantic improvements over the year and a half that it’s been released. But it’s just as undoubtedly not safe to drive a car without human supervision. They have reduced the need for interventions, but they have come nowhere close to eliminating interventions. At least not in a wide variety of scenarios - we have seen plenty of zero intervention drives with FSD Beta, it can be done, but it needs to be done in very specific circumstances. 

Elon Musk says that this will all be ironed out by the end of this year - that’s only like 6 or 7 months away. It’s entirely possible that Elon is right, but I think we can realistically say that it is equally as likely that he is wrong. I don’t know the exact math on that one.

But let’s say that Elon is right, and FSD goes to level 4 or level 5 autonomy in 2022 - that means that the car can drive with zero requirement for human intervention - level 4 means that the car can do this under certain circumstances, like inside a geofence, and level 5 means that the car can drive without supervision in every circumstance with no limitations. 

Level 4 is the most likely outcome in the short term, because then Tesla can just geofence off known locations where FSD doesn’t work so well - they are already doing this with FSD Beta in Canada, there is this big section of downtown Toronto where the street car tracks are just all over the damn place, it’s a frigging chaos of cars and street cars with people getting on and off of them in the middle of the road - it’s a nightmare. Never drive in Toronto if you can possibly avoid it, that’s my Canadian tip of the day. And Tesla has just accepted that for now at least, there is no safe way for FSD Beta to even attempt to navigate downtown Toronto even with human supervision, so they’ve geofenced the whole area and the program will not activate inside the fence.

So if Tesla’s software team can pull through with Level 4 autonomy in Full Self Driving in 2022, then it would absolutely make sense to release a dedicated autonomous taxi vehicle in 2023. And if Tesla can indeed follow through on Elon’s promise to scale their production to extreme size in 2022 and 2023, then it would make sense that by 2024 there will be enough capacity to roll out a brand new, high volume vehicle that is being built on the same platform as the Cybertruck, which by that point should be cruising along at high volume production itself.

That’s if everything goes perfectly. Will everything actually go perfectly? It’s very doubtful. Nothing ever goes as smoothly as Elon Musk promises. That’s not to say he’s a liar or anything like that - he probably has the best intentions when he makes these “predictions” or whatever you want to call them. And it is comforting to hear someone like Elon Musk talk about all this amazing stuff, like autonomous cars, and renewable energy and spaceships and going to Mars… and he always says that this is all coming very soon, it’s just around the corner. It makes you feel very optimistic for the future, and that can be hard to do some times, it’s getting harder and harder to do as time goes on,

So, Elon Musk’s optimism is a good thing, and I want him to keep it up. For our sake at least. But at the same time I think we’ve all learned to keep at least one foot planted firmly in reality. So, Autonomous Robot Taxi Van coming 2024? Probably not. But it’s still a lot of fun to think about, and that’s worth something.