Elon Musk Is Worried That Tesla Robotaxis Will Get Bored
Tesla may have to dumb-down its artificial intelligence.
During Tesla’s third quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Elon Musk was discussing the brand’s future planned autonomous vehicles. While the Full Self-Driving system offered in its customer cars hasn’t yet achieved full autonomy, company-owned Robotaxis are operating in pilot projects in Austin and the San Francisco Bay area and will roll out more cities before the end of the year.
The long-term plan is to make every Tesla capable of being a Robotaxi one day, and Musk thinks one thing in particular will make them impossible for car shoppers to resist and create demand that will be “really pretty nutty.”
“What it comes down to is, can you text while you’re in the car? If you tell someone, yes, the car is now so good, you can be on your phone and text the entire time while you’re in the car, anyone who can buy the car will buy the car. End of story. That’s what everybody wants to do. In fact, not everyone wants to, they do that. That’s why, in fact, the reason you’ve seen an uptick in accidents, pretty much worldwide, is because people are texting and driving,” Musk said.
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He’s not the only one thinking this way. Earlier in the day, General Motors announced that it intends to launch an updated version of its Super Cruise hands-off highway driving feature in 2028 that will allow drivers to take their eyes off of the road and “sit back, read, or catch up on messages while the vehicle handles the drive.” Both Super Cruise and Full Self-Driving are currently categorized as Level 2 autonomous systems that require driver supervision in order to operate.
Tesla regularly improves the Full Self-Driving software and hardware and is working on a next generation system that Musk said is at least 10 times more powerful than the current one.
“It might almost be too much intelligence for a car,” he said. “I do wonder, like, how much intelligence should you have in a car? It might get bored.” He does have an idea to keep them occupied, however.
“One of the things I thought of, like, well, if we’ve got all these cars that maybe are bored, well, why they’re sort of, if they are bored, we could actually have a giant distributed inference fleet. If they’re not actively driving, just have a giant distributed inference fleet,” Musk said, describing a network of connected computers that could be used to run a larger artificial intelligence system.
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Along with preventing Robotaxis from taking up street racing for fun or plotting to overthrow humanity, Musk thinks this application would add value for Tesla.
“At some point, if you’ve got tens of millions of cars in the fleet, or maybe at some point 100 million cars in the fleet, and let’s say they had, at that point, I don’t know, a kilowatt of inference capability of high-performance inference capability, that’s 100 gigawatts of inference distributed with power and cooling taken with cooling and power conversion taken care of. That seems like a pretty significant asset.”
That point is still a long way down the road, but Musk said that the golden, two-seat autonomous Cybercab unveiled last year is scheduled to be in regular production by the second quarter of 2026 with the new computer and without a steering wheel, which will give the left front passenger plenty of space for texting.
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