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Transportation Robotics

Elon Musk Unveils Tesla Cybercab, Robovan and Updated Optimus Robot 46

Posted by BeauHD from the future-is-now dept.
At Tesla's "We, Robot" event at Warner Bros. Studios tonight, Elon Musk unveiled the Tesla Cybercab, Robovan, and an updated version of the Optimus robot. Slashdot is at the event capturing photos and getting demos of everything announced. You can follow along on X. Below is a summary of each of the offerings.

Tesla Cybercab: The Tesla Cybercab is a futuristic, fully autonomous robotaxi designed without a steering wheel or pedals, positioned to revolutionize mass transit with extremely low operating costs. It features a sleek design with upward-opening butterfly doors and a compact cabin that seats two passengers. Musk said the Cybercab uses inductive charging instead of a traditional plug-in. "Something we're also doing is and it's really high time we did this is inductive charging. So the robotaxi has no plug it just goes over the inductive charger and charges so yeah, it's kind of how it should be." The vehicle is expected to cost under $30,000. Regulatory approval will be needed before it can go into production, which is projected to begin by 2026 or 2027. Tesla Robovan: The Tesla Robovan is a dustbuster-shaped electric passenger van featuring sliding glass doors, a bright interior, and carriage-style seating for up to 20 passengers. "One of the things we want to do and we've seen this with the CyberTruck is we want to change the look of the roads the future should look like the future," said Musk. Musk also claimed that autonomy will "turn parking lots into parks," as fewer cars will be needed and they won't sit idle for most of the day. Pricing and release details were not disclosed. Tesla Optimus: The updated Tesla Optimus robot is a humanoid designed to handle everyday tasks, such as retrieving packages or serving drinks. Optimus walked on stage and interacted with attendees, though its current capabilities are still limited. Elon Musk envisions the robot as a transformative product, with plans to produce millions of units at a price of around $20,000. "It'll be able to do anything you want. So it can be a teacher, babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do." Optimus is expected to start performing useful tasks by the end of the year, with broader availability projected by the end of next year. In closing, Musk said: "I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind. Because I think everyone of the 8 billion people of Earth, I think everyone's going to want their Optimus buddy." Developing...

Elon Musk Unveils Tesla Cybercab, Robovan and Updated Optimus Robot More | Reply

Elon Musk Unveils Tesla Cybercab, Robovan and Updated Optimus Robot

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  • Doubled down on stupid (Score:5, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Thursday October 10, 2024 @11:52PM (#64855861)

    The camera locations on the cybercab, like those on the model y and 3 etc. are shit. In FSD mode, on certain intersections .. Tesla vehicles have to jut about 3 feet further into it than a human driven car. And yes that 3 feet makes a difference, it's annoying to the cross traffic and causes them to stop and then if there are two lanes to cross it is another mess. It's really starting to look like someone like Benz may solve autonomous vehicles before Tesla.

    • I'll stick to my JohnnyCab thanks. I mean, Musk got us to Mars years ago so he must have JohnnyCab technology in these new FSD cabs... right?

      I thought he also had fleets of Model 3 FSD cabs on the streets already. I recall him promising that if you bought a Tesla for $30K you could use it as a FSD cab and make a fortune -- that was years ago so the numbers must be huge already.

      It's not like this guy would promise the earth and deliver a hand full of dirt -- is it?

    • They Cybercab, same amount of random crashing, not a damn thing you can do about it since there's no manual controls. The Future!

      Inductive charging! We're losing a lot of capital building chargers so we're gonna have the government build it out for us. The Future!

    • Careful with posts like that, you might summom teh Rei

  • In a lot of areas on the US where normal buses just don't do the job, having robovans come around might be the only way to have any effective public transportation, especially areas that are not well serviced by traditional bus routes. For example, a student area that needs shuttle buses coming every 5 minutes, where 1-2 Robovans can be used for that, and at peak times, send larger buses.

    The Cybercab can be useful as public transportation because it allows people to get use of a vehicle from their place to

    • Re:Good ideas for public transport... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kiddo 9000 ( 5893452 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @12:43AM (#64855917)
      The robovan is stupid. I live in an area with buses, and the answer is 100% just add buses. Normal buses absolutely will do the job, but for some reason people in the US just have this baseless belief that public transit just "doesn't work" in most of NA (psssst from up north, it does!). A single NovaBus LFS can carry 70-80 people, has wheelchair accessibility, dual door boarding (easier to get on/off when busy), articulating versions for busy routes with 100+ person capacity, handrails and handholds so you can easily stand and walk about the bus while in motion, etc. Some transit agencies also install bike racks on the front so you can bring a bike with you. The real reason public transit sucks in NA is because of car companies trying to make it not work as much as possible for their own benefit, which results in poor planning, bad maintenance, badly planned routes/timetables, etc. A well-operated transit agency is what NA cities and counties need for public transit to work. Elon is doing exactly this here, with basically a distraction for cities looking for solutions to their transit problem. It won't work out well, it will waste their money, scare them away from trying again with actual buses, and thus forcing people to continue driving.

      Also, for low capacity services, smaller buses exist. Just buy a smaller bus.

      On a different note, the cybercab concept you have isn't a terrible idea, in fact it already exists here but just using regular cars with drivers. You can book a trip with a mobile app that you get on your phone and someone will come to pick you up at the scheduled time. People with disabilities get door-to-door service as well with wheelchair accessible transit vans.

      • The advantage of driverless / autonomous cabs / vans will become evident some years in the future once there are a lot of them going around.

        At present obviously it seems like having a driver is better but once these things scale up you will find that the costs go down drastically due to no driver, electric, cheaper vehicle with way more 24/7 utilization of each car. Then you will feel how did we ever live without these. Like cheap high speed internet.

        Probably not so much for buses which are already cheap (t

        • I can understand the autonomous part, but the overall design of the robovan is still stupid. A standard bus frame with some design changes to allow it to accommodate autonomous driving tech feels like a much better approach, plus it'll cheaper to create since the vehicle itself is already designed and proven in the real world. It's like those automated LRT train lines, they don't look much different from an ordinary LRT line because it turns out there is no need to waste tons of money making a brand new des

        • See, I agree that in theory costs could go down dramatically. In practice I can only see Tesla scooping up all the extra money and transportation ending up being more expensive than ever, but also more inconvienient. I would love to be proved wrong though.

        • You're putting a lot of faith into an unproven idea there. First of all, let's look at Tesla as a whole, their cars are the epitome of over-promise under-deliver. They STILL can't figure out how weather seals work on models that have been in production for several years.

          They want absolute control over every piece of their cars, from the sale to the maintenance and the warranty. They want payments up front for sight unseen 2nd hand vehicles where you have to trust that they won't ship you something wors
      • You left out the fact outside of large cities, most locations refuse to fund public transport in the first place and any government program is perceived as some form of communist oppression or tyranny.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by havana9 ( 101033 )
        To add this there are a lot of driverless public transport systems in operation. Most of them have the logic of a complex elevator. A lot of underground lines, have a semiautomatic drive mode even there's a conductor.
        Now what I could be made and I think it's easier to design, is to have smart tramways that are segregated from other traffic. Trams have also the big advantage that they don't require batteries to operate. By the way Skoda [youtube.com] is testing an autonomous tram system. There are a lot of things that h

  • I sense the dark maga in the styling of those vehicles.

    • I sense the same silly, childish design philosophy Leon cribbed from Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone when he made the cybertruck.

      Take a run of the mill Tesla chassis, bolt on some stainless steel panels, don't ask any questions about why nobody does that or what'll happen when you get in a crash.

    • The event was supposed to be based on I-robot - maybe the designs too. Which was an interesting choice because I thought that movie was an incredibly bland envisioning of the future and also one of the most plothole filled movies I've seen recently.

  • Maybe it's just the cult I'm way over my head in at this point, but these new products look amazing. I certainly would never characterize them as phugly boondoggles that only a volunteer auto-lobotomy patient could enjoy.
    • I'll drink this kool-aid, cheers!

  • * Cybercab idea seems like a decent idea but it will need heavy initial investment, assuming it actually gets regulatory approval.
    * Robovan seems to still be in the idea stage.
    * Optimus will remain a plaything for the rich until they start making it more capable which requires a lot more R&D time.

    • Cybercab is silly, he's too far behind Waymo to catch up.

      A Tesla van would be fine if he could get the cost down, but he can't. He's been doing absolutely nothing to improve his tech for over 5 years now.

      His robotics division isn't even a joke, it doesn't exist. He's just making it up.

      This is all silly hype and nothing else. He's getting ready to try and take that $55bn dollar pay package again and he's pumping the stock. That's what the Cybertruck was, but then that lawsuit completely screwed u

  • Van and Cab - seem like great ideas and Tesla self-driving already beats out most driving by cabs I've been in over time.

    I really like the model where just anyone can buy one and have them start servicing an area. The one thing I wonder is how often cleaning these things will be a problem, but then I guess that brings you to:

    Optimus: If this can really do basic chore stuff like cleaning I really think it would have huge amounts of traction. Soemthing like this is badly, badly needed to take care of an ag

  • no steering wheel or pedals and low cost = owner doing hard time when that thing kills some one.
    And that owner may be like an amazon dps owner lots of liability but no real control.

  • put the Robovan in the las vegas loop

    • Have you seen what the ground clearance looks like on that thing? I don't know if they added a skirt to it or what, but it looks to me like it can't handle gradient change (which exists in the Vegas loop). I'm not sure how that thing can handle speed bumps.

  • If Musk says 2027, given his track record... I'll put money down on 2035 at the earliest. Although I'm betting the inductive charging is never going to happen, this will end up being a plug-in vehicle like the rest.

    For the Robovan... given Musk's past non-Tesla vehicle announcements, I'm betting 4-5 years from now this "van" will have morphed into just another Tesla car model that holds 4-5 people. And all the fanbois here will claim "you are mistaken - it was never anything but a Tesla car model".

    Optimus..

  • I came in with low expectations (Score:4, Insightful)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Friday October 11, 2024 @12:29AM (#64855911)

    He failed to meet them.

    The trouble with the Cybercab is it needs unsupervised self driving. So I expected he'd do what Cruise and Waymo are doing, LIDAR and a carefully mapped section of a city and build from there. Instead it was a (hardcoded) demo on a studio lot. Instead it's going to be vision only and NNs top-to-bottom, so it will work in only a year for the next 30 years.

    The Robovan, also autonomous. So again, not happening.

    And then the Optimus, a robot that can currently walk slowly and awkwardly, and carrying out some dance moves that involve not moving its feet, is going to become a generalized personal servant.

    Here's a question, if the Optimus is so close to being a domestic servant then why is Musk giving the Cybercab lossy inductive charging? Why not have a robotic charger that can automatically plug in the car?

    And if the Cybercab is going to be under $30k then why can't he make a regular EV for under $30k?

    The only part of the show I can see being an actual product line in the next decade is the the inductive charging. But except for people with enough solar and home battery storage that the power is basically free (or they don't care about the cost) I'm not sure that's useful.

    • The reason Tesla will not build a regular EV below 30k, is for the same reason Apple will not release an iPhone below $400. There are just too many customers buying their more expensive products, there really is no need to go lower.

  • the SEC should investigate. Tesla has none of this tech. There nowhere's near ready for self driving cars unless they're gonna license waymo/google's tech and they're not getting that down to $30k. And their robot tech is roughly on par with the stuff Toyota was doing in the 90s.

    We all know he's lying to us, why do we let him do this?
  • What do we all want? A cheap efficient compact electric car. What did we get? A "Cybercab" that won't see the light of day for at least 3 years, and maybe never. Same with the "Robovan," which Musk strangely and repeatedly pronounced, "Rubavin." His humanoid robots still seem a decade behind the stuff from Boston Dynamics and other dedicated robot companies. Also, why was all this shown to us in the dark? Does Elon have something to hide? Anyone else feel this event demonstrated a company going nowhere?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shilly ( 142940 )

      It is really sad to see this shite, instead of a Model 2 that would actually have been compelling for Europe and SE Asia, and possibly could even have made smaller cars more alluring for US consumers after years of bigger being better. Instead, we got all this shite. It's absurd. It screams of a man who has lost his way, in every sense (because let's face it, Tesla's strategy is set by him, soup to nuts)

    • What do we all want? A cheap efficient compact electric car.

      Most auto manufacturers have dropped their low-end compact cars from the US market. They just don't sell well here, often because car buyers with a constrained budget are more likely to be shopping used rather than new in the first place.

  • When will this Optimus be good enough to go to office/work and do what my boss says.. ? I mean what my boss's optimus says

  • The car and van are probably a bust, new car internals being so finicky. The van looks cool, simple though. A bit like a poison toad, to be honest. Either one looks a little unfinished without the KITT Bar, but the robotaxi looks like it's actually unpainted. It looks like they made a car out of Gort. (The day the Earth stood still). I hope the Optimus bot is properly priced. Are they going to profit-boost the machine by spying on the users? Just like they did with Alexa? I don't know how they intend to get
  • ... on a 1) one-way road, 2) that he built, 3) where the only other cars are Teslas [jalopnik.com]

    Normal people figured out long ago that Elon Musk isn't a real-life Tony Stark, he's a real-life Lyle Lanley [nocookie.net]

    Any article title that starts with the words "Elon Musk" should only contain variations of the words "worthless" and "fraud"

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