00:00 Speaker A
Tesla planning to roll out its hotly anticipated robo taxi this week. Here with what you need to know. We’ve got our senior auto reporter Pros Subramanian. Pros, what can people expect?
00:09 Pras Subramanian
Well, you know, it’s going to be this is a huge week for the company, right? This is the finally that they’re beginning their unsupervised testing of robo taxis, meaning there’s going to be no driver sitting in the in the driver’s seat. Just be totally empty car. Uh, about 10 or 20 cars are still to start off within in Austin, according to Musk and the company. Um, you’ll likely use a Tesla app to summon these vehicles as they’ve they’ve shown before with different mock-ups. Um, they perhaps model wise or first, maybe some Model 3s. We’ll see what vehicles they end up using. Um, but interestingly enough, the safety, there’ll be human tele operators that will be kind of monitoring things and will have to jump in in case a car is stuck somewhere or something happens to that effect where they can actually have a solution to a problem relatively quickly. So this is a big deal for them. We’ve seen a lot of the bullish analysts talk about this is the next step for unlocking the key trillion dollars in value with autonomous and physical AI and things like that. So, uh, yeah, big week for them, but you know, a lot going on in Tesla world with Musk and Trump and all that stuff. That’s also happening in the background. So I think a lot of investors want to focus on this and hopefully that goes well. But the 12th is the date, the tentative date, but you never know with Tesla, you never know if they might push that back. So we’ll see.
00:58 Speaker A
Yeah, talk to me about the sort of totality of catalysts impacting Tesla investors right now. Like can this event outweigh any of those negative headlines about the feud between Musk and and the president?
01:12 Pras Subramanian
Yeah, I think if if Tesla is able to sort of cleave itself from Musk and and show that we are this we are not just a car maker, we are also a technology provider and we’re going to advance in space. And you know, we were talking earlier about about Waymo, they’re they’re by far away the leaders in space right now, like 230,000 trips a week, autonomous vehicles already doing their thing in Austin and LA and places like that. So, you know, they have a lot of catch up a lot of catching up to do. But if they can do that, maybe they can actually just change the story a little bit and maybe Musk will be more focused on that too.
