I imagine how this sentence could have floated through the conference room one day when Tesla execs were discussing the next-generation platform that is supposed to fulfill the dual needs of a manually operated $25,000 car and a robotaxi: “How do we make the manually operated vehicle just as safe as the automated one?”
It will be a two-seater, based purely on hardware utilization statistics, as +80% of all rides will be one person., “When we commute to and from work, there are only 1.08 occupants in the car on average, and across all car journeys there are only just over 1.4 occupants in each car. This means that approximately 14 million empty seats drive around Denmark every day.” With a Danish population of 6 million, that’s over 2 empty seats per person! Delete second row….
What do I mean by Virtual Human Driving? That sounds ridiculous if not plain dumb. I know, I had to think about it a lot to muster the courage to write it here, but once I realized what the idea comprised, I had to. Stay with me, even if you might waste a few minutes of your life.If you have ever tried a driving simulator video game , with a real steering wheel and real pedals , and maybe even a real shift stick, you will have a better idea of what I am about to describe.
The driver slams the accelerator pedal from a green light. The car accelerates as hard as possible, but only to the speed limit.The driver falls asleep. The car finds the first safe place to park, or drives to the destination if one was set. We now know from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk that the Tesla team managed to persuade him to develop the next-generation vehicle in both manual and automated configuration. Elon explicitly stated that he did not want an ordinary car that could be changed into a robotaxi, he wanted it to be two different vehicles. But maybe he decided it was okay in reverse order? That means to have a dedicated robotaxi that could be changed into a manually operated car.