The CEO of Lucid air, Peter Rawlinson, said in an interview with Reuters, that fleets of completely automated robotaxi cars are no further than 10 years away. This is coming from the man who used to be the vice president of Tesla’s engineering department so he might know a thing or two more about the topic than we do.
“I think we’re 10 years out before we see fleets of robotaxis,” he told Reuters. “They ain’t coming anytime soon even with the most advanced sensing systems in the world. There is a mountain to climb – an intellectual mountain to climb in terms of software.”
This, of course, goes against what Elon Musk and Tesla have been saying in recent years. Back in 2019, Musk said that completely autonomous Tesla models would be operational in 2020 but we’re yet to see that happening. Furthermore, the vast majority of car makers are saying that this is a tough nut to crack anyway and we won’t see completely autonomous models that are completely safe driving on their own on public roads anytime soon.
Everyone seems to be engaged in some kind of race against the clock to get to this modern-day Holy Grail right now. Self-driving cars are seen as the next big thing, coincidentally the same one that could eventually lead to the demise of personal transportation as we know it today.
However, whoever gets to the finish line first will be able to sell the technology to interested third-party vendors and make a lot of money in the process. Automated taxis could be a business worth billions in the future, with minimal investments. Lucid is also investing in this tech and already has a comprehensive suite of self-driving assistants dubbed DreamDrive. It’s a Level 2 system, just like any other out there right now, but it does include 14 cameras, five radar units and a LiDAR, as it should.
