Self-driving car experts fear Elon Musk is shirking public safety in an effort to boost Tesla’s stock and sell more of the company’s electric cars.
SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects to start converting the company’s electric cars into fully self-driving vehicles next year as part of an audacious plan to create a network of robotic taxis to compete against Uber and other ride-hailing services.
To prove his skeptics wrong, Musk will have to persuade regulators that Tesla’s technology for transforming potentially hundreds of thousands of electric cars into self-driving vehicles will produce robots that are safer and more reliable than humans. Musk trashed Lidar as a “fool’s errand” and “frigging stupid” in a putdown of companies such as Google spin-off Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise Automation that are including the light beam sensors in their systems.
Musk’s quasi-sales pitch came two days before Tesla is expected to report a disappointing performance for the first three months of the year. Analysts polled by FactSet predict a $305.5 million first quarter net loss based on disappointing car sales, a setback after Musk pledged heading into the second half of last year that Tesla would be profitable from that point onward.
“People will die,” Rajkumar predicted. “I can tell you that right now. Because in the real world, crazy things happen.” If they’re allowed on the roads, fully driverless cars would allow Musk to carry out his plan to expand into the ride-hailing market with a fleet of sleek Teslas. Owners of Teslas with the company’s self-driving computer could plug into an app-based network to pick up fare-paying passengers when they didn’t need to use their vehicle.
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