Welcome to ElectroFied, it's your host, Dylan Lumis. Apologies if my voice is a little off today, dealing with a little bug, but was not going to stop me from making a video today as we have Tesla 99T sharing the first video of a robot taxi without a safety monitor in Austin. Meaning unsupervised customer paid rides are officially live in Austin. Oh, so long real. And yes, these were paid rides. Here's the proof. He shared the screenshot paying $2.22 for one ride in $3.07 for the other.
And we have many Tesla engineers sharing the news. A show said robot taxi rides without any safety monitors are now publicly available in Austin. Starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with a broader robot taxi fleet with safety monitors and the ratio will increase over time. Joe Tettmire shared a video of his first unsupervised robot taxi ride. And I do think it's important to point out that at least for now, these unsupervised vehicles do have chase Tesla vehicles.
And as Joe's vehicle pulled into the parking lot, the chase vehicle just kind of hung back just to make sure everything's going smoothly to validate the new operation. So maybe another two to three weeks of these chase cars just to take that extra step of safety precaution. You know, so they've got a lot of experience and a lot of data for this area of the town as well. So I think that may be one of the reasons why at least for today, the unsupervised vehicles are kind of concentrated here in this part of the site.
So great to see again just how this is continuing to progress. So what I'm going to do now, I think, is I'm going to try to change my routing and go back to where I started from so I can continue with this robot taxi. So there'll be a break here for a moment and then I'll resume in a second. Okay, well, I tried to re-root back to where I started. I was not able to at least at this stage of the robot taxi. So it's not clear exactly why Joe was not able to adjust his destination in this unsupervised ride, but something to note.
And it may be the case that these few unsupervised vehicles do have a more limited operational domain rather than the entire geofence in Austin. I've not yet seen anything about limitations on choosing destinations, but it's likely that you may only get one of these unsupervised rides if you're in a specific part of the geofence, which right now might be limited to South Austin where Tesla launched the service initially and has the most data.
I also think it's worth pointing out that the first person to break this news is indeed an X Tesla AI engineer. Due to that, what you will, it's not like he works there anymore, but I thought it was worth pointing out. But clearly, as we just saw Joe Tetmire Godin unsupervised paid ride and he does not work for Tesla now or in the past. No, I mean the passenger seat. I mean the passenger seat now. It's a different car.
This is a ride one. And what is interesting that you can't control the steering wheel. Yeah, it's now protected, though, but you can now control it. Yeah, so I'm pretty sure that this robot taxi can fit at least three people if not four. I'm not sure if it's allowed to see the gear actually. Yeah, it's so poor. Cool. So the steering wheel is locked for manual input and you are able to sit in the passenger seat.
And if you continually mess with the wheel and alert pops up and it appears to say that if you keep doing it, the vehicle will pull over. Joe Tetmire said his first trip was $4.31 for a 3.31 mile trip, which is exactly the same formula as before. Meaning at least with this data point, the robot taxi pricing model is no different with the safety monitor removed, which if that holds up would confirm what we've been saying here for months, that Tesla is likely to build this pricing algorithm without the safety monitor.
And they would just eat the salaries they're paying to the safety monitor for as long as they need to, but they're not going to build that into the model because long term, the plan is to not have monitors. And that's also why I said I was not expecting Tesla to offer lower rates when the supervisor was removed, one because they're already undercutting the competition significantly so they just don't need to and two because I was already expecting the pricing algorithm had the safety monitors removed.
Joe did share this screenshot. You have the option to leave a tip $0.69 for $1.20 or other, but as we've seen in the past, sometimes if you try to leave a tip, you'll just get the hedgehog notification and you're not actually able to. So it still might be Tesla just poking fun at other companies that are looking for tips for everything. And Elon shared it saying just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car, congrats to the AI team.
Joe确实分享了这个截图。你可以选择给 $1.20 留下 $0.69 或其他金额的小费,但正如我们过去所见,有时如果你尝试留下小费,你只会收到刺猬通知,实际上无法成功。所以,这可能仍然是特斯拉在拿那些对每件事都寻求小费的其他公司开玩笑。Elon 分享时还提到,相继在奥斯汀启动了没有安全监控员的特斯拉自动驾驶出租车,祝贺 AI 团队。
If you're interested in solving real world AI, which is likely to lead to AGI, IMO, join Tesla AI, solving real world AI for Optimus will be 100 times harder than cars. And I do think that's a line we should be repeating to ourselves as we set our expectations for the next few years. Remember how Morgan Stanley got a new Tesla stock analyst since Adam Jonas moved into a new AI centric role? Well, I think it shows with their update today. Andrew started off strong saying Tesla's removal of the safety driver in Austin marks a pivotal moment in proving out its vision only approach to autonomy. The scaling of a passive optical only AV system would seriously challenge the conventional thinking of many in the Robotaxi community.
And then it falls apart. We expect Tesla to make significant progress this year with a thousand Robotaxis on road by year end scaling to 30,000 by the end of the decade and 5 million by 2040. Now, yes, I'm on record saying I was overzealous with my Robotaxi estimates when the service launched. But if Tesla doesn't have significantly more than a thousand Robotaxis on the road by the end of the year, I will gladly come out and say something is not going right. And I think the same thing could be said about his prediction for 30,000 by the end of the decade.
I'd also be comfortable saying if Tesla can't average 8,000 Robotaxis each year for the next four years, then something is wrong. And for those counting, it was exactly seven months from the launch of the Robotaxi service in Austin to this first unsupervised paid customer ride. So for me, that will be the timeline to beat for each new launch in a new city. So this really is historic. Wemo may have beat Tesla to the punch, but Tesla pulled it off with cameras only. And outside of some GPS hardware to communicate with the remote operators, as we know, anyone can go buy this vehicle and own it themselves.
The capabilities are exactly the same, the camera suite is the same, it's just a matter of regulations and Tesla unlocking unsupervised. So of course, we'll watch how quickly Tesla adds unsupervised Robotaxis to the mix and how soon the Bay Area follows suit. But today, I hope everyone can sit back and take it in and celebrate this moment. Many of us have waited years for this. And I really can't even imagine what it's like for the AI team to watch their work manifest in the real world like this. And to everybody who said Tesla would never pull it off, I'd simply say don't doubt Elon.
As we've seen time and time again, he makes the impossible merely late. And if you thought the clip we shared of Devon the other day was a fluke, well here's one more to say that it's not. Elon gave an interview today at the World Economic Forum, which I found to be interesting. But not just because of what Elon said, but what he said about the WEF in the past. He said it's increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don't want. In the past, he said I was invited to WEF, but declined.
He said by misinformation, WEF means anything that conflicts with its agenda. He said it would be great if someone could compile a game contest of who said the craziest stuff between 4chan and WEF my money is on the latter. And one more, there are some really funny WEF parody accounts, although it's legit hard to tell WEF truth from WEF parody sometimes. There was not a ton of new information here, it was a lot of repeated themes like the cost of AI continually declining quickly, nearly monthly at this point. The limiting factor really is energy.
Elon said it'll likely be the case that we'll be producing more chips than we can actually turn on thanks to those electricity bottlenecks by later this year. One new thing we did learn is that Tesla and SpaceX are both now focused on building large scale solar. Elon said they're both working separately to build 100 gigawatts per year of solar in the US, and the way Elon phrased it, he did make it sound like that would be 100 gigawatts for both Tesla and SpaceX. Elon seems to think it'll take around 3 years for the companies to get there.
And just to give you a sense of scale here, Tesla in its lifetime has likely deployed less than 10 gigawatts of solar. The last time Tesla broke out, its solar deployments on a quarterly call was back in 2023, and at the time they were doing like 50 megawatts per quarter. And it's actually likely that Tesla has deployed less than 5 gigawatts of solar in its lifetime. So even if that 100 gigawatts number Elon talked about was combined for Tesla and SpaceX, that would still be 50 gigawatts for Tesla, which is likely to be an order of magnitude more than Tesla has deployed in its lifetime.
And now, Elon's talking about Tesla building that much every year. So maybe Tesla has seen an uptick in demand with a new lease offering with a new Tesla solar panel, but I think the safer assumption would be that both of these companies are going to be scaling up for these AI data centers in space. That's because also in this interview, Elon said that the lowest cost place to deploy AI in about 2-3 years will be space. And given Elon is talking about a 3-year timeline to build up to that 100 gigawatt number of solar, this announcement is likely Tesla and SpaceX gearing up for that endeavor. And I'm sure Buffalo will love to hear this announcement as that's where Tesla is making and assembling its solar panels.
And Elon did say the importation of solar cells is very expensive due to tariffs, but production domestically can and will be done. And this is actually a very important point because really to date, Tesla has been importing the cells from other places around the world and then just assembling them into solar panels in New York. It's always been very unclear to what level and to what degree Tesla solar is probably the most opaque division that it has, but very clearly today, Elon is talking about specifically producing the cells domestically.
So this is likely a shift not just in scale, but also when it comes to the level of vertical integration as well. Elon said humanoid will advance quickly, Optimus is doing simple tasks in the factory now, and probably later this year will be doing more complex tasks. But they will still at that point be deployed in an industrial environment. And then he said probably by the end of next year, Tesla will be selling Optimus to the public. Elon said he's confident that Optimus will have high reliability and safety and range of functionality at that point, meaning you would be able to ask it to do anything you'd like.
I will continue to say I have my doubts about that timeline. I won't be surprised if we don't see Optimus in a home setting until closer to 2030 because at that point with children and pets and security risks and fire risks, the reliability is going to have to be near perfect. And maybe more importantly, Tesla will have zero problem selling Optimus in an industrial setting really for the next decade plus. So Tesla should not be in any rush to sell Optimus to the home, although we all want it. It is going to be a safer path to keep it in an industrial setting for as long as it takes to work out the kinks.
And ultimately to develop all of these generalized capabilities. And Elon did say self-driving is a solved problem at this point. We have heard that before. And he said Tesla's robot taxi service should be very widespread by the end of this year in the US. Tesla is hoping to get supervised approval in Europe next month and China on a similar timeline. I'll have the full interview linked below. ARK Invest put out its big ideas report for 2026.
But parts of this report that pertain to the channel we've already covered in months past. Like the one where ARK is predicting that Optimus will be 200,000 times harder to scale than a robot taxi. Many of you will remember this chart, but it really is somewhat in line with what Elon just said that Optimus is going to be 100 times harder than robot taxi. On the robot taxi front we already highlighted in Pierre's report how Waymo is really stuck at about 15 to 20% market share in San Francisco. It has certainly taken some market share from Lyft, but Uber has remained relatively steady with the majority of the market.
And the discrepancy between these two charts on the right is perfect. Most Tesla skeptics will focus on the chart to the left, saying that Waymo, Baidu, Pony AI, and We Ride have all done more actual robot taxi miles than Tesla. But the Tesla Bulls will look at the chart on the right, which is cumulative autonomous miles, where Tesla is dwarfing every other company. Tesla will be eclipsing 8 billion autonomous miles in the next few months, and no other company is even sniffing 1 billion. And hopefully this is the year where this chart on the right starts to filter over to this chart on the left.
On this chart, Ark shows how Tesla's refreshed Model Y is about 35% more affordable when it comes to incremental cost per mile, and the bars are broken down by each different part of the business. And specifically that's 35% cheaper than Waymo's fifth generation vehicle, which is the Jaguar I-Pace, not the new OHI. And then on the right we have at scale by 2030, Waymo's Gen 6, which is the OHI compared to the CyberCab, where Ark is expecting the CyberCab to be 50% cheaper than the Waymo.
And they're expecting Tesla to be in the neighborhood of 20 cents per mile. And Elon responded to that data saying, probably true. Personally, I have some doubts that Tesla could maintain profitability at a cost per mile that low. So if in the future you want me to do a section on why I have those doubts, I'm happy to do it, but usually I hesitate because there's so many other people in the Tesla space already doing in depth modeling. I really tried to avoid being redundant, but if you'd want to see something like that, just let me know. I will have the full report linked below.
On LinkedIn, we have Copia Power saying that Mericopa Energy in Arizona has now installed 594 Tesla Megapax, representing one of the biggest Megapax deployments to date. This is a 550 megawatt solar project paired with 2,200 megawatt hours of battery storage. The project is still under construction, but the word is it should be operational toward the end of this year.
在 LinkedIn 上,Copia Power 表示,位于亚利桑那州的 Mericopa Energy 现已安装了 594 个特斯拉 Megapack,这代表了迄今为止最大的 Megapack 部署之一。这是一个 550 兆瓦的太阳能项目,配备了 2200 兆瓦时的电池储能系统。该项目仍在建设中,但消息称,它预计将在今年年底投入运营。
Tesla has now expanded the FSD demo drives across the EU now to Spain as well as Finland. Both are currently booking rides through the end of Q1. Heinrich Zane shared a new video of what we believe to be the latest updated edition of the Tesla semi. The code name for the new semi is Atlas, kind of like the new model Y was called Juniper. So this is only one of two atlas semis and I think that the atlas is the perfect name because the atlas can carry the freight of the world on its shoulders.
So this has no fairing. This is what the Tesla semi looks like with no fairing. Another thing I'd like to talk about is complete speculation, but this atlas refreshed semi appears to be slightly shorter and maybe even less tall than the original semi. And again, it's hard, but there's the regular, there's the old version of the Tesla semi. Now we have to go back into the archives to figure out what's going on with the flat top.
Assi Robinson replied to that saying there are two types, long haul and short haul, and then Dan priestly chimed in saying the roof height variance is independent range variance. The one in the video is a long range semi just with a shorter roof meant for lower profile trailers like flat beds, drop decks, tankers, etc. Better arrow for those setups. Also easier to transport truck to and from test sites. So what that means is the difference in roof height does not dictate whether it's long haul or short haul. That's what Dan meant by saying it's independent of range variance.
So the real difference for the shorter roof is for different use cases and it's easier to transport. And as you saw in Zangler's video, it looks like that truck with the shorter roof is being prepared for transport. And this is the year the Tesla semi enters production, so hopefully we get an update on all of this on the Q4 call next week. And I know these angles can play all kinds of tricks on our brains when it comes to sizing, but it does look like that one with the shorter roof is indeed a bit smaller and shorter.
So it is true that there will be different versions of the semi, a long haul and a short haul, but the difference in roof type is not going to be the giveaway for which is which. Tesla Europe in Middle East said the first Cybertruck deliveries have finally started in the UAE and it really does just look and feel like the Cybertruck belongs in the UAE.
And today the drive just reported that a small team in a 2024 Model S just completed a trip from Los Angeles to New York City and what they're calling the first zero intervention FSD Cannonball run. After multiple detours resulting from both human error and winter weather, the Model S completed the 3,081 mile trip entirely without human intervention. It took 58 hours and 22 minutes at an average speed of 64 miles per hour.
The car was on hardware 4 with FSD 14.2.2.3 and the team spent 10 hours and 11 minutes of the trip waiting for the car to charge. So that's about 17% of the time for the trip charging. And we know David Moss did something similar going from LA to Myrtle Beach, but that's not the trip that Elon talked about. He did say LA to New York. Remember back in 2017 as we shared when David Moss pulled off his feet.
And just like David, Alex and his team were fully hands off for the entirety of the trip including charging stops. The article did say there was only one disengagement the entire trip and Alex said it was his fault he accidentally touched the wheel but they said in the article that Alex is no Tesla loyalist. And Alex said craziest events in the snow but FSD did it. Holy smokes Roy said in one update snow performance and recovery is unreal. The video will be crazy.
And Alex said on X in the middle of winter through extreme cold snow ice slush and rain FSD drove 100% of the 3,081 miles of our journey. Elon was right once an autonomous vehicle is mature most human input is an error. A comedy of human errors added hours and hundreds of miles but FSD stunned us with its consistent and comfortable behavior. So these are certainly big achievements now but soon enough these will just be par for the course.
Waymo said starting today it's welcoming the first public riders into their fully autonomous ride healing service in Miami. With nearly 10,000 residents already signed up we will be inviting new riders on a rolling basis. They're starting with a 60 square mile service area.
It's looking more and more like SpaceX will IPO via the traditional route. Today we learned SpaceX has lined up four banks to lead its IPO. Those being bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley.
Nick said Elon has essentially confirmed SpaceX is going public this year and will use the funds to build solar powered AI satellites scaling to hundreds of terawatts in three years. And hopefully even without Elon's response here the alarm bells would be going off that is not at all what Elon said hundreds of terawatts is obviously a long long term play.
It was the 100 gigawatts of solar annually for Tesla in SpaceX that he's expecting in three years. But luckily Elon corrected it saying no the probable case meaning a 50th percental guess is reaching an annualized rate of 100 gigawatts per year of space AI satellites launched from Earth in three to four years.
100 terawatts per year requires manufacturing satellites on the moon at massive scale that are shot into deep space with a mass driver which is 10 plus years away. It's worth noting the average US electricity consumption is only 0.5 terawatts so that would mean launching 200 times the current electricity output of Earth.
And I have officially used up all of my energy and vocal strength for the day. Tesla stock closed the day at $449.36 up 4.15% while the NDX was up 0.76%. The volume came in effectively right on the average.
So again hopefully you all can celebrate this incredible milestone for Tesla and another successful coast to coast FSD intervention free drive. Hope you have a wonderful day and a huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters.