Inflating Tesla’s Self-Driving Capabilities: Musk, Tesla, and the BYD: Trade Barriers for Electrified Vehicles
Musk said on X that he will reveal a long-promised car on August 8th. The forthcoming autonomous vehicle is said to be built on Tesla’s next-generation vehicle platform.
For years, Musk has been promising an affordable electric vehicle, likely priced at $25,000, as a way to broaden the appeal of plug-in vehicles. He said in an interview last year that a $25,000 car was something we could do. Then, in 2020, at the company’s first Battery Day event, he speculated that Tesla could eventually produce upward of 20 million of these vehicles in a year — or roughly twice the current production of Toyota, GM, or Volkswagen.
This would be the so-called “Tesla Network,” as described in Musk’s Master Plan Part Deux. “You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app,” he wrote, “and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost.”
Those plans became even grander several years later. In the middle of next year, Musk said that he will have over a millionTesla cars on the road with Full Self-Driving hardware. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature would be so reliable the driver could “go to sleep,” he added. (Teslas with the company’s FSD software are not autonomous, and drivers would be well advised not to sleep in their cars.)
But critics argue that he inflates the capabilities of the technology, often with deadly results. Dozens of deaths have been linked to crashes involving the use of Autopilot and the use of FSD. The company is facing wrongful death lawsuits. The company issued a major recall and the US government is investigating their self-driving claims. Even the robot is flawed.
While Tesla spent years developing the expensive, polarizing Cybertruck, the company lost its place as the world’s top producer of electrified vehicles to China’s BYD. The company said it produced 3.02 million EVs in 2023, compared to Tesla’s 1.81 million cars.
Musk said that if there were not trade barriers, they would demolish most other car companies in the world. They are very good.