Electric car maker Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk unveiled new details on Tuesday about a long-awaited autonomous passenger transportation service, allowing passengers to summon supposedly autonomous vehicles via an Uber-like service.
During the company's first-quarter earnings presentation on April 23, the company gave a preview of what the passenger transportation app could look like, showing that a passenger could summon a vehicle, set the temperature inside the car, track its location and decide what music to play.
Tesla has long teased a massive deployment of robotics. In 2019. Musk expressed "a very high degree of confidence" that Tesla would begin operating robotics by 2020, but this did not materialize.
The program would allow a Tesla owner to rent a vehicle for rides, with Tesla cutting out the revenue and the rest going to the vehicle's owner - each car was projected to generate $30,000 in gross profit per car per year.
During a recent earnings call, Musk explained that the program would work more like a "combination of Airbnb and Uber," in which Tesla would operate the main fleet, but the number of cars would be owned by the end user.
"That end user can add or subtract their car to the fleet whenever they want, and they can decide if they want the car to be used only by friends and family, or only by five-star users, or by anyone," Musk said .
"At any time they can have the car come back to them and be exclusively theirs, like Airbnb," he added.
