Tesla robotaxis 2020? Be wary of Elon Musk's latest prediction.

Even Elon Musk seems a little skeptical about his promise to get 1 million fully self-propelled Tesla "robotaxis" on the road next year.

The South African born contractor on Tesla's Autonomy Investor Day on Monday made a number with bold demands on what is going on for the electric car company. Musk revealed a new microchip that he claimed would be "objectively" the best in the world, predicting that completely autonomous Teslas could operate without a human driver would be on its way in mid-2020 and said the company wanted a fleet of "Robotaxis" next year.

This is not the first time Musk has predicted that a completely autonomous car was on a one-year horizon for the Tesla ̵[ads1]1; the company made a fairly similar guarantee in October 2016 when Musk said Tesla wanted a vehicle that could make a hands-free, self-driving trip from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017. He did not beat this deadline and there is much skepticism that he will beat his new, including from Musk himself.

"Sometimes I'm not going," he said on Monday, "but I get it done."

Many observers agreed that 1 million Tesla robot axes by 2020 are probably not something to happen. 19659006] "It's totally off-base. There's just no way it's going to happen as it was presented. They're not even close," said Steven Shladover, a retired researcher at the University of California Berkeley, for me.

"To be polite, I think we saw their view of the best scenario. I think that's what they rolled out. And their track record would indicate that the best scenario doesn't always spread as they hope," Lou Whiteman, a contributor to the investment site Motley Fool and a veteran transport reporter.

"The Tesla Network Robotics Plans seemed half baked, and the company also did not seem to have an answer or even considered quite basic questions of pricing, insurance liability or regulatory and legal requirements, "Cowen analyst Jeffrey Osborne said in a note to clients.

That is not to say that a completely autonomous vehicle, including a Tesla, may not be a reality in the end. (It would be level 5 autonomy, which means that the car could operate completely driverless anywhere, under any circumstances.) But the scenario is far away – Shladover told me he thinks decades. is Mercedes, General Motors and Volvo, a partial or level 2. It basically means that the car should steer the steering and speed of a well-marked highway, but it still requires continuous supervision by a driver.

In other words, it is very unlikely that you will see a lot of driverless Tesla taxis on the road, preferably at any time soon.

Musk says that Tesla can be a taxi when you are not in

There are two prongs to Musk's new plan: one, that Tesla will have fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2020; and secondly, that these vehicles will be able to act as a driver's license. (Tesla is not quite there yet on the technology, but Musk says that when the software is finally set for the vehicles, the concept should be ready to go.)

When this robotics system is in place, it will basically happen that Tesla- Owners will be able to turn their cars into a taxi when they do not need them. Then, by using the Tesla ride company, strangers pay to take rides – like Uber or Lyft – but in your fancy electric car. Think about it: You drive to work, turn a switch to put the vehicle into the taxi service, and then go out until you need it back.

Musk says that the prospect can be a lucrative. He predicted robotic taxis could earn owners $ 30,000 a year, even after Tesla takes 25 percent to 35 percent of each rider's fee.

Not all cars will be owned by individual customers. Tesla has recently rolled out a new leasing structure for model 3 where customers can rent a car – but they will not be able to buy it when the rent is up. Tesla said it is planning to use these vehicles in its horseback riding network.

"Even if they were to achieve that, there were questions about revenue and margins, if it were crucial for the parent company," Garrett Nelson, a senior equity analyst at research investment firm CFRA Research, said. "You have to look at the economy of Uber and Lift, and none of these are profitable."

On Monday, Musk said that, given the potential for Tesla's vehicles to be a moneymaker for customers who lend their cars as taxis, would be "financially crazy" to buy something else. "It will be like owning a horse in three years. I mean fine if you want to own a horse, but you should go into it with that expectation," he said.

If Tesla was able to deliver customers $ 30,000 a year at about $ 40,000, it would of course be fantastic. "If it wasn't hard to believe, everyone should go out and buy five of these," Whiteman said. "Forget buying the shares, buy the cars."

To be sure, automated vehicle timelines do not increase a problem exclusive to Tesla, Greg McGuire, director of the MCity Autonomous Vehicle Test Lab at the University of Michigan, said. "If you look at what has been announced in the industry to date and timelines, you can see that there is a lot of infidelity and then reality comes in," he said. "Some companies have announced very aggressive time scales that have prolonged in recent years and shown that it is a very difficult problem."

A Tesla spokesman did not return a request for comment to this story.

The timing of this is interesting

There are several obstacles Tesla and Musk have to come over to make this robot ax dream a reality.

They must perfect the technology, and both they and their competitors seem to have some significant obstacles to cross. As Tim Higgins on Wall Street Journal notes, Waymo, the autonomous car unit owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, has been working on autonomous technology for a decade. It has deployed a robot taxi in Phoenix, but a human operator must still be in the car. And the safety of autonomous vehicles remains in doubt – Tesla's vehicles have been involved in crashes and it also has one operated by Uber.

The PAVE campaign, an automated automotive industry group, in a series of tweets following Musk's comments on Monday warned that the promises of "completely autonomous" and "driverless" vehicles can make people believe their cars have more automatic features than they actually do, thus jeopardizing drivers.

McGuire also pointed out that the industry has not yet defined what is so safe. "How many million miles will we drive before we are comfortable that a machine is at least as safe as a human being? Or does it need to be safer? Does it need to be 10 times more safe? What is our threshold?" He said.

There are also regulatory issues. Musk said on Monday that he did not believe that his robot deal would get regulatory approval everywhere. He said he thinks he'll get it somewhere but he didn't go into details. While it is probably possible that Tesla can win local approval for robotic actions, state and potential federal regulators may be smaller games.

The time of Tesla's investor's independence day is "curious," Nelson says, because it lands just before the company's earnings reports, set to Wednesday, where it is expected to report a loss. "This can be a way to increase interest in history, given the difficult results we expect to report on Wednesday," he said. "There is no reason why they could not have kept this until after earnings."

Tesla may have hoped to distract from his other problems – the pressure on margins, cash burns and governance, shake-up etc. – with the announcement that completely autonomous cars are just a year away. But it looks like Musk, who often promises things he can't finally deliver, at least in the timeline he promises, didn't spit the path. Case in point: Tesla's share price fell by almost 4 percent on Monday.

"We're about to tell the story that people don't believe in him anymore," Nelson said.