Tesla Robotaxi event: How to watch the unveiling on Thursday

Tesla loves to put on a show, and Thursday’s unveiling of Robotaxi might be the flashiest of all.

The electric vehicle maker is expected to unveil its much-hyped robotaxi vehicle at the Warner Bros. Discovery film studio in Burbank, California. Doors open for participants at 5:00 p.m. (PT), the speech begins at 7:00 p.m. (PT).

In usual Tesla fashion, we expect the company to stream the event live on its YouTube page and on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and owned by Elon Musk. We’ll add an embed here when Tesla releases it.

Musk first announced the Robotaxi event in April, setting the unveiling date for August 8 – a date that Tesla had to postpone due to “an important front design change.”

The unveiling of Robotaxi apparently came at the expense of a $25,000 next-generation electric car that Musk had also promised. A few weeks after Musk announced the Robotaxi event, he cut more than 10% of Tesla’s workforce and said the automaker would “do anything for autonomy.”

Musk has been promising autonomous capabilities in Tesla vehicles for years. The company’s advanced driver assistance system is rather brazenly called “Full Self-Driving” (FSD), although it doesn’t drive fully autonomously and requires a human driver to pay attention and take over when necessary – a fact that is reaffirmed and reinstated Drive-along videos that fans regularly post on social media.

When Musk first floated the idea of ​​robotaxis in 2019, the idea was that some existing Teslas could function as autonomous robotaxis only with software updates, potentially opening up the opportunity for Tesla owners to make money from their cars, if you don’t drive them. This plan, which was supposed to put millions of robotaxis on the road by 2020, was never implemented. At the time, Musk said Tesla would deploy its own fleet of robotaxis in places where there aren’t enough people sharing their cars.

We’re guessing this unveiling – taking place in a Hollywood studio – is less about the autonomous technology and more about the vehicle itself. Musk has said he wants to build a robotaxi without a steering wheel or pedals, and images of the vehicle included in Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography published in 2023 show a two-door, two-seater compact vehicle inspired by the Cybertruck.

Whatever the event brings, TechCrunch will be following it live and bringing you breaking news, so stay tuned.

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