Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a social media post on X that the company will launch a driverless taxi (robotaxi) product on August 8. The upcoming autonomous car is said to be built on Tesla's next-generation car platform.

After the news was announced, Tesla's stock price rose more than 3% after the market. By Friday's close, Tesla's stock price had fallen 34% this year.

Reuters reported earlier on Friday that Tesla has cancelled plans to launch low-cost cars and is shifting more resources to trying to bring autonomous taxis to the market. Musk responded that “Reuters is lying,” but did not provide specific details.

Earlier, Musk stated many times that his long-term vision is to provide affordable electric cars to the public. This low-cost model is expected to be highly anticipated by the market. The price is expected to be around 25,000 US dollars, and it is expected to become the next popular model to drive Tesla's growth.

Musk then said on X: “Tesla driverless taxis will be unveiled on August 8.” He seems to have confirmed some reports that Tesla's next product launch will focus on self-driving taxis.

Tesla has promised true autonomous driving technology for years, but it hasn't been fulfilled.

In 2015, Musk told shareholders that Tesla's cars would be “fully autonomous” within three years.

In 2016, he said Tesla would be able to drive one of these cars off-road before the end of the following year without any human intervention.

In 2019, Musk told a house full of investors that by next year, the automaker would “have more than 1 million Tesla cars equipped with fully automated driving hardware on the road.” But that didn't happen.

Analysts said that due to the complexity of related technology, the world's largest electric vehicle manufacturer is paying more attention to driverless taxis while also facing greater risks.

Philip Koopman (Philip Koopman), an autonomous vehicle safety professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said, “Everyone else found that they thought it would take two or three years, but the result was a project that took 10 or 20 years.” “Tesla discovered this too.”

The development of autonomous vehicles is not going well. In a recent example, autonomous driving software company Ghost Autonomy shut down its global operations on Wednesday, citing uncertain profit prospects.

Last fall, General Motors' Cruise (Cruise) autonomous driving division came under regulatory scrutiny because one of the company's cars hit and dragged a pedestrian, causing the company to lay off workers and cut costs by $1 billion. But GM CEO Mary Barra (Mary Barra) said in February that “automation technology has brought huge benefits” and that the company has “extremely valuable assets”

Tesla's autonomous taxi ambitions come at a time when lawsuits and government investigations are facing unprecedented scrutiny, which have weakened the carmaker's aggressive claims about its autopilot and fully automated driver-assistance system capabilities. These systems are designed to assist in steering, braking, and lane changes, and are not considered autonomous systems.

Despite controversy over the government's safety concerns, Tesla agreed in December to recall more than 2 million cars equipped with autopilots and push remote software updates to the system to add more driver alerts, under pressure from US safety regulators.

Some analysts pointed out that Tesla is about to launch Robotaxi, and the biggest motivation comes from significant progress in fully automated FSD. A few days ago, Tesla changed the name of FSD from the test version “FSD Beta” to “FSD Supervised”. Foreign media believe that this means that FSD has finished public testing and has entered large-scale commercialization.

On April 6, Tesla announced that its FSD mileage has exceeded 1 billion miles!