The Robotaxi Problem That's Making Owners Reconsider Their Cars

Hello, welcome back to another Behind the Wheel. My name is Rob Greenlee, and this is towards the end of December 2024, and I'm out driving in my Tesla Model 3 Long Range 2022 model and just wanted to just do another update on how I'm doing with my car and FSD. I've got the last version of FSD. I think it's 12.5, and that is the latest update for a vehicle that has the Hardware 3 in it. And have, I've been a subscriber for maybe 4 or 5 months to the Full Self-Driving stack. Am happy with it up to a point. I'm getting a little envious of the 13.0 series that has been released out to the Hardware 4, which is the, the newer cars out there. And I've been thinking a lot about two things. One thing is, what's the path forward? Is it to get a new Tesla, a Hardware 4? Model 3, trade my Model 3 in, of which I've only owned for a little over 2 years, to get a whole new car so I can get the latest FSD package, and that will hopefully be assured to be capable of unsupervised full self-driving at some point, or hold on to this car, wait hopefully for the option to get a hardware update to my Model 3 or the possibility that they will be able to port the 13.0 track to my Model 3 and it have it work as well. My, my gut tells me after being a technologist for many years of my life is that hardware does have a certain amount of obsolescence to it and that you do, if you want to keep getting better, that you are going to need to have a faster processor and greater abilities from a hardware perspective to, to actually keep moving along. Right. So, and I was hoping to have this car able to possibly be part of the Robotaxi fleet, that I could actually put this car on the Robotaxi fleet at some point and have it drive in and out of my garage and earn some income for me as well. But I do wonder if the best path for that, if I want to pursue that, is to trade this car in, get the upgrade here before the end of 2024, if that's even possible now, it may be too late, but to actually get the latest update to the car, I think the, my car payment would actually probably maybe go down compared to what I'm paying now. So that is something that I am contemplating here. I think I'm going to have to make a decision on that by probably tomorrow, or else I may not be able to do that and get all the tax incentives and things like that that are actually a part of this. But that is the key question that I'm wrestling with right now is what's my path forward with my Model 3 and what Tesla's doing right now with the software stack and the direction that they're going with the Robotaxi. And also I'm a shareholder in the company too. I've been a shareholder since 2012. So I've been very much following what Elon Musk has been doing with the company and just making sure that I'm up to date with what is going on. And I do want to keep moving forward. I realize that there's going to have to be probably other investments that I'm going to have to make. In the infrastructure around this car, even as we move into the robo-taxi era, I'm probably going to have to get a different kind of a charging system with the car that maybe is an inductive charger that sits on the floor of my garage. And then I'm going to have to get probably that package that basically allows the garage door to open and close on its own. And I believe that's available now and to be able to back out of the garage and go pick somebody up and take them to wherever they need to go. So that's kind of how I'm thinking about my involvement with the Tesla platform and also eventually getting a couple Optimus robots that maybe I can build a business around and have them do projects outside of the home for people and get paid for that. So I'm increasingly trying to think more about how AI is going to change things and how I can embrace it. And I mean, because clearly it's coming. I don't know that anything that Donald Trump is going to do is going to stop AI and autonomy and robotics from coming and being a big part of our lives. So I think the best strategy forward is to embrace it. And to look at opportunities for all of us to be able to continue living our lives and not be as concerned about what's my career, what's my job, what's my, what's my specific, very specific role in, in my life in the world. Yes, my life more to do around bringing value to others. Yes, that has been my life and that's, that's what I want to do. So. If using technology to, to improve people's lives and have AI add to people's lives in a positive way, which is what I'm hoping all this will, will move towards. It's this whole thing that technology in of itself is not bad. Technology is only bad when people use it in bad ways. And I've had that philosophy for my whole life. I have faced some criticism for being a Tesla supporter because there's a lot of people fearful of AI and where we're going with it, and people feeling like they're going to lose control of their lives, and that AI is going to take over and put us all out of work, and it's going to be a catastrophe. Well, I'm trying to think about it in a little bit more of a positive light. And this car, this Model 3 with full self-driving and autonomy is a reflection, I think, to some degree of how technology can be used in a positive way. And I do appreciate that on the part of Elon for bringing that. There's nothing about this car that I think is really oppressive or harmful. I think it just makes a lot of sense in what it does and how it thinks and how it wants to replicate what humans do. And I think that's maybe a good thing because it's going to put us in a better situation to have more alignment with technology and how technology can help us. I mean, also increasingly thinking about AI agents and how those are going to blend in with the autonomous robots and vehicles and other things that are going to be potentially connected to my AI agent. Now, in a lot of ways, this car is a representation of an agent. And it really feels that way. It actually drives for me on behalf of what I tell it to do. And so in a lot of ways, the FSD software is an AI agent. For me. And I want to be able to take that same kind of approach in technology and apply it to other parts of my life. Like maybe improve my life, maybe make things more efficient, especially when I think about my online communications and my scheduling and my ability to get work done or work on projects that I want to do for others. That those projects can be done more efficiently, more effectively, and much more rapidly, and have a quality layer to them that is sometimes difficult to achieve. So I appreciate you listening to me today. I wasn't sure what I was going to talk about in this Behind the Wheel, but it seemed like a good topic to talk about how I'm thinking about what I'm going to do with this 2022 Model 3 Long Range. And I think possibly many of you out there that are Tesla owners, if you're watching this, are going through that choice right now because most of the Tesla vehicles that are on the road today are Hardware 3 or AI 3 cars. There's only a subset of the vehicles that are on the road right now that are Hardware 4 vehicles. So there is kind of this tension, I would imagine, inside of Tesla that says they need to support Hardware 3, or they're going to have to get their act together to come up with a process to upgrade all these Hardware 3 cars to at least some upgrade. If it's Hardware 3.5, or is it Hardware— I don't know that they're going to be able to get in and replace all of the video cameras in the car in some sort of an upgrade. Though it'd probably be easier to replace just the CPU and the GPUs in the car and the memory and those kinds of capabilities and the speeds of the LRAM that this vehicle probably has in it. But the GPU is probably the most important thing. But if that can be done at a reasonable expense, like for a few thousand dollars or something like that, that might be a good solution for those of us that want to keep our Hardware 3 and our older Teslas. But if the price of newer Teslas come down, it, it may actually make it with all the incentives may make sense to just upgrade the car, try and sell this car and then just kind of move on. And I don't have that worry going forward. So, well, thank you. I hope you have a wonderful New Year's. We will likely see you with another episode of Behind the Wheel in 2025. Thank you very much. And have a wonderful rest of the year. So bye-bye.