Tesla’s surprising unveiling of its plans to create a Tesla Bot humanoid robot begs the question: Is it for real, or just another wild idea from a CEO with no inhibitions about sharing wild ideas?
In announcing the Tesla Bot at the company’s AI Day this week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk pledged to have a prototype of the Tesla bot sometime next year. He joked about how it will be friendly to humans, while also seriously and thoughtfully--but also vaguely--answered questions about the robot’s potential use cases and even how many fingers it might have.
“It needs to be able to do things that people do… You could give it two fingers and a thumb… We’ll give it five fingers and see how that works,” he said. “It probably will. It doesn’t need to have, like, incredible grip strength. It needs to be able to work with tools, carry a bag, that kind of thing.”
Such answers might be maddening to company watchers trying to figure out just how real the Tesla Bot is--or will be, what its specific use cases might be, and how serious Tesla is about broadening its business in a new direction.
Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, said it might be best to think about Tesla’s robot ambitions the same way we have come to think about experimental concepts that have sprung from the creative minds at Google.
“Tesla is a lot like Google in the sense that they explore many different areas and some (or many) of them may never make it to market,” Gold said via email. “I’m not sure the robot will ever see the light of day as a full fledged product offered to consumers. That said, a lot of the lessons learned from building a human-like robot can be applied to the autonomous vehicle and similar technology that Tesla needs for its mainstream products.”
He pointed out that for Musk, “pushing the boundaries, including now in robotics, is a way of life, so there are certainly possibilities for using the tech for exploration (as in the space programs he envisions) and perhaps with their tunneling operations.”
Reactions to the Tesla Bot across social media were, for the most part, not nearly as thoughtful as Gold’s analysis. On LinkedIn and Twitter, there was a large amount of derisive and humorous commentary (One LinkedIn user, for example, posted, “The robots main function is the ability to grab headlines.”), along with a few posts from people saying, “I want one.”
On Twitter, Gene Munster, managing director at Loup Ventures, put the announcement in perspective by calling it a “science project” and speculated that a prototype is five years away, but also lauded Tesla for being aggressive and “the leader in autonomy… and it’s not close.”
If the Tesla Bot is a science project on a long road to becoming reality, it could be a key part of a more serious effort by Tesla to broaden its horizons beyond vehicles. It certainly isn’t a bad time to attempt to steer the public’s attention away from the pressing controversy over Tesla car crashes and the company’s Autopilot system, but only time will tell if the Tesla Bot concept is a little less wild than it right now seems to be. Don't forget: Electric cars once seemed like a pretty wild idea.