Musk refused to believe in Tesla and Nvidia competing in the robotaxi market

Tesla CEO Elon Musk doesn't expect robotaxis with Nvidia technology to compete with his company's unmanned cabs in the coming years.

"It will be many years before drone technology is truly safer than humans," Musk noted in a post on social media X. - Major automakers won't start integrating cameras and AI computers into their vehicles on a large scale for a few more years. So maybe that competitive pressure [of unmanned cabs with Nvidia technology] on Tesla will come in 5-6 years, but probably later."

Earlier this week, speaking at the CES conference in Las Vegas, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled Alpamayo, a new family of open source artificial intelligence models designed for autonomous driving. Nvidia describes Alpamayo as a model that combines vision, language and action that mimics "human thinking" to make decisions in non-standard or rare situations. Huang also announced the launch of unmanned cabs by an unnamed Nvidia partner in 2027.

Huang's speech sparked a discussion on social media, with X starting to compare Nvidia's new AI system for autonomous driving to Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD), to which Musk responded, "[Nvidia's] platform will easily reach 99% [accuracy in providing autonomous driving in standard situations], but dealing with the remaining 'long tail' [1% of non-standard and critical situations on the road] will be extremely difficult."

Full Self-Driving is a key part of Tesla's long-term growth strategy. In the summer of 2025, the company launched a limited version of its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, and a little later in San Francisco, but with an instructor at the wheel. Although Musk has been promising fully autonomous electric cars for more than a decade, he said last August that Tesla is as close as possible and is training a new FSD model, CNBC recalls.

After Nvidia's presentation on Tuesday, January 6, Tesla's stock price collapsed by 4.1%. On Wednesday, January 7, shares of the automaker moved up 1% to $437.4. Nvidia shares rose 1.3% to $189.7 in trading on January 7.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor