Are fully self-driving cars on the agenda of Tesla AI Day 2022?

Is Tesla's AI Day 2022 event expected to display any updates on fully self-driving cars?

Tesla AI day 2022, a yearly event for the tech-obsessed wishing to see new ways Musk's company is pushing the envelope, has been organized for Friday, Sept. 30 in Palo Alto. Tesla is expected to highlight its proceeding development for its advanced driver-assist features that Elon Musk has promised will eventually offer us fully self-driving cars.

The event is expected to be live-streamed on the Tesla website and YouTube channel around 5 p.m. PT and promises lots of Big Musk Energy. It's visible that Tesla is putting hard efforts to be at the forefront of technology. One of the ways it dreams to change the landscape of the future is through fully self-driving cars. Although the technology isn't quite there yet, the previous year's AI Day involved presentations about the direction of the fully self-driving cars program. As Tesla strives to achieve this intrepid goal, more information on the project is expected by investors about what progress the company has made in the last year.

But this year, Tesla's self-driving car projects are likely to take a backseat to a robot named Optimus. Musk introduced the "Tesla Bot" at last year's AI Day, assuring that it would be "friendly" and potentially revolutionize the company's assembly line and manufacturing business. From that point, Musk has gone on to hype the robot as "the most important product development we're doing this year," assuming that it will have "the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time." Future applications could include cooking, gardening, or even "catgirl" sex partners, Musk stated. Production could start as soon as next year. Musk has announced the robot by bringing out a person clad in a spandex costume to dance awkwardly onstage, there's a lot of room for skepticism. Whether the robot is real or just a ruse to gin up some excitement about Tesla's AI division that has seen a lot of turnovers in past years probably won't be decided after Friday's event. But it is also a matter to understand: what you see is not necessarily what you get.

With that said, let's dive into what we should expect from Tesla's upcoming AI Day.

Autonomous vehicles and Fully Self-Driving cars

While the Tesla Bot is going to steal all the headlines, new details about the company's driver assistance technology are what most people will be eagerly waiting for. Tesla has mentioned that more than 160,000 drivers in the US and Canada are using its Full Self-Driving car (FSD) beta system, which despite its name, does not enable the vehicle to drive autonomously.

Musk has been promising fully self-driving cars are coming since 2016 — but till now it's not been delivered. He's gone from saying that Tesla will have 1 million robot taxis on the road by the end of the year to 1 million people in the FSD beta program, which are wildly different things.

Tesla Bot

To Musk, the dream of building a humanoid robot is a no-brainer. "Tesla is arguably the world's biggest robotics company because our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels," he stated during last year's AI Day. "It kind of makes sense to put that onto a humanoid form." To be sure, Musk's cars are not "semi-sentient"; they require constant monitoring by a human driver to operate safely. Even then, they tend to crash into stationary objects with enough frequency to spur multiple investigations from federal agencies. Nonetheless, Musk mentioned that the Tesla Bot would be "friendly," with "human-level hands," "Autopilot cameras" for eyes, and a "Full Self-Driving computer" for a brain. The robot would measure 5'8'' and weigh 125 pounds, with the ability to carry up to 45 pounds in its "human-level hands."

Dojo

Another revelation from 2021 was the Dojo chip, which helps to run a Tesla supercomputer. Instead of working from existing systems, the Dojo system is being developed from the ground up with a large system in mind. Since the chip is a key part of Tesla's plans for fully self-driving vehicles, AI Day viewers will likely get an update about this crucial piece of the automation puzzle.

The main goal of AI Day is to draw in top talent to work on these massive projects. For those who aren't well-known for AI concepts, the practicality or functionality of these ideas may be tough to gauge.