Tesla will use Warner Bros. Hollywood Studio as the "showcase" for Robotaxi

According to Zhitong Finance APP, Tesla (TSLA.US) announced that it will launch a new self-driving taxi (Robotaxi) at an event held at Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, California on October 10th. This electric car manufacturer usually holds events at its factories, such as the Gigafactory in Austin. However, in 2016, Tesla also utilized Hollywood studio space when showcasing its solar roof products on the set of "Desperate Housewives". The 110-acre Warner property has 29 sound stages that have been used for producing large-scale movies and TV shows. Due to changes in the design of the autonomous mass-market prototype vehicle, Tesla postponed the initial Robotaxi event from August 8th to October 10th. On Tuesday, Tesla rose slightly by 0.93% to $216.10 in pre-market trading. In addition to Tesla, other car manufacturers are also making progress in the development of self-driving taxis. Waymo confirmed that the sixth generation of self-driving taxis developed by Geely's ZEEKR will reduce the number of onboard cameras from 29 to 13 and the number of LiDAR sensors from 5 to 4 compared to Waymo's Jaguar I-PACE. The cost of this new vehicle may be much lower than the rumored $100,000 for existing models, seen as a key step in expanding operations. Waymo also announced that the number of autonomous driving instances per week has increased to over 100,000. Meanwhile, Baidu (BIDU.US) emphasized that its autonomous ride-hailing platform has an average of about 75,000 rides per week in the second quarter. Despite the progress made by the company, the management still points out that it may take several years to promote nationwide and gain a significant market share in the ride-hailing service market. Ark Invest stated that although Waymo and Baidu are the first to enter the market for operating self-driving taxis, Tesla is training its autonomous driving system with about 70 times more data. ARK analysts wrote, "Like most artificial intelligence projects, Tesla's data scale advantage may dominate the commercial leadership in this winner-takes-all opportunity."