Three Year Old Prediction that Tesla Next Generation Car Would Have Cybertruck Like Design

John Gibb (aka Dr Know it All) predicted the in 2020 Cybertruck like design elements of the Tesla Next Generation car. Yesterday, the Elon Musk Biography by Walter Isaacson revealed that the Tesla executive and engineering teams have designed a cybertruck like robotaxi and next generation vehicle.

John Gibb went to a first principles design for the next generation vehicle and came up with a small, inexpensive electric car.

Axios has excerpts from the Elon Musk biography about the robotaxi decisions.

In November 2021, Musk gathered his top five lieutenants for dinner in Austin to start brainstorming a basic, high-volume robotaxi.

“There is no amount that we could possibly build that will be enough,” Musk said, per Isaacson. “Someday we want to be at 20 million a year.”
For nearly a year, they debated whether to play it safe and build the car with a steering wheel and pedals, or make it truly autonomous.

The gamble: Regulators might not approve an autonomous car without traditional controls.
Most of Musk’s engineers pushed for the safer, conventional option. They had a more realistic outlook on how long it would take for Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology to be ready, Isaacson writes.

A central challenge was figuring out how to design a [robotaxi] car with no steering wheel or pedals that could meet government safety standards and handle special situations. Week after week, Musk weighed in on every detail.

“What if someone forgets to shut the door of the Robotaxi when they get out?” he asked. “We have to make sure it can shut its own doors.” How would a Robotaxi get into a gated community or parking garage? “Maybe it needs an arm that can punch a button or take a ticket,” he said. At times the conversations were so earnest and detailed they belied how wild the entire concept was.

For years they had talked about what should be Tesla’s next-generation offering: a small, inexpensive, mass-market car selling for around $25,000. Musk himself had teased the possibility in 2020, but then he put a hold on those plans, and over the next two years he repeatedly vetoed the idea, saying that the Robotaxi would make the other car unnecessary. Nevertheless, von Holzhausen had quietly kept it alive as a shadow project in his design studio.

Late on a Wednesday evening in September 2022, Musk ensconced himself in his longtime haunt, the windowless main conference room of the Fremont factory. Moravy and von Holzhausen led a few top members of the Tesla team in for a secretive meeting. They presented data showing that in order for Tesla to grow at 50 percent a year, it needed to have an inexpensive small car.