A note from Musk about Tesla’s plans for a fully covered vehicle and how to build it on a robot axis in the U.S

Musk showed off a completely covered vehicle during an event to unveil the third edition of the company’s master plan. Years earlier, he speculated that Tesla owners would be able to earn revenue from their autonomous cars by sending them out to pick up and drop off passengers.

According to Reuters, Elon Musk has canceled the company’s plans to build a low-cost electric vehicle in favor of going all in on a robotaxi. The news outlet said the decision was communicated to employees at an all-hands meeting in late February.

In a “master plan” posted by Musk that year, he outlined a (still) futuristic scenario in which Tesla owners could share their autonomous vehicles with others. When self- driving is approved by the regulators, customers will be able to add their cars to the shared fleet at no cost when they’re at work or on vacation, he wrote. In the year 2020, Musk told the investors, the company would have a million self-driving vehicles on the road. That didn’t happen.

It has been several years since they have delivered truly self-driving technology. In 2016, Tesla said that all the company’s vehicles would be shipped with the hardware necessary to drive themselves—allowing drivers to nap or even send their cars cross-country without anyone inside.

The National Transportation Safety Board has criticized the driver assistance technology in the past. A two-year investigation by the nation’s top road safety regulator ended last year with a determination that if drivers don’t pay enough attention to the road, their technology will be abused. The company pushed out fixes to customers through software updates, even though it didn’t agree with regulators. Driver assistance features from Tesla are safer than those of humans.

According to the note to shareholders, the company is focused on bringing the next generation platform to market as quickly as they can, with the plan to start production in Texas. “This platform will revolutionize how vehicles are manufactured.”

Chinese automakers have been producing more affordable EVs for years and that has led to the shift in strategy. Allowing Chinese companies to sell cheap electric vehicles in the US would be a death sentence for domestic automakers like Musk’s own. Chinese cars are not currently for sale in the US due to high tariffs.

Musk denied at least part of the story. He didn’t specify what the news agency got wrong. He posted that the next product release would focus on the robot axis, which seemed to confirm part of the report.

The last fifty-five years have seen serious growing pains for other self driving vehicle developers. The technology that was supposed to be just around the corner proved to be harder and more expensive than first thought. Some major auto and tech manufacturers have stopped promising self-driving software in the last few years. Waymo only gives paid taxi rides in San Francisco and Phoenix after billions of dollars in research and development, though it plans to launch in Austin, Texas, and Los Angeles in the near future. Generalmotors’ Cruise has put its entire service on hold, after it hit and injured a pedestrian in a dispute with regulators in California. If Tesla wants to roll out robotaxi service everywhere its cars are sold, its plans will be even more ambitious than these competitors’, who have been working on the problem of autonomy for years.