Tesla’s ride sharing service with self-driving cars to compete against Uber

CEO Elon Musk has hinted at introducing a ride-sharing program being developed by Tesla that is aimed at opposing other services such as Uber and Lyft, with its autonomous cars for hailing rides.

In a recent third-quarter earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the firm ‘obviously’ is planning to step its foot into the ride-hailing services, but with its self-driving cars – what it call its ‘Tesla Network’.

Musk said, “Tesla will operate its own ride-hailing services and compete directly with Uber and Lyft, obviously.” This will give customers the ability to ‘offer their car, add or subtract to the fleet at will’.

According to Business Insider, Tesla aims to run a company-owned fleet of autonomous cars for customers to hail and maintain a network of Tesla owners who can make money by lending out their cars for use and recalling them for personal use, a similar model used by Airbnb.

Musk explained, “The company-owned fleet will just be where there aren’t enough customer cars to be loaned out. So if we find a particular metro where there aren’t enough customers who are loaning cars to the shared fleet then that’s where we will supplement with a Tesla own fleet. So that’s why it sorts of a combination of Uber and Airbnb.

“And then we charge 30% or something in order for somebody to add the cars to fleet. I think that’s like a pretty sensible way to go.”

Also, as per CNBC, Tesla too is moving forward to develop true self-driving capabilities for its vehicles that go well beyond the firm’s current Autopilot offerings, and have the ‘strongest competitive position long-term’.

“We absolutely see the future as kind of a shared electric autonomy. The advantage that Tesla will have is that we’ll have millions of cars in the field with full autonomy capability and no one else will have that. So I think that will end up putting us in the strongest competitive position long-term,” said Musk.