Tesla picks Hollywood movie lot for the location of its Robotaxi reveal

Tesla (TSLA) announced that it will unveil its new Robotaxi on October 10 at an event at Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, California. The electric vehicle maker typically holds events at its factories, such as the Gigafactory in Austin. However, Hollywood studio space was also used when Tesla (TSLA) showed off its solar roof product on the set of Desperate Housewives in 2016.

The 110-acre Warner lot holds 29 sound stages and has used as the site to produce major majors and TV shows.

The Austin-based company delayed the timing of the original robotaxi event from August 8 to October 10 due to changes in design to the autonomous mass-market prototype.

Robotaxi developments: Waymo confirmed that its sixth-generation robotaxi, developed by Geely’s ZEEKR (ZK), will cut the number of onboard cameras from 29 to 13 and lidar sensors from five to four, compared to the hardware on Waymo’s Jaguar I-PACE. The cost of the new vehicle is likely to be much lower than the rumored +$100,000 for the current model, which is seen as a critical step toward scaling operations. Waymo also announced that it has ramped up the number of autonomous rides per week to more than 100,000. Meanwhile, Baidu (BIDU) highlighted that its autonomous ride-hail platform averaged ~75,000 rides per week in Q2. Despite the company’s progress, BIDU management noted that rolling out nationally and gaining a significant share of the ride-hail market could take years. Ark Invest said that despite Waymo and Baidu (BIDU) being the first-to-market in robotaxi operations, its research suggests that Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is training its autonomous system with ~70X more data. “As will be the case with most AI (artificial intelligence) projects, Tesla’s data scale advantage is likely to lead to commercial dominance in this winner-takes-most opportunity,” wrote the ARK analysts.

Shares of Tesla (TSLA) inched up 0.33% in premarket trading on Monday to $214.88.