For those who thought Tesla’s concept for a robot snake charger for self-driving vehicles was dead, think again. Tesla CEO Elon Musk just confirmed that it still might happen.
The automated robot snake charger was originally introduced via teaser video in 2015. The goal was to achieve autonomous charging with no human intervention. Once Tesla achieves a truly autonomous vehicle, sans a driver or passengers, eventually the vehicle will have to be able to charge itself without a person manually plugging the charger into the EV.
Now, after five years of silence regarding the robot snake charger, CEO Elon Musk was asked about long distance “summoning,” which consists of a Tesla vehicle autonomously driving to its owner:
A follow-up tweet confirmed that the robot snake charge concept is far from dead:
Musk did not specify any timeline as far as a plan or deployment for the robot snake charging solution. With Musk claims of a producing “1 million robotaxis” fleet by the end of the year, Tesla better get working. However, that timeline seems highly unlikely with just a few months left in 2020 along with the delay of the company’s Autopilot rewrite release.