Jon McNeill’s insights on Tesla’s robotaxi and why EV startups fail
Jon McNeill — a former Tesla and Lyft executive and current CEO at DVx Ventures
Jon McNeill — a former Tesla and Lyft executive and current CEO at DVx Ventures — spread the word last week at the World Business Forum on what he calls the “Tesla innovation method” of radical simplification.
After his presentation, we sat down to chat about Tesla’s automation goals, its new robotaxi, and why building electric vehicles is a tough business.
On the Tesla robotaxi
Tesla rolled out Autopilot, its advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that can perform limited automated driving tasks, back in 2015. McNeill said automation has been a major initiative for Tesla for almost a decade.
“It was a topic of conversation every week, if not every day,” he told TechCrunch.
That’s partly why McNeill, along with many others, was surprised by the nothing burger that was Tesla’s much-anticipated robotaxi reveal earlier this month.
“Oftentimes, Elon has got something up his sleeve where he’ll not reveal it until one of those product events. And so I was really wondering, what’s up his sleeve? What does he have? Because Waymo and Cruise are already at Level 4. Tesla’s at Level 2. He’s got to have some major breakthroughs he’s going to talk about to take it from Level 2 to Level 4.”