Fully self-driving technology still hasn't lived up to the name of Tesla owners, but Elon Musk's company is determined to move forward with its next plans. Musk has already promised to unveiling of its long-awaited Tesla robotaxi on August 8 (though the public may want to take that date with a grain of salt). But if Tesla's autonomous taxis ever hit the road, they'll need to be regularly cleaned between passenger-carrying trips, something Tesla also wants to outsource to robots.
The plans are detailed first posted on X on June 30 by an account dedicated to tracking patents from technology companies. According to the 67-page file in February 2023 with the World Intellectual Property Organization and alone recently revealed by a patent examiner on XTesla plans to integrate systems aimed at “managing environmental conditions in confined spaces,” specifically future fleets of self-driving electric robotaxis.
Tesla's patent WO2023/163943A1 presents a system and method for automatically disinfecting closed spaces, in particular the interior of vehicles, which may be shared by multiple people.
The core of this patent is detecting the current environmental conditions of the… photo.twitter.com/Mh5Q6oITak
— SETI Park (@seti_park) June 30, 2024
“[A]“A car that provides transportation for multiple people throughout the day has lower transportation costs and a lower carbon footprint than a car that is used by only one person for commuting,” the patent applicants wrote.
Those shared spaces can get pretty dirty, though. Tesla's patent authors argue that current human-driven cleaning methods “can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and may result in unsatisfactory sanitary conditions.” Additionally, they argue, it can be difficult to verify the cleanliness of a space with certainty, even after it's been wiped down.
But in keeping with Tesla’s ethos, the company’s potential solution involves packing robotaxis with even more technology, specifically some combination of vision, thermal, acoustic, pressure, radio frequency, gas and/or capacitive sensors. Once it detects that the vehicle is empty of passengers, the cleaning systems themselves could include everything from blasting the interior with disinfecting UV lights to sterilizing an EV using heating plates that raise the internal temperature to as much as 132 degrees Fahrenheit for as long as 30 minutes. This may not kill extremely harmful bacteria and viruses, but it could certainly eradicate certain strains after such a long time, including COVID-19.
[Related: Dead Teslas keep locking owners out of (and inside) their cars.]
Any effective sanitation system would need to access all those hard-to-reach spots in a car, and Tesla’s patent application lays out a number of possible ways to do that. In one scenario, for example, a robotaxi that senses an inappropriate level of dirt could drive itself to an independent cleaning station, where yet another external robotic system would perform the precision cleaning. In another example, the robotaxi would shift its seat positions to expose hidden spaces to its UV, heating or other sanitizing agents.
Of course, all of this assumes that Tesla actually achieves fully autonomous vehicle technology (which it hasn’t), deploys the system in a fleet of robotaxis (which don’t yet exist), and convinces paying travelers to trust their lives to self-driving cars (which isn’t certain). Even if enough people would be fine with sitting in the passenger seat of a self-driving Tesla, they might still balk if there’s even a remote possibility that the EV will mistakenly think it’s empty, and subsequently subject its human occupants to (at the very least) an unpleasant experience.
And while you might think it’s easy to just hop out of a robotaxi in those scenarios, several people have recently been locked in their own Teslas due to a dead 12V battery. With that knowledge in mind, the idea of hopping into a self-cleaning robot on wheels can be a tough sell.
