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Elon Musk has shown off his “Cybercab” in an eagerly anticipated event for Tesla investors, but was vague on crucial details as he predicted the self-driving taxi would be available for less than $30,000.  

“I think the cost of autonomous transport will be so low that you can think of it like individualised mass transit,” Musk said on Thursday, after he made a Hollywood entrance at Warner Bros Studios in Los Angeles, riding in a Cybercab with no steering wheels and pedals.

He said production of the robotaxis was likely to start before 2027, with the caveat that the service needed to be approved by regulators. He also unveiled a prototype for a 20-person autonomous vehicle called “the Robovan”.

Since Tesla announced a “robotaxi day” on April 5, its shares have risen 45 per cent in anticipation of the unveiling. Musk has said the new electric vehicles could take the company’s valuation as high as $5tn, about seven times its current market value. 

However, following months of delay, Musk’s presentation started nearly an hour late and ended in less than 30 minutes, with Optimus autonomous humanoid robots dancing in what looked like a giant fish tank.

“I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind,” Musk said, adding that the humanoid robot would be available for less than $30,000 at scale. “It can be a teacher or babysit your kids. It can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks, whatever you can think of.”

Musk has repeatedly missed his own targets to roll out self-driving taxis, first promising fully autonomous rides from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017. In 2019, he predicted that 1mn robotaxis would be on the road by the following year.

On Thursday, he said unsupervised rides using its self-driving software could be available in Texas and California from next year.

Most analysts believe it will take several more years for Tesla to roll out the robotaxis in light of the regulatory hurdles and questions about the safety of its self-driving technology, which relies on cameras and artificial intelligence to steer the vehicles. Rivals including Waymo and China’s Baidu depend on lidar — laser-based sensors — and high-definition maps to understand the vehicle surroundings.

In a note ahead of the event, Pierre Ferragu, analyst at New Street Research, said Tesla is unmatched in terms of its access to data through its fleet of nearly 7mn cars on the road, its AI capabilities and the ability to scale. 

But he added: “There is potentially a lot of competition, and the appetite for supervised self-driving, chauffeur services and even robotaxis is uncertain.” 

In recent years, Musk has tried to convince investors to value the company not as an electric vehicle maker, but one focused on autonomous driving and artificial intelligence. 

Its automotive sales, which still account for 82 per cent of its total revenue, have declined in the face of increased competition. More affordable EV offerings from Chinese companies have forced Tesla to cut its prices. 

In its latest quarter, vehicle deliveries rose 6.4 per cent from a year earlier, rebounding for the first time this year, despite slightly missing Wall Street expectations. 

While robotaxis hold potential over the longer term, a bigger focus for investors is whether Tesla can quickly roll out a more affordable EV, known unofficially as the Model 2 that will be priced at $25,000, to replace its ageing product portfolio. 

There had been expectations that Musk would unveil the cheaper model on Thursday.

Following the presentation, Garrett Nelson, analyst at CFRA Research, said he was disappointed by the lack of detail for Tesla’s near-term product road map. “We think the event did little to change an opaque intermediate-term earnings outlook,” he said.

Chinese police have detained four workers of the Taiwanese iPhone maker, Foxconn, in circumstances Taipei has described as “strange”.

The employees were arrested in Zhengzhou in Henan province on “breach of trust” charges, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said in a statement.

The BBC has contacted Foxconn for comment.

The company is the biggest maker of iPhones for US technology giant Apple and is one of the largest employers in the world, with major manufacturing facilities in China.

Taiwanese authorities suggested the detentions may be a case of “abuse of power” by Chinese police officers.

And said the case undermines the confidence of businesses operating in China.

In October last year, China’s tax and land authorities launched an investigation into the company.

At that time, Foxconn’s founder Terry Gou was running as an independent candidate in Taiwan’s presidential election.

Taiwan has urged its citizens to “avoid non-essential travel” to the mainland as well as Hong Kong and Macau after China unveiled guidelines in June detailing criminal punishments for what Beijing described as diehard “Taiwan independence” separatists.

Foxconn’s facility in Zhengzhou is the world’s largest iPhone factory which is widely known as “iPhone City”.

The company is among many Taiwanese businesses which over the last 40 years have looked past a long-standing geopolitical rift and built factories in China.

Professional coaching has been good to Alejandra Badilla, helping to accelerate an already rapid rise. The 36-year-old Chilean, who will complete her Executive MBA at Madrid’s IE Business School late this year, started monthly coaching sessions over Microsoft Teams six months into the course. Soon afterwards, she was promoted to a director-level role at the insurance business Chubb, managing a $100mn portfolio of clients.

“I believe that everybody needs a coach, always, because your life is changing constantly,” says Badilla, who switched careers a few years ago, having trained originally as a physiotherapist. She also has experience in the health and financial sectors and was a convert to coaching long before starting at IE. “For me, it is like a religion.”

EMBA providers increasingly emphasise the importance of executive coaching. According to 2023 research by the Executive MBA Council (EMBAC), a network of schools, more than 87 per cent of its member programmes offered a coaching service, up from 58 per cent in 2011.

Prospective students are also demanding coaching. The most recent Tomorrow’s MBA study, by higher education consultancy CarringtonCrisp and the European Foundation for Management Development, found executive coaching was the second most demanded career development service sought by prospective EMBA candidates, just behind mentoring.

Randall Peterson, professor and academic director of the Leadership Institute at London Business School, was involved in the decision to increase coaching for LBS EMBA students six years ago. The shift was driven by the reality that coaching was, even then, standard for senior executives.

“The logic . . . was that these students didn’t have much experience of it, so let’s get them used to the idea of coaching accelerating their careers,” Peterson says.

He adds that it was also important to differentiate in students’ minds the practices of coaching from other forms of careers support. “We wanted to show that it is not therapy and it is also not mentoring, in that they are not going to tell you to do X and Y,” Peterson says. “What coaching does is support your thinking about where you want to go and how you want to get there.”

Coaching EMBA students “presents unique challenges” because they are studying while holding down often senior full-time jobs and balancing competing demands on their time, says Sarah Langslow, executive coach and author of Do Sweat the Small Stuff. But, she adds, it can also be the best time to be coached.

“We can work on their leadership, communication, influence, executive presence and so on in the context of their working environment, not only their MBA class environment,” Langslow says. “Coaching on live challenges allows direct challenge and support, and the chance to follow up to explore the impact of their changes in behaviour and approach.”

Few business schools hire coaches as staff members, usually preferring to use freelance professionals. Los Angeles-based Sue Ann Gonis, a former business executive who has been a certified coach since 2008, supports students on the Executive MBA at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

Gonis says she can relate to EMBA candidates who are often in senior roles and looking to switch to other sectors or professions “because I have made a career shift”.

Executive MBA Ranking 2024

This is a story is from the EMBA report publishing on October 14

Her services are also in demand when Michigan Ross students come to LA, where she runs workshops with the cohort and follows up with Zoom calls.

Christoph Kiegler experienced private coaching before his Global Executive MBA at Barcelona-based Iese Business School, having hired a coach to support his rise to partner at KPMG, his employer of more than 20 years.

He and the approximately 40 participants on the GEMBA programme were offered four executive coaching sessions as part of the course’s leadership element.

Kiegler says he valued these interactions highly, particularly as Iese was able to pair him with a fellow German-speaking coach. But he adds that those who want to benefit fully from the process should continue after they graduate, something that Iese also offers.

Coaching supports your thinking about where you want to go and how you want to get there

“As a senior executive, the only way to grow is by such self-reflection, [but] having four sessions with the coach is not enough to get to something very specific,” he says.

Kiegler admits, however, that he has not used an executive coach since the GEMBA, blaming demands on his time. “It is like sports: I know I should do it because it’s good for me,” he says — adding that he also struggles to find time for those activities.

The process of coaching involves more work than just the time spent in one-to-one sessions. Alejandra Badilla’s coach at IE Business School recommended self-help books for her to read, worked together with her to discover aspects of her character that might help in achieving career goals, and assisted with strategies to capitalise on personal strengths.

“If you don’t have the ‘mirror’ to question you all the time, who sees your best skills, you won’t be aware of what you are best able to do,” Badilla says. “I have some friends, older than me, who always had a coach and they are successful people. On the other side, I have friends who are not open to that experience and they have been doing the same [job] for the last 10 years.”