Movie studios are where Hollywood spins fantastical worlds out of fancy camera angles and special effects. So where better to show off the Tesla Cybercab, a two-door self-driving taxi that CEO Elon Musk says will be in production in just three years—but that’s still fascinatingly short on firm detail?
Almost an hour after Tesla's previously announced start time, Musk was escorted by a man dressed as an astronaut to the butterfly doors of the silver prototype. He took a quick, seemingly driverless jaunt through the dark, ghostly streets of the Warner Bros. Studios in Southern California before emerging from the car to take the stage.
Later, in front of an audience of excited Tesla fans and shareholders, Musk referred to the entire setup as a “set”—far from the messy, busy streets where an eventual autonomous vehicle might one day be challenged to drive.
Tesla also showed off a “Robovan” designed to autonomously move up to 20 people. Like the Cybercab, the van did not appear to have pedals or a steering wheel, just seats.
Musk, an admitted collector of missed deadlines, has been promising Tesla self-driving tech since 2016. On Thursday evening, he made a few more promises. Full self-driving (unsupervised), a technology meant to be autonomous, will be available in California and Texas next year, Musk says. He says the Cybercab will go into production in 2026, and will eventually cost less than $30,000.
“I think it’s going to be a glorious future,” he said.
Musk repeated a vision he’s articulated before: that one day, Tesla owners may be able to send their vehicles off to offer rides on their own, driving others around to increase each individual vehicle’s utility by five to 10 times. In the future, one person might own a fleet of autonomous taxis and “take care of them like a shepherd tends to their flock,” Musk said. Tesla has shown off mock-ups of an Uber-like app that might allow a rider to hail an autonomous Tesla cab. But Musk didn’t articulate new details about the service Thursday.
Video renderings showed robots cleaning out the interior of a Cybercab, pointing to a solution to an oft-cited autonomous taxi problem—how to keep the things clean without the assistance of a human driver. The robotaxi would also be charged wirelessly, through inductive charging, Musk said. But a timeline for both tech features went unmentioned.
The event concluded with Optimus, a humanoid robot that Musk has said could eventually make the automaker some $25 trillion dollars by becoming “the biggest product ever, of any kind.” The robot was making progress, Musk said. To prove it, five bots illuminated by lights danced in a nearby gazebo. More Optimus bots mingled with the crowd after the presentation, serving drinks at the bar and posing for photos.
In April, Musk seemed to beat back concerns that Tesla was losing its EV edge by insisting autonomy and robotics would live at the center of Tesla’s mission. “The value of Tesla overwhelmingly is autonomy,” Musk told investors this summer. He also encouraged nonbelievers to sell their Tesla stock.
The event comes at a critical time for Tesla, which faces increased competition in electric vehicles not only from legacy automakers, but also from upstart firms in China which are exporting inexpensive vehicles overseas like never before. Tesla deliveries are down globally this year, and the automaker last quarter underperformed compared to analysts’ expectations. The automaker laid off some 14,000 employees earlier this year, many of whom had been working on the core competencies of electric vehicle production, including batteries and charging infrastructure. A series of top executives have departed the automaker in just the past few weeks.
Tesla’s approach differs dramatically from what other self-driving vehicle developers are doing. The electric automaker uses just cameras, rather than a series of sensors, to orient its vehicles in space. Tesla’s techniques combine this visual-based data with artificial intelligence to allow their vehicles to make “decisions” on the road. Competitors, by contrast, layer in information from lidar, radar, and other sensors, “fusing” this data. Musk has argued that loading vehicles with sensors is too expensive and adds unnecessary complexity to self-driving.
Waymo, by contrast, offers paid self-driving taxi services in the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Arizona, and parts of Los Angeles. The company says it plans to launch in Austin and Atlanta next year. Other firms are further behind, but unlike Tesla, have taken initial steps to get their autonomous vehicles permitted by regulators and on the road. Amazon-owned Zoox tests its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco and Foster City, California, and plans to launch service in its toaster-like, purpose-built vehicles in parts of Las Vegas this year. General Motors’ Cruise last year offered paid rides in San Francisco and Austin, Texas, but has faced serious setbacks since state and federal regulators alleged the company misled them about an October 2023 crash that seriously injured a pedestrian. Now the firm is back to testing with driver supervision in a select few cities.
