The billionaire has made these kinds of promises before. Many times.
Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s autonomous robotaxi, now known as the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California on Thursday night. And tell me if you’ve heard this one before, but the billionaire Tesla CEO says it’s coming in two or three years.
The Cybercabs are two-seater vehicles with no steering wheel or pedals, and Musk billed them as “individualized mass transit.” Musk promised inductive charging, meaning the vehicle won’t need to be plugged in like a traditional electric car, but didn’t provide any details on how that would work.
Musk started the highly anticipated show by walking out of a Warner Bros. studio building into a Cybercab that drove him to the audience. It made for quite a splashy presentation, complete with the glitz and glitter of Hollywood, and Musk is nothing if not a showman. The only question is whether he can actually deliver something he’s been promising is just “two years away” every year for the past decade.
A concept video for the vehicle was playing behind the Tesla CEO as he was speaking on stage and he claimed “we expect the cost to be below $30,000,” to a large swell of cheers from the audience. But it wasn’t long after naming the price that he was interrupted by someone in the crowd who shouted out to ask when the Cybercabs were going to be available for purchase.
“We do expect actually to start fully autonomous, unsupervised FSD in Texas and California next year,” Musk said to even more cheers.
But then Musk finished his sentence, making it clear he was just talking about the existing Teslas on the road that would presumably get permission to operate without drivers.
“And that’s obviously… that’s with the Model 3 and Model Y. And then we expect to be in production with the Cybercab, which is really highly optimized for autonomous transport, in probably… well, I tend to be a little optimistic with time frames, but in 2026,” Musk said stammering with a laugh.
“So, yeah. Before 2027, let me put it that way. And we’ll make this vehicle in very high volume,” Musk claimed, to a much more subdued crowd response.
Amusingly, some of the graphics playing behind Musk still called the vehicle a “robotaxi,” and whoever’s running the X account for Tesla also didn’t get the memo that they’re called Cybercabs now, not robotaxis:
Robotaxi is premium point-to-point electric transport, accessible to everyone pic.twitter.com/oLykwaaTHm
Tesla (@Tesla) October 11, 2024
Twenty of the Cybercabs were available for special guests to try out at Thursday night’s event in Burbank. Musk predicted that autonomous cars would become ten times safer than a human and a big selling point is the idea that people who buy Cybercabs would be able to rent them out when the owner isn’t using them like a driverless Uber.
