Today could be the day Tesla changes forever.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a couple of hours, Tesla will \u201claunch\u201d the Cybercab \u2014 a small, gold, two-seater sedan with no steering wheel or pedals that uses cameras and AI to navigate the world \u2014 in its hometown of Austin, Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The company hasn\u2019t said what the launch will entail, exactly. It could be a few cars offering rides in a small area downtown, or a far grander affair in both size and scope.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tesla certainly wants you to believe it\u2019s the latter.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the runup to the event, Tesla staged dozens \u2014 perhaps more \u2013 of its Cybercabs around Austin and in many other U.S. cities. At the time this story was published, 420 autonomous vehicles were registered in Texas, according to the state\u2019s automated vehicle tracker<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Ashok Elluswamy, the head of Tesla AI, recently said in a post on X that the \u201cstreets won\u2019t be the same anymore.\u201d When another user wrote that Tesla is \u201cabout to flood Austin,\u201d CEO Elon Musk replied: \u201cYes.\u201d On Wednesday night, Musk posted a seemingly AI-generated photo of the Cybercab consuming the city alongside a massive dust storm.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cA Storm of Cybercabs,\u201d Musk wrote in another post<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n These gravitas-laced posts mark a departure from the company\u2019s go-slow-and-safe messaging in the months leading up to the event.\u00a0Musk and other Tesla executives had previously professed they were taking a cautious approach to its robotaxis in the name of safety, though at times they seemed more concerned about public perception of a potential failure.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, Tesla\u2019s launch strategy isn\u2019t as meaningful as the outcome. Tesla\u2019s ability to successfully build a robotaxi network around the Cybercab would provide the first tangible evidence that it has transitioned from an automaker with some side projects to an AI and robotics company.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s a trope Musk favors that is apt for this moment: the fork in the road. It was the subject of an email he sent to Twitter employees in 2022 when he gave them an ultimatum to stay or leave. He invoked it again in early 2025 when he encouraged federal government employees to leave as part of his job leading DOGE, before he truly started wrecking house.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Musk loves the metaphor so much that he commissioned a 30-foot-tall sculpture of a literal fork on a literal road for Burning Man in 2022, before moving the sculpture to a Tesla office.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Cybercab is Tesla\u2019s fork in the road.\u00a0This is either the moment the company begins to transform urban transportation as we know it, or the moment that reveals that, despite its many efforts, Tesla really is just an automaker after all.\u00a0<\/p>\n Musk first revealed the Cybercab in 2024 at a Hollywood movie lot. But the idea has been around far longer.\u00a0<\/p>\n Musk has spent more than a decade promising that Tesla would find a way to make its cars fully autonomous, paving the way for a network of robotaxis. He even went so far as to claim, in 2016, that every Tesla being made had the capability to become fully autonomous and that the cars only needed the right software update to make it happen.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n He was wrong. Tesla has reworked the hardware in its cars multiple times since that declaration, and Musk recently admitted that millions of them will need some kind of hardware retrofit to become autonomous.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, Tesla kept developing driving automation software. It has steadily released and refined its primary offering, Full Self-Driving (Supervised). But as capable as that software has become, it is still driver-assistance software. The responsibility and liability remain with the driver.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The Cybercab is supposed to change all that. It emerged from an effort by Tesla to develop a next-generation EV platform that was cheaper to build.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The plan was for the company to take what it learned from the Model 3 and Model Y \u2014 its two biggest mass-market successes \u2014 and develop a new platform that would cost half as much, allowing Tesla to make more affordable EVs.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Years of reporting and Musk\u2019s own biography have shown that he was so dead set on achieving full autonomy that he decided against building a manually drivable car on the platform. Instead, Musk focused entirely on using the new platform to power the two-seater robotaxi we now know as the Cybercab.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In April 2024, months ahead of the Cybercab reveal, he approved massive layoffs at Tesla in service of going \u201cballs to the wall for autonomy,\u201d which he called a \u201cblindingly obvious move.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEverything else is like variations on a horse carriage,\u201d he wrote at the time.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Tesla started testing the first version of its Robotaxi program last June in Austin using modified Model Y SUVs. For the first few months, the company had an employee in the front seat (sometimes behind the wheel, sometimes in the passenger seat) who could stop the car if something went wrong.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Things have gone wrong along the way, though not catastrophically. Tesla has reported a few dozen incidents in Austin since it launched the Robotaxi pilot. Most were minor crashes with stationary objects, and a few involved teleoperators remotely moving the vehicles at low speeds.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company has expanded this Model Y-based system to a few other cities in Texas and Florida. But over the past year, the network has not lived up to the hype Tesla manufactured at launch in June 2025. In July, the company revealed that the number of paid miles the network was facilitating was actually moving backward<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n But that may not matter much to Tesla, which believes scaling its robotaxi network requires the Cybercab.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Tesla designed the Cybercab around cost. It\u2019s smaller, lighter, and has a lower-capacity battery pack than any other Tesla. Fewer raw materials \u2013 especially on the battery side \u2013 make it cheaper to build. The cheaper it is to build, the faster Tesla can potentially turn a profit once it\u2019s deployed.\u00a0<\/p>\n That math has Tesla\u2019s most ardent fans giddy. They look at Tesla\u2019s ability to build dozens of Cybercabs for roughly the same amount of money Waymo spends to purchase and outfit fewer than 10 of its newest \u201cOjai\u201d vans and see it as proof that the robotaxi war is already won.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Musk seems to agree. In a reply to a post that included a graphical representation of this argument, he wrote, \u201cthis doesn\u2019t even take into account the operational efficiency of Cybercab.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n There are caveats worth considering. Tesla has, to date, only operated its robotaxi network within a geofence in each city. While some are larger than others, and the company has kept expanding some of them, Musk himself once said: \u201cIf you need a geofenced area, you don\u2019t have real self-driving.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the challenge of operating the network at scale.\u00a0<\/p>\n Tesla has so far benefited from having a small network in just a few cities. That naturally means its self-driving software encounters fewer edge cases than Waymo, which has 4,000 robotaxis on the road. Fewer trips and fewer edge cases also mean fewer chances for riders to spot problems and post them on social media or report them to regulators or journalists.\u00a0<\/p>\n Tesla has also benefited from the fact that its fleet has consisted of Model Y SUVs, which are harder to distinguish on the road than a bright white Jaguar I-Pace kitted out with sensors. That will change with the Cybercabs. If Tesla\u2019s software isn\u2019t up to the task, its failures will be much harder to miss when they happen in shiny gold cars.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\nRobot taxis\u00a0<\/h2>\n
Slowly, then quickly?\u00a0<\/h2>\n
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