Tesla has shown off its much-anticipated ‘Cybercab’ robotaxi, a vehicle which the company’s controversial CEO Elon Musk has said will be on sale by 2026 and will be priced at less than $30,000 in the US (equivalent to about €27,500 by today's exchange rates).
Revealed in Hollywood
Musk himself revealed the car - which has neither steering wheel nor pedals - at an event held on the Warner Brothers studio lot in Hollywood and said, “We’ll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving, where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination. It’s going to be a glorious future.” Tesla plans to offer ‘unsupervised’ Full Self-Driving in its Model 3 and Model Y cars by next year.
Musk did allow that he sometimes makes ‘optimistic’ predictions, likely a sly reference to a recent lawsuit by Tesla owners - which Musk won - that tried to bring charges against him for over-promising on technical features.
Controversial claims
Specifically, that referred to Tesla’s ‘Full Self Driving’ software, which has become controversial as it’s not fully self-driving (nor ever could be) yet has been sold as such to thousands of willing Tesla owners prepared to stump up a significant sum on the promise of evolving software. Equally, Tesla has been criticised by safety experts for overpromising on the capabilities of its driver-aid systems, the overconfidence in which has been cited as a possible factor in several fatal accidents.
Nonetheless, Musk - having just stepped off a stage in Pennsylvania where he was supporting Donald Trump’s bid for re-election as US president - reckons that a fully autonomous vehicle is the way forward for Tesla and has brought forward the development and release of the Cybercab ahead of the long-awaited smaller, more affordable Tesla Model 2, a car for which the company’s investors have been calling for some time now.
Two-seater
The Cybercab stylistically looks like a cross between the current Model 3 saloon and the Cybertruck pickup. It’s a two-seater with Lamborghini-like doors and, according to Musk, a wireless charging system for its batteries.
Alongside the Cybercab, Tesla also unveiled a massive ‘Robovan’ electric autonomous bus, which can carry as many as 20 passengers, although production plans, dates and technical details remain much more vague.
Questions already asked
Already, Tesla and Musk are being criticised for making promises that the Cybercab will struggle to keep, with some referring to the project as ‘vapourware.’
One prominent critic - software engineer Dan O’Dowd, who has been a thorn in Tesla’s side for some time now - commented: “Tonight Elon Musk said that Tesla drivers would soon be able to sleep at the wheel of unsupervised Full Self-Driving. This is the exact same promise he made in 2019 when he said FSD owners would be able to fall asleep and wake up at their destination by the end of 2020. The promised low cost vehicle that everybody was expecting to be announced turned out to be a two-seat cybercab which will no doubt be a big hit with families. Elon Musk has claimed that Tesla will solve FSD “this year”, every year since 2014, most recently in July. Now he has announced that FSD has been delayed another year until the end of 2025. This date will be delayed again next year as it has for each of the past ten years. Until Tesla robotaxis are transporting 100,000 paying customers a week around major American cities like Waymo does, Tesla robotaxi is nothing more than the latest work of fiction to come out of the Warner Bros. Studio.”