On Thursday evening, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk showed off the company’s Cybercab concept after a decade of dashed hopes on driverless technology. Unveiled was a sleek sliver two-seater sans steering wheels and pedals.
Musk, emerging from a Cybercab, an autonomous taxi concept, took the stage at the “We, Robot” event nearly an hour after the scheduled start. He said there were 21 of these vehicles and 50 total cars that were autonomous available at Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, Calif., where the exclusive event was held.
While Musk did not disclose which factories would produce the Cybercab, he said consumers could buy one for less than $30,000. He said he was hopeful that Cybercab production could start before 2027.
Musk also said Tesla would deploy “unsupervised FSD” in Texas and California next year for the Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles.
FSD is short for Full Self Driving, which is Tesla’s driver assistance system currently on the market today and only available in a “supervised” capacity which always expects a human driver ready to assume control of the vehicle at any moment. Earlier this year, Tesla tacked on the “supervised” descriptor to the product name.
“It’s going to be a glorious future,” Musk exclaimed during the presentation.
Apart from this, he also unveiled a design for an autonomous electric Robovan that can carry as many as 20 passengers or freight. The vehicle, he added, will address high density transportation requirements, such as transporting a sports team.
Charging for both the Cybercab and Robovan is foreseen to make use of inductive technology, whereby these driverless vehicles would need only to pull up at a charging station without requiring any physical connections.
Musk has spent years touting Tesla’s work in autonomous cars and promising they would hit the market. Along the way, he’s repeatedly woven a fantastical vision for shareholders, setting and missing his own deadlines.
In 2015, Musk told shareholders that Tesla cars would achieve “full autonomy” within three years. They didn’t. In 2016 Musk promised a Tesla car would be able to make a cross country drive without needing any human intervention before the end of 2017. That never happened. And in 2019, speaking on a call with institutional investors that would help him raise more than $2 billion, Musk said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxi ready vehicles on the road in 2020, able to complete 100 hours of driving work per week each making money for their owners.
In April this year, Musk was still telling investors autonomy is the company’s future.
“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” he said on a call with analysts. “We will, and we are.”
At Thursday night’s event, which he had described to investors as a “product launch,” Musk greeted the audience by saying welcome to the “party, and you’ll be able to take the cars for a spin on the autonomous test rides, here on site, at the closed environment of movie studio lots.
It marked Tesla’s first product unveiling since the company first showed off the design for its Cybertruck in 2019. The angular steel pickup began shipping to customers in late 2023, and has been the subject of five voluntary recalls since then in the U.S.
