Tesla’s Cybercab is now in production at the company’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, but Elon Musk is sounding unusually cautious about the rollout.
The robotaxi’s start of production was announced Thursday on X, with Tesla posting a video shot from inside a steering wheel-less Cybercab as it drove out of the factory with the caption, “Purpose built for autonomy.” The company made a few initial Cybercabs back in February, but continuous production only started this month.
But with the company’s robotaxi plans creeping along much slower than expected, many Tesla watchers are left scratching their heads about the future — especially as Musk reins in his bombastic tone.
In an earnings call this week, Musk sounded uncharacteristically pessimistic about Tesla’s robotaxi expansion plans. And he offered no new details about the company’s recent expansion to Dallas and Houston. (Each city only has two vehicles a week after the launch.)
“The limiting factor for expansion is really rigorous validation, making sure things are completely safe,” he said in response to questions about the slower-than-expected rollout. “We don’t want to have a single accidental injury with the expansion of Robotaxi, and we have, to the credit of the team, not had a single one to date.”
But we don’t know if that’s exactly true. Tesla has reported 14 crash incidents involving its robotaxis to the federal government since the service launched in Austin, Texas, a year ago. And unlike other robotaxi operators that provide details about the nature of each crash and any injuries that occurred, Tesla routinely redacts that information.
Still, it was weird to hear Musk sound so downbeat about Tesla’s robotaxi experiment. In the past, the billionaire CEO could barely contain himself when talking about the company’s autonomous future, consistently promising that unsupervised Full Self-Driving, in which the driver would be able to let the car drive for them without any interventions, was just around the corner.
His supporters point to the success of Autopilot, and then FSD (Supervised), as evidence that while his promises may not exactly line up with reality, he is still at the forefront of a societal shift from human-powered vehicles to ones piloted by AI. He’s even making an army of worker bots to prove the point that the technology is formally agnostic.
But there have been hundreds of crashes involving Tesla vehicles using FSD and Autopilot, and dozens of deaths. Multiple government agencies have investigated the company’s claims around self-driving, and FSD appears to be on the cusp of a major recall. So perhaps knowing all this, Musk decided to rein in the overpromises and sound a bit more realistic about what’s to come. He acknowledged that the Cybercab’s production would be slow going until the end of the year.
“Whenever you have a new product with a completely new supply chain, new everything, it’s always a stretched-out S curve, so you should expect that initial production of Cybercab and Semi will be very slow, but then ramping up, and going exponential towards the end of the year and certainly next year,” he said. “In fact, we’ll be ramping up production of all vehicles, in all factories, to the best of our ability through the balance of this year.”
“Whenever you have a new product with a completely new supply chain, new everything, it’s always a stretched-out S curve.”
— Elon musk
Last year, Musk said that by the end of 2025, 50 percent of the US population would have access to Tesla’s Robotaxi service, describing the expansion has “hyper exponential.” But as of today, the company is operating in only a handful of cities, including Austin, Dallas, and Houston. The company is also running a human-driven ridehail service in San Francisco, where access is “invite only.”
With the Cybercab, another issue is the lack of traditional controls, like a steering wheel, pedals, mirrors, and other features that are required under Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. The government provides exemptions to companies that want to produce vehicles without these features, but caps the number of vehicles at 2,500 per company. Legislation to lift the cap, and allow more purpose-built autonomous vehicles to be manufactured, has been stalled in Congress for years.
But when asked on X whether the Tesla Cybercab’s production would be subject to the cap, vice president of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy responded “No.” The company is apparently self-certifying that its vehicles comply with existing safety standards, similar to how Amazon’s Zoox approached the issue with its purpose-built autonomous shuttles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, under President Biden, launched an investigation into Zoox’s self-certification claim, but that investigation was closed after President Trump took office.
Tesla’s Cybercab is designed to operate without any human intervention — after all, there’s no steering wheel or pedals for a human to use. But Tesla has yet to solve full autonomy. Musk keeps pushing the deadline for unsupervised FSD, especially to customer vehicles that the company no longer owns. And when asked to predict the rollout of unsupervised driving, Musk has consistently offered timelines that have later proven to be wrong.
In the earnings call, Musk waffled between caution and overpromising. He said that Version 15 of FSD, “a complete overhaul of the software architecture,” was coming by the end of this year or early next. But he also acknowledged that millions of Tesla vehicles with Hardware 3 computers, which were sold between 2019 and 2023, would not be able to achieve unsupervised driving without serious retrofits — contradicting past commitments.
“I think probably unsupervised FSD or Robotaxi revenue will not be super material this year, but I do think it’ll be material probably in a significant way next year,” Musk added.