Tesla’s much-anticipated robot event took place Thursday evening with CEO Elon Musk taking Center Stage to unveil the company’s latest Innovation the Tesla Cybercab. This intriguing fully autonomous vehicle designed without steering wheels or pedals caught many by surprise.
The Tesla Cybercab is a compact electric Coupe that looks sort of like a blend between the Aesthetics of the Tesla Cybertruck and the Model 3 sedan. It doesn’t have a steering wheel it doesn’t have pedals heck it doesn’t even have rear glass and that’s because Tesla envisions this to be a a fully autonomous electric taxi. You don’t drive it it drives you.
Now under the hood, the Tesla Cybercab is powered by the next generation of Tesla’s full self-driving software the so-called unsupervised FSD as opposed to the driver-supervised FSD that you’ll find in this current crop of electric vehicles. Now this is a completely vision-based sensing system cameras only so no spinning LiDAR sensors like you’ll see in the other electric taxis operating in certain cities in America.
Now in addition to the next generation of Tesla software, the automaker is also said to be equipping Tesla Cybercab with an overs-spec version of its AI Hardware. The idea is that this extra overhead will help make rides a little bit safer. Anyway, Tesla head Elon Musk did say something along the lines of using these vehicles as a distributed computing system while they’re parked something along the lines of Amazon cloud computing but for cars. Details on how this would work remain unclear and how they plan on using this if at all we’ll just have to keep an eye on it.
Tesla demonstrated The Tesla Cybercab’s autonomous capabilities during an event at the Warner Brothers Studio Lot in Southern California, where Tesla head Elon Musk arrived at the event in a cyber cab that was driven autonomously. Attendees also had the chance to experience rides in either a Tesla Cybercab or in an unsupervised FSD-equipped Tesla Model Y. That’s right this cyber cab technology is also planned to come to Tesla’s crop of current electric vehicles so the model 3 or model y that’s in your driveway now could One Day become completely autonomous.
Now there is a big difference between getting a ride in an autonomous cab on a closed Studio Lot and having this technology work on the chaotic streets of American cities. So let’s hope the Teslas worked The Kinks out by the time it arrived on our roads. Now we can expect it to arrive on our roads in 2026 or before 2027 Elon Musk joked during the presentation. Though let’s be honest tussle has been promising fully autonomous Robo cabs next year since 2019 so expect delays.
In the meantime, there are still several unanswered questions. For starters, we don’t know how big the battery is or how much range the Tesla Cybercab is going to have. we also don’t know how quickly or efficiently its inductive charging will be or when this technology will become widespread for us to use on the roads or in our driveways.
Now what we do have is a ballpark figure of under $30,000 when Tesla eventually begins sales to private owners. The automaker doesn’t plan on running a cabinetwork itself instead what it wants to do is sell you a Tesla Cybercab or two and when you’re not giving yourself a ride to work or wherever you can rent them out to other people for autonomous rides making money while you sleep.
Alongside the Cyber Cab, Tesla also unveiled the Tesla Robo van or Robo van a 20-passenger autonomous electric vehicle that can be reconfigured for cargo. That’s right Tesla invented the bus. It’s not very different from the purpose-built vehicles that we’ve been seeing from Japanese and Korean automakers at shows like CES for years now think of the PBV concepts that KIA rolled out at CES This year.
Now when you think about it an autonomous electric vehicle is essentially a robot only it’s got wheels instead of legs and it’s not shaped like a person but that’s why Tesla chose this opportunity to also Trot out its humanoid Optimus robots at the event. You should be able to buy an Optimus robot for around $20,000 to $30,000 in the long term.
It can be a teacher, babysit your kids, walk your dog, mow your lawn, pick up groceries, be your companion, serve drinks—essentially, anything you can imagine. It brought out a platoon of these monochrome C3PO-looking dudes to do a little dance at the end of the presentation and serve drinks to partygoers. That’s where we’ve also got a deep dive into the long and rocky road toward Tesla’s autonomous Robotaxis. Drive safe and I’ll see you soon.
