Tesla’s highly anticipated “We, Robot” event has finally concluded and the highlight of the event has been the Cybercab – a fully autonomous vehicle featuring no pedals and no steering wheel. With the electric car market having witnessed a slowdown both globally and in the US markets, Tesla is banking on its advancements in the autonomous driving space, to drive long-term growth in the electric car market.
What is the Cybercab?
As its name suggests, the Cybercab is a fully-autonomous robotaxi. While no details have been revealed with regard to the car’s battery capacity or power levels, we know that it gets butterfly doors and room for two. Musk claims that it will go into production by late 2026 or more likely, 2027. However, no one in particular is holding their breath as several upcoming Tesla projects remain stuck in the pipeline. A primary example of this is the Roadster whose concept surfaced in 2017, and was earmarked for production in 2025. At present, a production-ready Roadster in 2025 remains an unlikely event. Musk’s plans to produce a low-cost ($25,000) Model 2 were also ditched abruptly. The Cybercab marks a decisive shift in strategy for Tesla which begins its move away from being a maker of EVs to one that produces robots and AI-driven tech. With legacy carmakers having gained considerable ground in the EV market, to say nothing of the onslaught of cost-effective Chinese EVs, led by BYD, Musk is counting on autonomous driving to be the key differentiator.
Low running cost is a major aspect of Cybercab ownership as Musk rather ambitiously describes it as a mix of “AirBnB and Uber” meaning that consumers can rent out the Cybercab as a taxi when not deploying it for personal use. “It’s going to be a glorious future” claims Musk. At present, the Cybercab has been announced with a price tag of $30,000 or approximately ₹25 lakh.
What does it mean for personal mobility?
The implications of the Cybercab and its big brother the RoboVan are immense. Affordable, hassle-free autonomous mobility for the masses. However, at the moment, Tesla does not have approval from regulators, which it will require before putting the Cybercab into production. Musk is presently the world’s biggest evangelist for autonomous driving, although his claims have been met with scepticism thanks to several mishaps that have occurred under the watchful eye of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) tech. Its most recent casualty occurred as early as this year where a motorcyclist was killed by a Tesla driver allegedly using FSD. However, Musk claims that autonomous driving technology, when turned mainstream will lead to far fewer accidents, will ensure greater on-road safety and save a lot of time for individuals.
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Musk has repeatedly maintained the self-driving can only become mainstream through extensive real-world testing, which will provide the brand the necessary data to fine-tune the technology till it is error-free.
Despite Musk’s optimism, the fact remains that Tesla isn’t even the first carmaker in the US to be granted government approval for Level 3 autonomous driving – Mercedes-Benz was. At present Tesla has not received approval to even sell the Cybertruck in European markets. Although Tesla is closer than ever before to getting FSD approvals in Europe and China where regulators are rumoured to approve FSD (Supervised) by the end of 2024, the event failed to increase shareholder confidence as Tesla stocks sank 6% in pre-market trading on Friday.
The future of technology like the Cybercab lies heavily on how quickly and widely Tesla’s unsupervised and fully autonomous driving software gets regulatory approval. And thus far, Tesla is yet to crack its former home state of California and its current one in Texas. Although most true believers claim that Tesla is operating at Level 4 autonomous tech, officially it is only classified as Level 2.
It is far too early to speculate what this means for the Indian market where Tesla is yet to officially exist, and whose India plans appear to have been put on ice indefinitely. As impressive as the Cybercab and the Robovan are to behold, tapping into Sci-fi movies and Art Deco aesthetics, it has only excited die-hard Tesla enthusiasts.
The road to fully autonomous driving is a long and arduous one. Musk himself has highlighted the challenges on X saying: “The limiting factor right now is that the amount of miles between interventions is so long that it takes a while to figure out which version is better than the other version because none of them are requiring any interventions. The average person only drives about 10,000 miles in a year”
What this effectively means is that even if unsupervised FSD is authorised in states like Texas and California, where it’s scheduled for approval next year, the more effective it becomes, the longer it has to be driven to discover errors in the software’s ability to intervene at a critical juncture. Tesla has to effectively have access to, in Musk’s words “billions of miles” under its belt and history has proven that such an undertaking has been accompanied by considerable collateral damage, often leading to fatalities. While Musk’s ultimate goal may be a sincere one, ensuring total driving safety in the future at the cost of today’s pedestrians is one that’s not likely to sit well with regulators in any part of the world.
Musk has a history of making claims that cannot be backed. In 2016, Musk said that a Tesla would make a cross-country journey without needing human intervention by 2017. That never happened. According to CNBC, he told investors in 2019 that he would have a million road-ready Robotaxis by 2019. In 2023, Musk had to provide a critical update for all its Autopilot enabled vehicles in the US (over 2 million units due to a defect. He does have some incredible victories (Model 3, Cybertruck) to his credit, but fully autonomous self-driving vehicles seems like yet another bid to raise funds.