Elon Musk unveiled Teslaâs autonomous robotaxi, now known as the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California on Thursday night. And stop me if youâve heard this one before, but the billionaire Tesla CEO says itâs coming in two or three years.
The Cybercabs are two-seater vehicles with no steering wheel or pedals, and Musk billed them as âindividualized mass transit.â Musk promised inductive charging, meaning the vehicle wonât need to be plugged in like a traditional electric car, but didnât provide any details on how that would work.
Musk started the highly anticipated show by walking out of a Warner Bros. studio building into a Cybercab that drove him to the audience. It made for quite a splashy presentation, complete with the glitz and glitter of Hollywood, and Musk is nothing if not a showman. The only question is whether he can actually deliver something heâs been promising is just âtwo years awayâ every year for the past decade.

A concept video for the vehicle was playing behind the Tesla CEO as he was speaking on stage and he claimed âwe expect the cost to be below $30,000,â to a large swell of cheers from the audience. But it wasnât long after naming the price that he was interrupted by someone in the crowd who shouted out to ask when the Cybercabs were going to be available for purchase.
âWe do expect actually to start fully autonomous, unsupervised FSD in Texas and California next year,â Musk said to even more cheers.
But then Musk finished his sentence, making it clear he was just talking about the existing Teslas on the road that would presumably need local government permission to operate without drivers.
âAnd thatâs obviously⊠thatâs with the Model 3 and Model Y. And then we expect to be in production with the Cybercab, which is really highly optimized for autonomous transport, in probably⊠well, I tend to be a little optimistic with time frames, but in 2026,â Musk said stammering with a laugh.
âSo, yeah. Before 2027, let me put it that way. And weâll make this vehicle in very high volume,â Musk claimed, to a much more subdued crowd response.
Amusingly, some of the graphics playing behind Musk still called the vehicle a ârobotaxi,â and whoeverâs running the X account for Tesla also didnât get the memo that theyâre called Cybercabs now, not robotaxis:
Robotaxi is premium point-to-point electric transport, accessible to everyone pic.twitter.com/oLykwaaTHm
â Tesla (@Tesla) October 11, 2024
Twenty of the Cybercabs were available for special guests to try out at Thursday nightâs event in Burbank. Musk predicted that autonomous cars would become ten times safer than human-driven cars and a big selling point is the idea that people who buy Cybercabs would be able to rent them out when the owner isnât using them like a driverless Uber.
Notably, Musk didnât say that Tesla was pursuing the regulatory approvals needed for any of the things he was mentioning. And as weâve seen with other companies, thatâs a huge hurdle.
Musk also showed off a Robovan, with a sleek futuristic style, but didnât give any indication when that might be a reality. âWeâre going to make this. And itâs going to look like that,â Musk insisted, with a tone betraying the fact that he perhaps didnât even believe it himself.
The Robovan will supposedly fit 20 people (four more people than the futuristic Loop vehicles he promised and never delivered on back in the 2010s).
Robovan details pic.twitter.com/Pdito0dfRq
â Tesla (@Tesla) October 11, 2024
The billionaire CEO also showed off the Optimus robot, which he says will mow your lawn, get your groceries, and watch your kids. Musk said he thought Optimus would be âthe biggest product ever of any kind.â
Musk claimed the robot would cost â$20-30,000 long-term,â but didnât give details we hadnât heard before. Many experts are skeptical that Musk could meet that price point if he gets Optimus into mass production.
But the robots were on hand during the event, supposedly mixing drinks for guests, though itâs not clear how âautonomousâ the robots were in reality. Musk has tried that sleight-of-hand before, with a human operator controlling things just out of frame.
Optimus is your personal R2D2 / C3PO, but better
It will also transform physical labor in industrial settings pic.twitter.com/iCET3a9pd8
â Tesla (@Tesla) October 11, 2024
The event was titled âWe, Robotâ and livestreamed on YouTube, but itâs likely to be a huge disappointment to many people who were hopeful that Musk would promise something that was actually coming soon.
CNBCâs Squawk on the Street asked a bullish analyst on Thursday morning whether weâd get any info on cost per mile, scaling the cybercab, a ridesharing app, or insurance costs. We didnât hear anything even approximating those kinds of details on Thursday.
Companies are already doing driverless taxis out in the real world. Alphabetâs Waymo is operating in markets like Los Angeles and San Francisco. GMâs Cruise operates in Phoenix, Dallas, and Houston and recently announced the company will be launching a partnership with Uber in 2025. Cruise temporarily suspended operations in California after an incident in October 2023 where a self-driving vehicle hit and dragged a pedestrian who was jaywalking in San Francisco, but resumed in three cities in June 2024.
Musk has become a lightning rod of controversy over recent years, buying Twitter in 2022 and turning it into a hotbed of far-right extremism and conspiracy theories. Musk also came out as a Republican in 2022, coincidentally just a day before an unflattering Business Insider story alleging he offered to buy a flight attendant a horse in exchange for sexual favors. The billionaire denied that story.
The American oligarch has fully embraced Trumpism, despite previously calling Trump too old to run again, and has even started a Super PAC thatâs trying to get the neo-fascist former president back into the White House. But Trump may not be the good friend in business that Musk is hoping for, if Trumpâs own words can be believed.
Trump gave a speech in Detroit on Thursday where he rambled about a number of topics, even touching on autonomous vehicles, which he doesnât like.
âChinese and other countries produced automobile and autonomous vehicles,â Trump said. âDo you like autonomous? Does anybody like an autonomous vehicle? You know what that is, right? When you see a car driving along.â
âSome people do, I donât know,â Trump continued. âA little concerning to me, but the autonomous vehicles, weâre going to stop from operating on American roads.â
TRUMP: "Other countries produced auto-moâbile and autonomous vehicles. Do you like autonomous? Does anybody like an autonomous vehicle? You know what that is, right?"
CROWD: *one person claps* pic.twitter.com/68y8nP5sIl
â Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 10, 2024
But who knows if Musk can deliver on the things he promised on Thursday. Weâve heard all of this before in some version or another. Musk has been saying for years that fully autonomous vehicles will be delivered so very soon. Someone even created a video a couple of years ago collecting all his promises since 2014.
âIn 2020, we expect to have a million robotaxis on the road,â Musk said on an earnings call in 2019, as just one example.
Nobody knows what the future holds, and Musk does have a habit of delivering products very late. But there are certainly times when his promises simply didnât happen or the finished product was so unlike what he promised that itâs just downright comical.
Do you remember the 16-person vehicles he was promising various municipalities like Chicago and Las Vegas? Musk called it The Loop, not to be confused with the Hyperloop.
The Boring Company was going to build it and transport passengers in a tunnel covering the 18 miles between downtown Chicago and OâHare Airport. The whole ride would take about 12 minutes, according to Musk, and it looked pretty futuristic, as you can see in a portion of the concept video below.

That video has since been scrubbed from the internet. Musk never delivered on a futuristic version of The Loop for Chicago or any other city. Instead, he built a tunnel in Las Vegas with human drivers who are operating normal Teslas at slow speeds. It was very disappointing, to say the least.
What are the odds that Muskâs new Cybercab becomes The Loop? We donât know. But that two or three-year timeframe doesnât make us very optimistic about the Cybercabâs future.