Tesla revealed their new Cybercab on Thursday at their We, Robot event, along with a surprise announcement of a new Robovan.
This comes as the long-awaited realization of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s promises of fully automated vehicles, which he has been making for about a decade. Musk showed up to the stage of Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California in a silver, two-seater Cybercab an hour after the event was supposed to begin.
He said that Tesla had 21 more Cybercabs already built and that when the model hits the market, it will sell for below $30,000. Musk also said he hoped Tesla could begin producing Cybercabs in earnest by 2027. Furthermore, Tesla revealed a surprise in the Robovan. The Robovan is a large, fully autonomous vehicle that works similarly to a bus, with a capacity of 20 people.
Cybercab and Robovan
Musk and Tesla’s plans to produce an unsupervised version of Fully Self-Driving vehicles (FSD) have been a long time in the making. Tesla has had FSDs for a while now, but all of them are considered to be supervised by Tesla because the driver needs to be in the vehicle for it to function.
Both models revealed on Thursday will be unsupervised, marking a new era of FSDs for Tesla and Musk. “It’s going to be a glorious future,” Musk said at the We, Robot event on Thursday.
The Robovan was the big surprise of the entire night. With its capacity of 20 people, it is meant to solve the potential issue of user density. The Cybercab, in turn, is a two-seater vehicle, so it has minimal capacity.
The high-capacity model will also feature inductive charging, which can charge by pulling up to a charging station. No one will need to plug anything into the vehicle to recharge its batteries.
The Robovan and Cybercab look very futuristic. Both are silver and have slick designs as viewers would have imagined the future to look like when watching The Jetsons.
“One of the things we want to do – and we’ve done this with the Cybertruck – is we want to change the look of the roads,” said Musk. “The future should look like the future.”
Musk’s unsupervised FSD delays
In 2015, Musk promised to have fully autonomous vehicles by 2018, but that didn’t happen. He also said in 2016 that an FSD Tesla would make a cross-country drive in 2017, and again, that promise went unrealized. Musk said in 2019 to investors that he could have one million Cybercabs out in 2020, and like his previous promises, it fell through the cracks.
When Musk announced that he was making the Cybercab in early 2024, there was a lack of investor confidence because he had made the claims before. However, this event proved that Tesla is committed to an unsupervised future for FSD.
“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” Musk said on a call with analysts. “We will, and we are.”