GoKawiilis transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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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.
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