Tesla’s steering wheel-free, scissor door-having Cybercab is apparently ready for primetime.
The two-seat robotaxi is getting an official launch event next Thursday in Austin, the carmaker announced this week. How quickly Cybercabs will actually hit streets—and whether you’ll be able to buy one for $30,000 anytime soon—are just some of the questions hanging over this rollout.
A big one centers around software. Specifically: Is Tesla’s good enough? Famously, Elon Musk is betting that he can make Tesla an autonomous-vehicle juggernaut using cameras alone. The Cybercab was built from the ground up around that gamble. But how reliable Tesla’s system is at scale is still an open question. Many experts argue that sensor redundancy through lidar and radar is key for safety. Industry leader Waymo took a not-so-subtle shot at Tesla’s strategy this week by saying in a blog post that cameras are “not enough” for safe autonomous driving at scale.
[We discuss the Cybercab and more on this week's Plugged-In Podcast, available wherever you listen/watch.]
To Tesla’s credit, its Robotaxi service does now offer driverless Model Y rides in Austin and some other markets, and that part of the business seems to be growing. On X this week, Tesla said its “unsupervised fleet is a lot bigger” and that it had extended its operating hours. Ethan McKanna of the crowdsourced Robotaxi Tracker website has detected a significant uptick in unsupervised rides, The Verge reported.
