- Tesla said it is starting to invite “select customers” to order Cybercabs.
- The steering-wheel-less two-seater could be the first Level 4 autonomous vehicle that people can actually own.
- Customers will also need to purchase a self-driving subscription for the Cybercab to work, Tesla said.
Tesla will soon begin selling its steering-wheel-less Cybercab for personal use, the company announced Friday.
The Cybercab will cost $29,990, which is $7,000 less than the Model 3 and will make the cheapest golden two-seater Tesla vehicle ever. According to a screenshot of the order page shared by Tesla, deliveries will begin as early as next month.
There are a few pitfalls. The Cybercab won’t work anywhere in the country, Tesla says, but rather in “supported service areas.” Its operation will also require a $299 per month self-driving subscription, with the first month included for free. That’s about $3,600 per year just for vehicle use, before insurance or maintenance costs.
And the model will be sold to hand-picked buyers, at least to begin with. “Some customers are now welcome to purchase Cybercab for personal use,” the company said in a tweet on its Robotaxi X account. Tesla said initial availability was limited.
It is unclear when or if sales will expand to the general public. But selling a car that you can actually own and that is capable of driving itself without supervision would be an important step both for the automotive world and for Tesla in particular.
Putting self-driving cars in the hands of everyday people has been one of Elon Musk’s central promises for about a decade, and he has missed his self-imposed deadlines year after year. Meanwhile, today’s driverless cars are owned and operated by ride-hailing companies, like Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla, not by individuals. The Cybercabs in service today are part of Tesla’s Robotaxi service, which opened last year and now transports passengers in a handful of U.S. cities, including Austin and Miami.
Tesla’s biggest promoters online applauded the news. But it’s sure to annoy some of the many Tesla owners who have paid for fully autonomous driving over the years and waited patiently for their Model 3s and Model Ys to become autonomous. Most recently, Musk said this would happen in the second quarter of next year in areas where the Robotaxi service operates.
The Tesla Cybercab has two seats and no steering wheel or pedals.
Photo by: Motor1.com
Tesla is far from the only company looking to one day sell self-driving cars to the public. Rivian plans to introduce lidar and a new internal chip into the R2 in hopes of one day giving it autonomous driving capability. General Motors plans to introduce an eyeless version of Super Cruise on the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028. It will work first on highways before expanding to other types of roads, GM says.
Tesla touts the Personal Cybercab as “fully autonomous” and says owners will be able to monitor their vehicles and manage trips through the Tesla app. But overall, the announcement raises almost as many questions as it answers.
For example, it was not mentioned whether customers could add their taxis to Robotaxi’s fleet and earn passive income, another long-standing promise of Elon Musk. It’s also unclear where the Cybercab will be able to operate, or whether Tesla will expand that territory quickly enough to make its purchase worthwhile beyond a handful of cities.
Another cloud of uncertainty hanging over the Cybercab deployment is regulatory in nature. The Cybercab’s unconventional design has attracted the attention of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which questions how exactly Tesla determined that the vehicle complied with motor vehicle safety standards. The Tesla lacks a steering wheel, pedals, and side mirrors, all items typically required for a car to be road legal.
The federal government allows companies to request the deployment of non-compliant vehicles, but these deployments are capped at 2,500 vehicles per year. (Zoox, for its part, recently won an exemption to commercially deploy 5,000 of its autonomous pods over two years.) NHTSA has said it is working to streamline the rules for autonomous vehicles, which could work in Tesla’s favor here.
If Tesla can achieve this, it will go down in the history books. Of course, the company has made plenty of ambitious promises about self-driving cars — like 1 million robo-taxis by 2020, and unsupervised autonomous driving almost every year since — and they have generally fallen short. It remains to be determined whether the deployment of Cybercab will interrupt this sequence.
Contact the author: Tim.Levin@InsideEVs.com
Updated at 8:12 p.m. ET with additional details on the Cybercab, background on other automakers’ efforts and regulatory issues.
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