I wonder what a Cybercab would charge for a trip from Boston to Washington DC? How competitive compared to an air flight, train ride, or bus trip? I’m guess a bus would be the cheapest.
And that brings us to remaining questions. Those include: Will Tesla actually sell these to customers for $30,000 or less? Will they come without steering wheels and pedals, or will they start out with these basic controls? Will they really be fully autonomous and safe? If Tesla wants to operate these in its own robotaxi fleets, how many will be deployed in those fleets? If they offer them to normal customers, how many people will actually buy a two-seat vehicle? Will the Cybercab flop like the Cybertruck did, or will it be a revolutionary small vehicle? I’m sure there are more questions, but those are a few that come to mind. What do you think?
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I’m surprised that the cargo area (trunk or hatchback) is so small. It’s not practical for a cab because passengers need to carry luggage when traveling.
Wendy
Time will answer! Enjoy a beer or two in the meanwhile.
What percentage of rides are passengers with luggage?
The Captain
Groceries?
Baby stroller?
Purchases from Home Depot, Lowe’s, WalMart, Kohls, Target, Costco?
Food for church or neighborhood dinner?
Bats & balls for Little League?
Dunno, it seems that “a trunk” is one of those things people kinda, sorta use for a variety of things. That’s why even Henry Ford had to start including them on his earliest cars, because people wouldn’t buy them without one. (The word comes from the “trunks” people strapped onto the earliest Model T’s for storage. Like “glove compartment”, it was a feature that the eponymous name stuck with even though the original use has long since disappeared.)
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The concept is fine, but Teslas can only operate autonomously in carefully geomapped areas, only during daylight hours and good weather, and can’t operate on freeways.
These restrictions are too limiting for a mass market vehicle.
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The Tesla taxi fleet is expected to be 90% CyberCab, and 10% Model Y Robotaxi and larger vehicles.
Tesla has looked at the number of passengers per fare and what they carry and found that the CyberCab works for 90% of the trips. it doesn’t make sense to dispatch a larger vehicle for a 1 -2 person fare.
intercst
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However that means there will be many fewer “larger” vehicles available if/when people need them, leading to more deadheading and/or wait times for such.
I’m sure they have done the math, but it seems that equipping vehicles with the kinds of accoutrements that most people use at one time or another would make sense, rather than try to individualize such things to such a small degree.
I mean, seriously: groceries?
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That was the statistic I was looking for. Ask the fare if they have luggage! Send the right size car. To travel with luggage reserve early.
Back then they didn’t have smartphones. 
The Captain
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The Cybercab does have a trunk, it just isn’t very big. Looks big enough for luggage for two people or some groceries.
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If the vehicle works for 90% of the trips, that’s not individualized, it’s “mass market”
But I understand your logic, “I once went to Home Depot and bought an 80 lb bag of concrete mix, so I need to buy a pickup truck.” And now your driving a much larger vehicle, and burning more fuel on all your trips. I don’t know if it’s still true today, but at one time Detroit sold a lot of vehicles by selling that.
Doesn’t Home Depot still offer a one-hour pick-up rental for $19.95?
https://www.homedepot.com/p/rental/load-n-go-truck-rental/316822131
intercst
(of course, I would have dragged the 80 lb bag home in a shopping cart)
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I mean, that’s not really analogous. If 10% of your trips require the hauling capacity of a pickup truck, then you need to buy a pickup truck as your vehicle. It’s simply not efficient or practical to rent a car for 10% of all your ordinary trips.
That’s not really the situation Tesla would be in either, though. They’ll be operating a fleet. They will be able in theory to supplement the Cybercab with larger vehicles (say, Model Y’s) in order to service the 10-15% of trips that involve more than two passengers.
But that’s in theory. In practice, we’ll have to see. Because part of the whole ride-hailing system is trying to balance the number of cars on the road with getting an acceptable ride-hailing wait time for your passengers. If your fleet has 100% cars that can take more than two passengers (which is everyone but Tesla), a four-passenger party will get their ride in the same amount of time as anyone else. But if your fleet is almost entirely two-passenger cars, then that party will have to wait a consider amount of time to get their ride - the cars are more dispersed. People in a 3- or 4-person group may get a worse experience than those travelling alone or in pairs.
Here’s what we don’t know - and how it relates to your example above. If 10-15% of cab rides are people in larger parties, does that mostly involve 10-15% of customers mostly using cabs for large parties (ie. a small number of your customers regularly travel in large groups), or does it mean that 10-15% of trips are used for large parties (ie. nearly all of your customers sometimes travel in large groups). If it’s the former, we would expect a modest impact on growth and adoption. If nearly all folks almost never need large cars, so you can easily afford to lose the small minority of folks who do. But if it’s the latter, then you have a problem - if nearly all folks need large cars sometimes, then you can’t afford to write them off.
To analogize back to pickups, if 10% of all trips in the U.S. actually need a pickup truck, but nearly all of those trips are done by all the same people (contractors or landscapers or what have you), then you can have a thriving non-pickup-truck market. Because 90% of the population doesn’t need a pickup. Which is the world we live in. But if we were in a timeline where 10% of all trips in the U.S. actually needed a pickup and those trips were evenly distributed - everyone needed to have a pickup for 10% of their trips - then there would be virtually no non-pickup car sales.
Which version applies to ride hailing? TBD…
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Depends on the consumers ability to do the arithmetic. If the pickup owner is needlessly paying a lot more for fuel on 90% of his trips, when does it get painful enough to reconsider? Most pickup purchases are a fashion statement.
One thing I know for sure. Elon can do the arithmetic better than most, and he’s a fantastic world-class salesman.
While Ford and GM were spending billions of dollars a year on advertising, Elon sold more cars with what he was crap-posting on Twitter. Genius.
intercst
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I hope it has a big trunk 'cause I’m gonna put my bike in it.
I think an autonomous two-seater with limited storage room will be as successful as Smart cars were in the US.
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Maybe, but that’s not the hypothetical here. If you have four people, you can’t fit into a cybercab. If you have trips that require a pickup, you can’t do them in a Corolla. So if the 10% of large group trips is concentrated like actual pickup truck trips (most of them are taken by the same people, and folks outside that subset of customers almost never have large group trips), then Tesla will be fine. If they’re not, and instead it’s nearly all people have large-group trips some of the time, then there will be less appetite to rely on the Tesla robotaxi app, since everyone will also have Waymo (or whomever) on their phone. Because Tesla can’t meet their needs one out of every ten trips.
I mean, that’s one way of framing it. Another is that Musk is actually pretty terrible at consumer-facing ventures as soon as he faces competition. Tesla’s sales grew as long as they were pretty much the only company that was really focusing on selling EV’s. As soon as other competitors entered the segment in earnest, sales declined for three consecutive years, even as EV sales were growing strongly. In part because his crap-posting on Twitter (and other endeavors) ended up hurting Tesla’s brand image, and in part because he didn’t adjust to the fact that advertising is more necessary in a crowded market than when you’re all alone.
BTW, I fully expect Tesla will have to advertise this new service. People actively research when they buy cars. They aren’t going to actively research when they choose a ride-hailing service. Tesla won’t gain much market growth if they’re doing their own app with no advertising, against competitors like Waymo that already have a larger footprint and are already starting to advertise.
Ignoring that, it’s no answer to the issue raised above to simply point to Musk’s successes. Musk is like a venture capitalist. He fails a fair amount of the time, but his wins are incredibly profitable. It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that he hasn’t done the math correctly on this - that this is more like solar roof or Dojo or the Loop or any of a number of endeavors that don’t really pan out.
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Yes that is what happens when competition enters the picture to any business that once had the only product in a business sector but now faces competition. It is inevitable.
Tesla is STILL the #1 brand in the USA 2025 & 2026 so far.
Tesla is no longer the best selling brand in China; yet the model Y is the best selling single model in China.
And:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas-chinese-made-ev-sales-rise-394-may-2026-06-02/
Tesla extends Chinese-made EV growth as sales surge in May**
https://www.reuters.com/business/tesla-may-registrations-jump-several-european-markets-recovery-continues-2026-06-01/
Tesla May registrations jump in several European markets as recovery continues**
BYD in 2025 and currently in 2026 holds the crown for most global EV sales.
Likely Tesla won’t ever recapture that title. But it still sells lots of EVs. Tesla is now a conglomerate-EVs, Space, Robots, Energy Storage, Chargers, Batteries, Cybercab, Brain Chip, AI…I’m sure I’ve missed a few of Musk’s businesses.
Yep, he doesn’t have winners in every sector. He just needs to be competitive in some. And he will move his billions into areas that he is doing well. Musk cannot really control all the businesses he has started. He must choose the right people to run those businesses. The Musk haters need to get over it. He’s not going anywhere.
Getting back to the cybercab. I believe Waymore has the lead in self driving vehicles utilized in this type of service. It remains to be seen if they can maintain the lead.
A new entrant today:
https://insideevs.com/news/798932/lucid-gravity-robotaxi-houston-expansion-uber-nuro/
Lucid And Uber Will Bring Robotaxis To Houston Next
The Lucid, Nuro, and Uber partnership is moving fast. Their next stop after California is Texas.
The ride-hail giant is gearing up to deploy the Gravity EVs in San Francisco this year.
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I think it’s really meant for one passenger, or maybe two. So for most people, there’s sufficient space for their luggage. If a family is traveling, they would order a larger vehicle … with more luggage space.
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I used to be much more bullish about robotaxis, but now no longer see them as a very disruptive idea, for a few reasons. However, a comment today from a reader really helped me zero in on one key point.
First, though, let me emphasize that I do think robotaxis will take over the taxi market. Eventually, they will be good enough and cheap enough that paying a human to drive a car instead of using robotaxi software just won’t make sense. In fact, I don’t think we’re far off from this.
Robotaxis will end up eating into some portion of normal owner-driven transportation as well.
However, that is not what a lot of the robotaxi hype centers around. A lot of the robotaxi hype assumes that robotaxis will make much of the car ownership market go away, that most people (or at least many of them) will stop buying cars and start using robotaxis instead. There are a few reasons I just don’t see that happening. Let’s dive into those now.
Consumer cars are already getting the same self-driving capabilities as robotaxis. You will be able to have your own car drive you wherever you want, and more safely than you would do it. BYD is already saying it will take on crash liability whenever its self-driving tech is being used. Tesla “Full Self Driving” will easily drive you on most trips now, even if it’s still not able to be unsupervised due to edge cases and bad weather concerns. The tech needs to improve, competition needs to come to market in the US, and costs need to come down, but capabilities have clearly improved.
The key point is that a Robo Taxi will NOT be cheaper per mile than owning a similar car. They are running the wheels off those RoboTaxis. Many sets of tires . Component parts, including seats, wearing out, needing replacement. A Robo Taxi might last only 2 or 3 years where a personal EV could possibly last 15-20 years.
And besides cost considerations:
People own cars for status reasons
People treat their cars as extensions of their homes, with all kinds of personal stuff in them, as mobile storage spaces, etc.
[some] People want immediate access to a car
People like different types of vehicles and are not going to be happy all using a few standard robotaxi vehicles.
Consider this final point: Most people buy cars well beyond what they need in terms of size and capability just for the odd chance they need more space or capability.
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One thing @albaby1 has articulated so well, is that with the Uber/Lyft model a lot of indirect costs are pushed off onto the driver. Things like the cost of parking, cleaning, time spent maintaining the vehicle, etc.
While robotaxis eliminate the non-trivial cost of the driver, all those indirect cost are born directly by the fleet operator. So it stands to reason that while robotaxis might be cheaper than Uber/Lyft, the likely won’t be a ton cheaper.
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