Fred Lambert's TSLA Cybercab re-launch predictions

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So TSLA is re-launching the Cybercab again on September 3rd after having most recently launched it back in 2024. Neutral observer Fred Lambert has a good take on it.

To summarize, Fred believes that TSLA will announce something like 1,000 cybercabs, but they will continue to only have 25 or so robotaxis in service nationwide at any one time. So the headlines from this launch will look OK, but the reality on the ground will remain the same.

TSLA longs may pump the stcok in the short-term on this news, but I expect it will come back down soon enough.

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I asked GoogleAi about Fred Lambert…

Fred Lambert is the Editor-in-Chief of Electrek, a prominent online publication dedicated to electric transportation and renewable energy.

Within the EV community—particularly among Tesla owners and investors—the concept of him being a “neutral observer” has long been a subject of intense debate:

  • Early Advocacy: In the mid-to-late 2010s, Lambert was widely seen as highly supportive of Tesla, gaining prominence through exclusive scoops and frequent interactions with Elon Musk. During this era, critics outside the Tesla ecosystem often accused him of being a “shill” or overly biased toward the company.
  • The Shift: Over time, particularly around 2018–2019 and accelerating through his decision to sell all of his Tesla stock (TSLA) by 2024, Lambert’s reporting became increasingly critical of Tesla’s management, timelines, and driver-assist safety claims.
  • Current Perception: Today, the community is deeply divided. Hard-core Tesla enthusiasts frequently label his coverage as “FUD” (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) or emotionally driven. Conversely, Tesla skeptics and more broad-market EV observers view his perspective as a realistic, necessary critique from someone who thoroughly understands the industry.

The Captain

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Fred is definitely not neutral. :smiley:

However, I think he is correct. Tesla’s robotaxi operation is barely functioning. Over a year after launch they only are running 20-30 vehicles a day. On the earnings call they said they had about 380,000 total autonomous miles thus far. Waymo does that about every two or three days.

The Cybercab is shaping up to be a flop. Production started back in February and they are just now entering service. In the meantime they are just sitting in parking lots depreciating.

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Elon Time is notoriously over optimistic. Have you heard of Parkinson’s Law?

Google AI:

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. [1]

What It Means

  • Time stretching: A task that takes two hours will stretch to fill an entire day if you give yourself a full day to do it.
  • Origin: British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote this rule in a 1955 essay for The Economistafter observing how bureaucracies operate.
  • Procrastination: Extra time leads to overthinking, distractions, and slower work. [1, 2, 3, 4]

How to Use It

  • Set short deadlines: Give yourself less time on purpose to force focus.
  • Use time limits: Track your time with a timer to finish tasks faster.
  • Control budgets: The rule also applies to money, where people spend a full budget just because it is there. [1, 2, 3]

Parkinson’s Law .pdf

Elon Time might be a Feature, not a Bug. It is also inline with Elon’s penchant of mass firings. At X/Twitter he fired 80% of the staff and got the remainder to do more than the bloated staff ever did.

The error lots of people make is judging Elon Musk against ordinary mortals. Ordinary mortals don’t amass a trillion bucks in a lifetime.

GoogleAI:

Evaluating Elon Musk by standard corporate or personal financial metrics often misses the mark because his wealth behaves more like a sovereign economy than a standard bank account. He briefly became the world’s first trillionaire following the SpaceX initial public offering, though a subsequent market correction pulled his net worth back to roughly $864 billion. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Even with the massive volatility of his wealth, the idea of evaluating him under a unique lens stems from how that money is structured and used:

  • Unrealized Paper Asset Power: Musk famously draws no standard cash salary. Instead, his massive wealth is entirely tied up in equity across companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. This scale of paper wealth is deeply bound to public hype, narrative, and future promises rather than liquid cash flow. [1, 2, 3]
  • Civilizational Risk vs. Traditional Business: While traditional billionaires often build empires based on consumer goods or retail software, Musk’s underlying business thesis focuses on high-capital, high-risk infrastructure projects—colonizing Mars, rewriting global energy grids, and rebuilding space flight infrastructure. [1, 2]
  • Sovereign-Level Influence: Because he commands industries that hold monopolies over satellite internet networks (Starlink) and launch capabilities, his business decisions function essentially with the geopolitical weight of a medium-sized nation state. [1, 2]

Whether that standard makes him an “extraordinary mortal” driving humanity forward or a dangerous concentration of private power over public democratic systems remains one of the modern era’s most polarizing debates. [1, 2]

The Captain

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I guess I would dispute that. While the firings certainly reduced staffing and overhead - they also slowed the development of new features and more importantly virtually wiped out the content moderation staff, something that came back to bite him quickly as sponsors had no where to turn to keep their paid content away from unbecoming environment like stiff-arm salute tropes, nudity, or other things.

See if you can figure out during which year Elon bought Twitter:

IMG_0927
IMG_09271596Ă—1092 183 KB

This is not the chart of a thriving business. (it may also be true that he doesn’t care and that it is just a vanity project for him, but that is a different thing.)

Here’s the same trend in numbers, by year. See if you can follow it from this cumulative revenue report beginning in 2012, in billions:

| 2012 | 0.3 |
| 2013 | 0.6 |
| 2014 | 1.4 |
| 2015 | 2.2 |
| 2016 | 2.5 |
| 2017 | 2.4 |
| 2018 | 3.0 |
| 2019 | 3.4 |
| 2020 | 3.7 |
| 2021 | 5.0 |
| 2022 | 4.4 |
| 2023 | 2.9 |
| 2024 | 2.5 |

They also got rid of a lot of the legal, HR, and other departments, and one of the things bubbling now is that a different organization is laying claim to the name “Twitter”, along with “tweets” and other stuff. Yes, the law is that if you do not use a trademark for three years, it is considered “abandoned” and is available for someone else to take - without payment.

Maybe a law department paying attention to things could have avoided creating a competitor using your own brand equity?

In the mantra of “move fast and break things”, I’d say he’s moved fast. He’s also broken things, so … good? (The results of DOGE are likewise attributable to this theory. After claiming it would be “easy” to get $2 trillion in savings, that was amended to $1 trillion, then to $500 billion, and in the end it s unclear if thee were any savings at all, given that entire industries have been upended as a result of the project:

I’m thinking for the expensive consultants that had to be hired to replace some government workers who had been fired. The people overseeing nuclear arsenals, for one. There’s the bird flu epidemic which has cost that industry billions, there’s the cancelled leases on buildings which led to lawsuits and renegotiations, causing more than 70% of those efforts to be invalidated (at some legal cost.) There’s the cutback and rehiring of over 400 FAA staff which caused legal and real peril in the aviation industry, likewise at the USDA and FDA.

So some big hits Likewise big misses. I’m wagering Cybercab is another. Looks cool, but “does it work” is somehow more important, methinks.

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Pretty dismal revenue, especially considering the amount of inflation that occurred since 2019.

In related news,

More than 26,000 electric car owners in 30 countries were queried on behalf of the Global EV Alliance, an international network of national electric vehicle driver associations.

When asked to specify which brand or country of production they would avoid, 41 percent of all EV drivers named Tesla, 12 percent said China, and five percent said the United States.

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Regarding the Cybercab, I was driving down what we here in Houston area know as the “West Loop” which is a freeway. Everybody in Houston typically speeds on freeways when there is no congestion. I was passed by a Cybercab - also speeding - with Fla license tags so clearly not a TX Robotaxi.

Observation - it is incredibly UGLY in person - in same ugly class as CT. This one undoubtedly had a driver with controls though I never had a good angle to see in. Vision was horribly limited anyway because there was no rear window at all and the small windows at rear were covered too. I always thought a tiny 2 seat shoebox car like this was a bad choice. And with how bad it looked it was not a good look for already dis-illusioned shareholders (like me)

Edit: As for Elektrek Fred, he had an incredible level of bias re:Tesla for years. He actually still praises Tesla when it is deserved, however, he does what any good media person should do and that is point out BS now when he sees it. The Fred of past would never or rarely make any comments that were not glowing praise.

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I’m not quite understanding your point. Parkinson’s Law is bad thing, not a good thing as your AI output correctly summarizes.

In this case Elon Time is a definitely a bug. The available time to complete the project ended in February, or April at the latest when it was announced Cybercab was in full production.

The difference in these case and simply being late on a product is that according to Gemini Tesla spent roughly $5 billion in R&D and capex for the Cybercab, which includes building an assembly line with 125,000/unit per year capacity.

But there is no market or profit center for Cybercab, and won’t be for a long time. The assembly line was built years too early.

Goofy handled this one pretty well already, but it is worth noting that Fidelity had an investment stake in Twitter/X and the last known valuation before Twitter/X was rolled into XAi was $9.4 billion., down 78.7% from the $44 billion purchase price in just two years.

Instead of viewing Elon as immortal, it might be more accurate to view him as a human willing to make long shot bets that sometimes pay off, but not always.

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Interesting! 59% would buy Teslas, dozens of other car makers have to fight for the lesser half, the 41%. The Model Y is the proof in the pudding. With BYD and Tesla in the lead they sure have a hurdle! And they have to share the profits with dealers and supply chains.

GoogleAI:

The direct sales model used by Tesla and BYD gives them a massive pricing advantage over legacy automakers, who must share profits with their independent dealer networks. By cutting out the middleman, these EV leaders can adjust prices instantly to capture market share, while traditional brands face dealer markups and conflicting profit margins.

Traditional automakers are facing critical hurdles trying to catch up:

:money_bag: Profit Margins & The Dealer Dilemma

  • Legacy Automakers: Must build in a profit margin for both themselves and their franchise dealers. Dealers make most of their money on maintenance and repairs, which EVs need far less of, creating a misalignment of incentives.
  • Tesla & BYD: Control the entire supply chain and sell directly to consumers. This allows them to absorb price cuts that would push legacy dealership networks into the red.

:factory: Scale and Battery Supply

  • BYD’s Vertical Integration: BYD actually started as a battery company. They manufacture their own cells, chips, and powertrains in-house, giving them the lowest production costs in the world.
  • Tesla’s Gigafactories: Tesla’s massive manufacturing scale and casting techniques (like “megacasting”) allow them to churn out vehicles like the Model Y with far fewer parts and lower labor costs than traditional assembly lines.

:chart_decreasing: Legacy Software Traps

  • Over-the-Air Updates: Tesla and BYD designed their cars around a centralized computer architecture.
  • Legacy Fragmentation: Traditional cars use dozens of third-party parts, each with its own software. Updating a legacy EV often requires a physical trip to a dealership, frustrating buyers and slowing down innovation.

:winking_face_with_tongue:

The Captain

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Uh, no. That’s not what those numbers are saying. 59% might buy a Tesla. 41% will never buy a Tesla. Globally, Tesla has about 13% of the BEV market share, which is down a lot. Tesla sales have been basically flat since 2023 while the BEV sector has grown by double digits.

Also of note, Tesla’s margins have been compressed down to that of a typical car company. Which is to say they are buying sales just to sales volume.

The good news is Elon Musk got a gargantuan compensation package designed to keep him laser focused on Tesla. While this will cost shareholders plenty, they can sleep easy knowing his eye is squarely on the ball.

In unrelated news, Elon Musk is working on building data centers in space for a different company.

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I should have been more explicit. Yes, Parkinson’s Law points out a bad thing. Having been a management consultant for ten years I connected the dots between Elon Time and Parkinson’s Law by asking how Elon Time might speed things up. Here is how it works:

  • Creating a new product might take a year by traditional standards. By Parkinson’s Law it won’t get done in less time but more than likely the deadline will be missed.
  • Elon Time announces that the new product will be done in six month.
  • By Parkinson’s Law the deadline will be missed!
  • But it might get done in eleven months!
  • Tesla bears will shout, Elon gets it wrong again, HURRAH! :slightly_smiling_face:

As I have no financial interest in X I have no idea how it worked out economically. I’m super happy that Elon broke the censorship barriers! Did Elon lose money? Charity has its costs which Elon can easily cover.

Totally in line with the philosophy of breaking things to make them better faster.

The Captain

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In other words, once Tesla brought back EVs no one should ever catch up with them. The industry caught up with Ford’s model T. The difference is that Ford still makes cars while Tesla branched out to EV charging, storage, etc., and is branching out to Robots and CyberCabs and more.

Elon’s compensation package must increase the stock’s price.

GoogleAI:

Elon Musk’s massive potential $1 trillion compensation package requires Tesla’s market capitalization to surge to an astronomical $8.5 trillion. [1, 2]

Key Details of the Package

  • Performance-Based: Musk receives no traditional salary or cash bonus; the package consists entirely of stock grants tied strictly to goals. [1, 2]
  • Market Cap Milestone: Tesla’s market value must reach $8.5 trillion over a decade, requiring about a sixfold increase in stock value. [1, 2]
  • Operational Targets: He must also achieve operational milestones, including delivering 20 million vehicles, producing 1 million robots, gaining 10 million Full Self-Driving subscriptions, and deploying 1 million Robotaxis. [1]
  • Shareholder Approval: The controversial package was overwhelmingly approved by BBC News voters in late 2025. [1, 2]
  • Tesla’s current market cap is $1.377T
  • Tesla’s market capitalization to surge to an astronomical $8.5 trillion.
  • A six fold increase

GoogleAI:

Elon Musk’s equity-based compensation package approved by Tesla shareholders creates a dilution of approximately 12% of the adjusted share count. [1]

Key Details of the Dilution

  • Restricted Stock Grant: The package includes granting Musk 423,743,904 shares of common stock.[1]
  • Proportional Ownership: This amount represents 12% of Tesla’s adjusted share count, which reduces the proportional ownership stake of existing shareholders as the tranches vest and new shares are issued over a 10-year period. [1]
  • Performance Milestones: The dilution occurs progressively across 12 tranches tied to aggressive operational and market-cap milestones, scaling Tesla’s valuation up to $8.5 trillion. [1, 2]

Instead of a six fold increase, it gets diluted by 12%, say

  • Tesla’s current market cap is $1.377T
  • Tesla’s market capitalization to surge to an astronomical $8.5 trillion.
  • A FIVE fold increase

As Liberace might have said, “I cried all the way to the bank.”

GoogleAI:

Liberace famously used the phrase “I cried all the way to the bank” to brush off harsh newspaper critics and bad reviews while focusing on his massive financial success. [1, 2]

Origin of the Quote

  • First Use: Liberace originally wrote a letter to a critic saying he and his brother George “laughed all the way to the bank” after reading an amusingly bad review. [1, 2]
  • The Catchphrase: He later adjusted the phrasing to “I cried all the way to the bank” after dealing with particularly stinging attacks, and later noted on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson that he didn’t need to cry anymore because he eventually “bought the bank”. [1, 2, 3]
  • Cultural Impact: The line turned into a famous 1950s catchphrase representing commercial success over critical approval, eventually earning a spot in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The Captain

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I predict “more of the same.”

Which equals “not much.”

My earlier predictions don’t look to be at risk and they are much more modest than “1,000s of vehicles” and “serving half the population.”

If Tesla’s software and HW4 couldn’t achieve meaningful unsupervised autonomy all of last year and now 8 months into this year, why would we expect some big change now while vehicles are still using HW4?

They should make progress, but it’ll be a slow grind, city by city, with hardware updates (such as Cybercab) and software updates - like what we’ve been seeing.

There’s no big, rapid scaling, or hyper-exponential anything, except modest growth starting from small numbers.

Tesla Q1 2025 Earnings
”Once we can make it based [sic] to work in a few cities in America, we can make it work anywhere in America.”

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