Elon Musk’s Cybercab, Robovan reveal party falls flat

Tesla’s stock price was down 8% early Friday after a Thursday event where company CEO Elon Musk unveiled a new two-door electric vehicle dubbed Cybercab that is designed for fully autonomous operation, a feature most notable in the car’s lack of steering wheel or pedals.
Those attending the private event also got a peek at a Tesla Robovan, another new model aiming for full autonomous driving and capable of carrying 20 passengers. Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, also made an appearance at the gathering, with a number of the android units mixing and serving drinks to guests, according to reports.
While the Cybercab and Robovan reveals represent the first new model unveilings since the Cybertruck coming out in 2019, a Thursday evening event long on pomp and short on details, along with Musk’s history of coming up short on promised innovation goals, soured investors in spite of the Tesla leader’s upbeat commentary.
“We’ll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination,” Musk said at the event, per a report from the Associated Press. “It’s going to be a glorious future.”
Among the few specifics shared were pricing for the Cybercab at under $30,000 and plans for the vehicle to go into production in 2026.
While Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving software has been an available feature for nine years on Tesla vehicles, the platform requires an attentive human driver at the wheel, ready to take over steering or apply the brakes at any time.
Musk has repeatedly missed deadlines he’s publicized for technology advancements when it comes to Tesla’s vehicles. A report from CNBC notes a few of those misfires, including in 2015 when Musk told shareholders full autonomous driving was only three years away; in 2016 when Musk said a Tesla vehicle would be able to drive across the country without any human intervention by 2017; and in 2019 when the Tesla CEO said his company would have 1 million robotaxi-ready vehicles on the road in 2020.
“Tesla yet again claimed it is a year or two away from actual automated driving — just as the company has been claiming for a decade. Indeed, Tesla’s whole event had a 2014 vibe, except that in 2014 there were no automated vehicles actually deployed on public roads,” Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies automated vehicles, told the Associated Press in an email. “Now there are real AVs carrying real people on real roads, but none of those vehicles are Teslas. Tonight did not change this reality; it only made the irony more glaring.”
While Tesla, which launched its first vehicle in 2008, has dominated U.S. electric vehicle sales for years, the company’s market share has been in decline in the face of a growing slate off electric vehicle offerings by competitors. Tesla’s share of the domestic EV market fell below 50% for the first time ever in the second quarter of this year, but sales remain well ahead of all other U.S. makers.