Elon Musk has unveiled his long-promised robotaxi – called Cybercab – as the electric car boss bets on self-driving ride-hailing cars to revive his company’s fortunes.
At a much-hyped event in California on Thursday the Tesla chief executive arrived on stage in one of the new robotaxis, which has no steering wheel or pedals.
He told the excited crowd that Tesla will begin production on the new cars in 2026.
“The autonomous future is here,” Mr Musk declared.
The two-seater vehicles, which have butterfly-style wing doors and no rear window, will be available for customers to buy for less than $30,000 (£23,000) and will cost only 20 cents a mile to run, he said.
“The vast majority of the time, cars are just doing nothing,” he said on stage at Warner Bros Studios in Burbank. “But if they’re autonomous, they could be used five times more, maybe 10 times more.”
The announcement comes after years of delays to his promised autonomous taxi service.
Only a handful of investors and influencers were invited to the demonstration in person, although it was live-streamed on Mr Musk’s X social network, formerly known as Twitter.
A few people at the event were given rides in the new vehicle.
The Tesla boss also showcased a larger, self-driving vehicle – called Robovan – capable of carrying up to 20 people, and showed off the company’s Optimus humanoid robot.
Mr Musk’s plan is to operate a fleet of self-driving Tesla taxis that passengers can hail through an app. Individual Tesla owners will also be able to make money on the app by listing their vehicles as robotaxis.
The billionaire has repeatedly claimed Tesla is close to launching a robotic taxi service, first predicting in 2019 that it would produce operational vehicles by 2020.
That date has repeatedly slipped. In April, Mr Musk promised the company would reveal its plans on August 8, but in July pushed the date back again.
At the time, he said: “Requested what I think is an important design change to the front.”
Tesla already sells electric cars which feature a suite of autonomous and advanced driver assistance features. Its cars in the US include technology dubbed “Full-Self Driving”, which allows the vehicles to drive themselves on most roads with human monitoring.
For years, technology companies have been pursuing developing self-driving taxis, which will operate similar to ride-hailing apps like Uber.
Businesses such as Google-backed Waymo and Cruise have already built and deployed small fleets of self-driving cars, picking up passengers across multiple cities in the US.
However, these cars have already run into difficulties, with complaints from locals that self-driving cars can clog up traffic with erratic driving. In November, Cruise was forced to recall its vehicles after one was involved in a serious accident where a pedestrian was dragged under one of its vehicles.
Like Tesla’s other vehicles, the Cybercab will rely on cameras and an on-board computer to drive the car, eschewing more expensive Lidar sensors and lasers used by some rivals.
Yet even before launching a robotaxi, Tesla has faced questions over the safety of its autonomous driving features on its passenger cars – although Mr Musk has insisted its features will make Tesla’s cars safer than an average driver.
A report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that Tesla’s cars had been involved in 542 crashes when driving its Autopilot or self-driving systems, resulting in 14 deaths.
Mr Musk has pursued launching a self-driving taxi service after electric vehicle (EV) sales stalled around the world. Tesla’s electric car sales fell across the first six months of 2024, as consumer demand for EVs fails to live up to expectations owing to their higher costs.
Despite emerging as the Western world’s leading electric carmaker, Tesla’s market value is down around 40pc from a high point in 2021, when the company was worth more than $1 trillion.
While its rivals have been running robotaxi services for longer, some analysts say Tesla’s manufacturing capacity and vast amount of data gathered by its passenger vehicles should allow it to expand more rapidly.
“Like Waymo, Tesla is likely to launch its robotaxi service city by city; but unlike Waymo, it should be able to scale much faster,” said Tasha Keeney, an analyst at Tesla shareholder Ark Invest.
Mr Musk, meanwhile, has pegged investors’ hopes to its self-driving future. He said in July: “The value of Tesla overwhelmingly is autonomy. So I recommend anyone who doesn’t believe that Tesla would solve vehicle autonomy should not hold Tesla stock. They should sell their Tesla stock.”
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