Tesla CEO Elon Musk walked up to the mic on Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call and dropped a date that will either send its stock soaring, or age like milk. According to Musk, Tesla’s Cybercab, a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals, will enter production within the next 251 days.
Start the clock, folks.
Welcome back to Critical Materials, your daily roundup for all things electric and tech in the automotive space. Also on deck: car companies are asking Trump not to tax manufacturing robots, and Volkswagen has some unsurprising data about how people ended up with its electric vehicles.
30%: Tesla Cybercab Coming In 2026, Musk Says
Photo by: InsideEVs
The Tesla Cybercab was arguably more polarizing than even the Cybertruck was. After all, showing off a car without any way for someone to control it from the front seat (without an Xbox controller, that is) does raise a few questions.
According to Musk, the company is making some great progress on its completely vision-based Full Self-Driving software. Consumers are currently being pushed the non-Robotaxi branch of FSD v14, which has been received fairly well. The progress is apparently so promising that Tesla feels comfortable enough to begin the preparations necessary to launch the production version of the Cybercab before the end of Q2 next year.
“We’re going to expand production as fast as we can, and as fast as our suppliers can keep up with,” Musk said during the call. “Then we’re going to think about where we build incremental factories beyond that. The single biggest expansion in production will be the Cybercab, which starts production in Q2 next year.”
For all of those hoping that Tesla’s production version would have a steering wheel and pedals, I’ve got some bad news for you. Musk says that the production version (which, again, is poised to launch in less time than it takes to gestate a human baby) won’t have either. “That’s really a vehicle that’s optimized for full autonomy,” he continued. Musk then confirmed what we were all wondering: “It, in fact, does not have a steering wheel or pedals and is really an enduring optimization on minimizing cost per mile for fully considered cost per mile of operation.”
The Cybercab production timeline alone is a bit of a wild promise, but there was one other interesting piece of news from Musk about Tesla expanding its production as fast as suppliers could keep up with. The only thing is that Tesla isn’t really production-constrained right now. For example, Gigafactory Texas is operating at around 20% capacity on the Cybertruck production line. Tesla also said that it was planning for a few bad quarters following its tax-credit-boosted Q3.
So when Musk says that Tesla is planning to increase capacity based on anticipated demand, it’s probably fair to ask: demand from who? Investors? FSD buyers? The general public looking to buy a cheap EV that also drives them around?
Maybe Tesla can pull off a Q2 launch for the Cybercab. If it does, and it goes off without a hitch, this could be Tesla’s next Tesla moment. With falling demand, slimmer margins and models that are feeling a bit old (despite recent refreshes), the automaker needs a win. If it’s lucky, this will be a more realistic Musk timeline than usual.
60%: Automakers Plead With Trump: Do Not Tax The Robots
Photo by: InsideEVs
If there’s one thing that unites automakers, it’s a shared hatred for higher costs. There’s been a lot of that going on lately, too. President Donald Trump’s love of tariffs has not been great for their bottom lines.
Now, the U.S. Department of Commerce will begin conducting probes under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, a move that could tax the import of factory automation equipment used to assemble vehicles and other core automotive components.
That led to an industry lobbying group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, to fire back with a simple message: if you tax the robots, you’re taxing the cars, too. Here’s a snippet from Reuters:
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai and nearly all other major automakers, urged the administration not to impose new tariffs after the Commerce Department opened a national security probe last month, opens new tab. The government can use such investigations to impose tariffs.
“Increasing the cost of equipment at existing facilities will raise overall production costs for automotive manufacturers, could cause production delays, and may result in vehicle shortages and higher vehicle prices on American consumers at a time when new vehicle prices are already at historic highs,” the group wrote in comments made public Wednesday.
The move is justified under a push to create more domestic manufacturing. However, eventually you have to question just how much you can domesticate manufacturing before everything just gets more expensive or unattainable.
For example, the Alliance argues that 40% of the robotics and industrial machinery installed in the U.S. last year were for automotive manufacturing facilities.
That really puts some weight on the cry that turns it from corporate sob story to a justified plea. After all, if adding more U.S. auto manufacturing jobs is a priority—which was one of the key pushes for taxing imports of many foreign vehicles earlier this year—making it harder or more expensive to build those cars in the U.S. undermines the progress.
It goes way past the auto sector, too. Warehouses, stores and distribution centers all use the types of automated machines and robots that would be subject to the tariffs, which means that just about everything sold or shipped in the U.S. could get marginally more expensive (again) to cover the increased cost of doing business.
90%: VW Says Most Of Its EVs Were Leased This Year
Photo by: Volkswagen
The lease deals were just too good.
Automotive News recently spoke with VW Financial Services CEO Christian Dahlheim to talk about the future of the auto industry, and one interesting topic that came up was leasing—specifically how it relates to electric vehicles. According to the CEO, vehicle ownership of EVs has shown one of the biggest upticks in so-called “usership” rather than ownership in the past few years.
In fact, Dahlheim revealed that as many as 80% of the EVs it financed in the U.S. so far in 2025 have been leased rather than purchased.
It’s true that like other automakers, VW offered aggressive and competitive lease delas on its electric models. But it goes deeper than that. I’ll let Dahlheim’s own words with Automotive News take it from here:
In a finance contract, the customer owns the car and then finances it with us. In a leasing contract, we own the car, and the customer rents it from us. We have an ongoing business relationship with our customers.
As an automaker, you sell a car to a dealer, the dealer then sells it to the customer. This year it’s been about 64 percent, in general. So, if Volkswagen sells 100 cars and 64 out of these 100 end up in our books, we effectively buy 64 out of 100 cars from Volkswagen, then we give them to the customers.
With BEVs, it’s above 80%. This trend is actually good for the automaker, which leases the car from us, then we sell it again once it’s a used car.
We call it the captive triangle. Our sales force is our dealers. They sell the car and they sell the contract with it. If they sell our contract, our insurance business, for example, brings the customer back to us. When the leasing contracts end, we try to sell them another product from our group brand.
I’m not sure if you caught those last few sentences or not, but VW’s financing arm made it clear that its goal is customer retention—”the captive triangle,” as it calls it. This method of long-term usership is akin to a subscription to Netflix or Spotify, according to Dahlheim. People want to use their assets, but they might not want the burden that comes with owning them.
Dahlheim continued:
The trend toward leasing will continue to accelerate. You see the trend to usership in everything; whether it’s your Netflix or your Spotify subscription, people are used to using assets, they don’t necessarily want to own them anymore.
We also believe that all-inclusive, hassle-free packages, which include insurance for example, will increase as will subscription products, such as 12-month renting products. However, leasing will by far be the dominant way of acquiring a car. Increasingly, this will also fall more on the used-car side. Used-car leasing is a smaller market that will accelerate as well.
We’ve seen this sort of subscription push before. These all-inclusive services might tie-in things like registration and insurance for one price. Volvo tried it. So did Lincoln. And Cadillac. And a number of other brands. None were extremely successful, and maybe that’s because the bottom line was just a really big number rather than paying for each of the services individually.
On the flip side, EVs have a rather sharp depreciation curve. Leasing allows consumers to avoid eating that loss. It could be one of the reasons that consumers prefer leases, or, perhaps the numbers have been skewed with the tax credit leasing loophole.
But VW still believes it’s the future, and leasing might just be the way to convince people to subscribe to a car without actually calling it a subscription.
100%: Lease Or Buy?
Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
There are a number of reasons why VW saw an EV lease surge. But now that the EV tax credit is gone, the leasing loophole is also closed and electric cars will have to survive on their own merit.
That being said, if you leased an EV over the last few years, what drove you to a lease rather than a purchase? Would that have changed if the EV tax credit weren’t applicable? And if you’re looking at a new EV in the near future, are you considering leasing or will you be purchasing?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
