Tesla will begin producing the Cybercab, an autonomous electric vehicle with no pedals or steering wheel, this April at its factory in Austin, Texas, CEO Elon Musk said during the company’s shareholder meeting Thursday.
His comments on Cybercab came just moments after shareholders overwhelmingly approved a compensation package for Musk that could be worth as much as $1 trillion in company shares — the largest in corporate history.
“We’ve got the first car that is specifically built for unsupervised, full self-driving to be a robotaxi called a Cybercab — it doesn’t even have pedals or steering wheel,” Musk said, adding there will be no side mirrors either. “It’s very much optimized for the lowest cost-per-mile in an autonomous mode and production is happening right here in this factory, and we’ll be starting production in April next year.”
Tesla has yet to demonstrate that its cars are capable of driving themselves at scale without a safety monitor, despite years of promises.
Musk’s comments seem to conflict with Tesla chairwoman Robyn Denholm, who recently told Bloomberg the Cybercab would include a steering wheel and pedals as a backup plan. Tesla once planned to make a version of the Cybercab with a wheel and pedals, but Musk killed the idea and opted instead to make very stripped-down versions of its cheapest cars.
Musk went on to tout how the Cybercab would be produced, claiming the manufacturing line would have a 10-second cycle time — a massive acceleration from the one-minute cycle time to assemble a Model Y. Musk said this could mean producing 2 million to 3 million Cybercabs in a year.
“So these will be everywhere in the future,” he said.
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Tesla first revealed the Cybercab in October 2024 during its splashy “We, Robot” event at Warner Bros. Discovery studio in California with a promise to eventually sell the vehicles for personal use.
Since then, Tesla has launched a very bare-bones robotaxi service, but not with the proposed Cybercab. The service, which launched in June in certain parts of Austin, uses Model Y SUVs equipped with what Musk has described as a new, “unsupervised” version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software. A Tesla employee sits in the passenger seat on these driverless rides.
Putting a Cybercab — or any vehicle — on the road without standard equipment like a steering wheel will require approval from federal regulators. Earlier this year, Amazon-backed Zoox managed to get an exemption and even then it has been only to demonstrate its custom-built robotaxis on public roads. Zoox is still seeking an exemption that would allow it to operate a commercial robotaxi service.
The regulatory process for those exemptions is a long and sticky one. General Motors tried and failed to get approval for its custom-built Cruise Origin vehicle, for example. Waymo, the dominant robotaxi service provider in the U.S., has stuck to its modified Jaguar I-Pace vehicles that still have traditional controls. Waymo is also developing a vehicle with Zeekr.
Musk didn’t seem fazed by the potential for regulators to thwart his plans and thanked Waymo for “paving the path.”
“I think we’ll be able to deploy all the Cybercabs that we produce,” he said in response to a shareholder question at the annual meeting. “Once it becomes like, extremely normal in cities, it’s just going to become like … the regulators will have just fewer and fewer reasons to say no.”
