Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s self-driving robotaxi — the Cybercab — at an event in California. He moved beyond the PowerPoint and prototypes from over a decade of missed autonomous driving targets to show something more tangible: Twenty Cybercabs with no driver, no pedals, and no steering wheel were available to drive the launch event’s attendees around the roads of a movie studio in California. But as we discuss in The State Of Autonomous Vehicle Technologies, there are many challenges to overcome before a car that’s capable of driving itself around a closed and well-mapped movie set should be trusted to ferry paying passengers on public roads.

Musk claims that the Cybercab will enter production “in 2026,” although he later qualified this to “before 2027.” The vehicle “should” cost less than $30,000. He also promised that the company’s full self-driving capability would be approved for “unsupervised” operation in the US states of California and Texas next year, letting owners of suitably equipped versions of the company’s current Model 3 and Model Y cars take hands off the wheel and eyes off the road on at least some of the highways in those states. Unsupervised driving is just one aspect of operating a successful fleet of autonomous taxis. Musk’s presentation suggested that Tesla is also considering the practical side of day-to-day operation. He showed video of inductive charging (removing the need to plug in a cable to charge) and a cleaning robot that autonomously vacuumed and tidied the interior of a messy vehicle.

Tesla Is Not Alone, Whilst Regulators Remain Cautious

Tesla is not the first to offer a commercial robotaxi operation. Baidu operates hundreds of robotaxis in Wuhan and other Chinese cities and recently announced plans to expand into other Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Waymo carries paying passengers in Phoenix and San Francisco, and both Google-backed Waymo and GM-backed Cruise are running test drives (with safety drivers) in several more US cities.

Regulators around the world are approaching self-driving vehicles with extreme — and understandable — caution. Existing autonomous taxi operations from companies like Baidu (in China) or Cruise and Waymo (both in the States) have taken years to secure permission to operate commercial services in just a few cities. Tesla’s vehicles, sensors, and software will all need to be approved in any market that it hopes to enter. The Cybercab’s lack of a steering wheel or pedals makes sense in some future autonomous vehicle but may further complicate the process of reassuring cautious regulators today.

Unsupervised driving is just one aspect of operating a successful fleet of autonomous taxis. Musk’s presentation suggested that Tesla is also considering the practical side of day-to-day operation. Once regulators eventually approve Tesla (and others) for commercial autonomous operations, it will be these details that make the difference between cool experiment and viable business: If a passenger leaves a mess in the back of a cab, how quickly and accurately can the broader system detect that mess, take the cab out of service, and direct it to a nearby cleaning facility? If there’s no driver, you really don’t want the next passenger to be the one who gets into a filthy vehicle and has to report the problem — or leave a thumbs-down review!

Tesla Once Again Sets The Benchmark

As we’ve come to expect from Elon Musk, his presentation was full of hype, big visions, and bold promises. It was lighter on the proof points to support his claims. Is the unsupervised full self-driving capability he sees rolling out to existing Model 3 and Model Y cars next year dramatically upgraded from the less capable system available to those drivers today? How has Tesla improved it to the point that drivers — and regulators — should trust it, and will hardware upgrades be required to deliver the local computing power that the system probably requires? But it’s easy to poke holes. It’s also undeniably true that Tesla — and Musk’s other companies — have achieved impressive results in many of their endeavors, both on their own and in terms of the push they’ve given competitors to up their own game. I doubt you’ll travel far in a Cybertaxi this decade, and I doubt it will cost anything close to $30,000 in the next five years. But current and future entrants in this space now have something against which they will be compared — and a high bar to pass.

We discuss the future of mobility in this on-demand client webinar, and several new reports will be published later this year. As always, if you have your own perspectives to share, please schedule a briefing and tell me all about them. If you’re a Forrester client and want to discuss (or challenge) my thinking on this topic, please schedule an inquiry. There’s plenty more to come from Forrester on the future of mobility, and we very much look forward to engaging with all of you on the journey.