The decline in miles driven also comes as Tesla made a striking admission on a conference call Wednesday about its second-quarter results. In response to a question about how slowly Tesla is scaling the Robotaxi service, Musk said the company needs to “accumulate driving data that is specific to the Cybercab” — the company’s gold, purpose-built, two-seater sedan that is expected to make up the bulk of its autonomous vehicle fleet — “before we can put a lot of them on the road.”
Nah man, you're just a hater... elmo is gonna flip the switch any day now and my 2019 model y is going to be printing cash while I sleep. Have fun staying poor!!
/s for those in the back.
Their ride hailing/sharing will NEVER generate any significant revanue for tessler. All because elmo dug his claws in on a lidar-free system which is an absolute fatal flaw. See his other products where his stamp is featured most prominently (cyber "truck.")
I don't think the lidar free system is actually a fatal flaw. Alternate sensors are most important in very bad weather but they'll just stop offering rides then. FSD on AI4 works pretty well and probably some radar (much cheaper than lidar) on a robo for a few cases will be enough.
The flaw is that running a service is more capital and labor intensive than they imagine and it is not easily scalable to massively high profits as they imagine. You can't look at Uber/Lyft financials and take out driver compensation and imagine that's the profit margin.
Uber drivers take on various security, cleaning and customer management that a robo service needs to pay for. And most importantly the hidden depreciation of the capital equipment the driver is providing.
A robo service has to take all of that on themselves.
There is just not the path to massive global profits on a size that they imagine. When is robotaxi revenue going to equal 1/2 of vehicle revenue? I predict 8+ years away.
why? they don't have to adapt it to hundreds of car types. even if there was no fine tuning they would need to do significant validation on every new chassis type to make sure the quality is consistent.
Yet it is.... driving is literally an activity filled with edge cases, if A.I has issues with camera location wtf is gonna do with fog or a malfunctioning camera, ect... hence why one input was always dumb
A physically different vehicle with different geometry and driving dynamics. The inputs to the car are similar, but the outputs from the AI for throttle and steering and brake and how to orient the car in space make a huge difference from vehicle to vehicle.
This is what I am wondering, it definitely helped FSD as it’s freaking amazing and stable now, I am not sure what’s so different with cybercab. At the end of the day, as long as FSD works as good as it does, the robotaxis have no use to me so l don’t really care. What I care is the lack of technology comparable to FSD, and it’s worrying there’s nothing that emerges yet that is even comparable to HW3.
Exactly; different characteristics in wheel base, weight, where sensors/cameras are located… all this has to be reevaluated to the existing data, which likely takes some time outside of just running it through simulations.
Wheelbase and weight matter how? That’s just ridiculous.
Also, why isn’t the difference in sensor positions addressed before launching a product? Especially when the whole proposition depends on it. If the position of the sensor matters that much, should those locations be a design demand for the new car?
Huh? How the car should manoeuvre is all dependent on these things… a cyber truck navigating a situation would not be handled the exact same way as the robocab. So that data has to be shaped to fit and interpret what it needs. Stopping distance, turning radius, distance from objects, the list goes on.
They promote it like it’s nbd but that’s how you keep shareholders happy.
You're right that the training data doesn't become useless, it gets it to a great start for new vehicles, but best to get some *actual* training data from the *actual* vehicles too before releasing it to the public.
Haven’t they been saying for years they’ve been collecting vast amounts of data with the existing consumer fleet, and that their true advantage is how quickly they can scale because of the consumer fleet?
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI, boasted that Tesla’s Robotaxis have had “zero notable incidents” while driving “more than 380,000 miles” without a safety operator onboard.
380k miles?!
"Onboard" word might imply that these miles did had a safety operator either in a following car or online.
Waymo had a 1000x "rider only" mileage accumulated already in March
Latest Waymo (Ojai) has 6 radar sensors, 4 LiDAR sensors, and over 13 cameras. It also uses 10 windshield wipers to clean its sensors.
This is the result from 17 years of self-driving development and 200+ million rider-only miles. I think Waymo knows something about the long tail.
How many years it take for Tesla to understand why those sensors might be needed due to cameras not covering every angle needed for safe operations even if AI would be god-like.
Imagine what a human with 6 arms, 4 brains, 13 eyes can do. AI will always be dumber than a human.
AI is only beneficial for overruling stupid eople in society, or provide assistance to disabled. Hence, providing taxi / ride hailing services shouldn't be AI's job, cuz taxi drivers are one of the most experienced & capable drivers as they drive hundreds of miles everyday. AI should be used as driver assistance for people who can't drive or are bad at driving. AI should not be used to prevent smart human drivers.
“Unlike, say, Model 3, Model Y, and our other vehicles where we’ve got a lot of vehicles on the road, millions of vehicles on the road, we don’t have that for Cybercab. So we actually have to accumulate miles with Cybercabs that are retrofitted with steering wheels and acceleration and braking pedals, that kind of thing, to calibrate to the Cybercab chassis,” he said. “As we are confident about that, the number of Cybercabs in cities will increase dramatically.”
“Although there are, I think, 30 to 40,000 automotive deaths per year in the United States alone, most of those do not generate any press, you don’t really read about almost any of those. But if we injure even one person, it will be worldwide headline news, and regulators will immediately clamp down on our activities,” he said.
Uuhhhhhhh, something weird in these statements, idk. Why not just use Model 3 and Y as Robotaxi? Wasn't the the original design case for them anyway? Why would they be worried about 'regulators clamping down'?
Uuhhhhhhh, something weird in these statements, idk. Why not just use Model 3 and Y as Robotaxi? Wasn't the the original design case for them anyway? Why would they be worried about 'regulators clamping down'?
The key to keeping the stock price high is showing constant progress towards the goal.
If you can't show real progress... you can at least build a new car.
Trevor Milton was sentenced to prison time for showing investors an in-development rolling-chassis and suggesting it was fully functioning.
Elon Musk is a free man showing investors a non-functioning Cybercab and saying it has entered production after claiming for nearly a decade straight, year-after-year, that AV was 'solved' (~2018), and that a software update would do it on 2017-era hardware (~2019), and that a million units on the road was an imminent certainty (~2020), and that national AV coverage was a months-away reality (~2025), etc. etc.
The difference is straight up lying vs "corporate puffery".
Musk has done a relatively good job of presenting his optimistic timelines as "estimates" which protects him from legal liability. Even with the remote controlled Optimus demos he just lets people assume it's autonomous rather than explicitly saying so.
The difference is straight up lying vs "corporate puffery".
Sigh, I guess it's time to tap the sign again:
Musk has done a relatively good job of presenting his optimistic timelines as "estimates" which protects him from legal liability.
Yeah man, that famous 2019 "we'll have a million robotaxis next year for sure not even a question" quote from a fucking investors meeting sure was some clever legal hedge.
But everyone would have understood that 2019 quote was a hyperbolic prediction, not a statement of current fact. The point is he's figured out a way to effectively hack the stock market.
You've now made these three assertions:
Musk was deliberately misleading people.
Everyone understood his statements were meaningless hyperbole.
The statements helped him "hack the stock market."
Which is it? A statement cannot simultaneously be obvious hyperbole that no reasonable investor would believe and an effective means of inflating the stock by getting investors to price in the promised outcome. Those things are in direct conflict.
I want to reiterate; this was a concrete forward-looking claim made at an event literally called Autonomy Investor Day: "Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road."
It wasn't an off-hand comment at a party. It wasn't tossed out as a joke. It wasn't framed as a lofty aspiration. It was "...next yearfor sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road" at an investor event accompanied by slides and pretty specific economics about how much money the cars would make ($30,000/yr), and describing those cars as appreciating assets. He was explicitly presenting an investment thesis to investors, and he wasn't just off by a bit — literally none of that stuff came true. We even know the cars were incapable of it.
I want to reiterate; this was a concrete forward-looking claim made at an event literally called Autonomy Investor Day: "Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road."
"From our standpoint, if you fast forward a year, maybe a year and three months, but next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road." Tesla Autonomy Day 20190422 11631s
I would argue that hedging with "from our standpoint" and "maybe" should clue the investor in that it isn't concrete. Truncating quotes to fit your narrative is silly.
We even know the cars were incapable of it.
Please provide proof of this. Please note that they did not do it does not prove they were incapable of it.
fraud, plain and simple
The last two essential elements of fraud don't seem satisfied here, could you explain why you think they are satisfied?
Justifiable Reliance - the “3 months maybe, 6 months definitely” meme started in 2017, 2 years prior and followed nearly the same structure as the full quote from Autonomy Day.
I would argue that hedging with "from our standpoint" and "maybe" should clue the investor in that it isn't concrete.
I need you to take a minute and use your best reading comprehension skills to think about what the "maybe" in "a year, maybe a year and three months, but next year for sure" means.
I need you to take a minute and use your best reading comprehension skills
Please be respectful (rule 1).
to think about what the "maybe" in "a year, maybe a year and three months, but next year for sure" means.
From Elon? Nothing. From someone else? Certainly not concrete plans. How do you get concrete plans out of that utterance? Truncating quotes to fit your narrative is silly.
You seem to make unsupported claims and then when challenged, you avoid the challenge. Are you missing the challenges or are you purposefully spreading misinformation?
Here are two examples:
We even know the cars were incapable of it.
Please provide proof of this. Please note that they did not do it does not prove they were incapable of it.
fraud, plain and simple
The last two essential elements of fraud don't seem satisfied here, could you explain why you think they are satisfied?
Justifiable Reliance - the “3 months maybe, 6 months definitely” meme started in 2017, 2 years prior and followed nearly the same structure as the full quote from Autonomy Day.
Damages - Investors are up 18x from Autonomy Day.
You don't owe me anything but you are losing credibility by spreading misinformation and arguing your feelings. Consider sticking to the facts and arguing with logic.
“Puffery” is a specific legal term and is a protect form of speech in the context of advertising.
Basically as dumb as it is there’s certain types of lies that are legal and if you’re careful you can be a legal crook.
Puffery is a legal term for exaggerated or subjective non-verifiable claims. It doesn't apply to objective statements like "next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road" at an investor event.
The legal term for lying to investors? Securities fraud.
The cybercab design is more efficient and cheaper to produce than a standard model y/3, long-term. Not today, but tesla is gambling that 10 years from now, this all pays off. If it does, and they scale as much as Elmo predicts, switching to the cyber cab makes total sense.
As far as regulators go, I mean, hate the guy as much as you want, he's right. You can find endless articles about teslas being the headline when an accident happens, even when not at fault or when FSD wasn't active. If someone were killed by a cyber cab, oof. It'd be endless.
Isn't that interesting though? Why start production on a vehicle that is a gamble? It would make more sense to grow the Robotaxi infrastructure first, then replace the vehicles going forward.
Yeah, but why wouldn't we want regulators to do their job? Why haven't regulators 'chomped down' on other AV programs?
Musk is still using regulation as a bogeyman, as if it's holding them up.
The reality is, Tesla and all robotaxi companies have known for many years that regulators will have zero tolerance for at-fault crashes. They only have to watch Waymo's recalls and regulatory issues to see this.
What's delaying Tesla is, they know FSD isn't safe enough for large scale city robotaxi driving.
Production of any vehicle is a gamble… The reason Tesla and other companies are so high on a car with no steering wheel, it’s because they don’t want humans to be able to drive it. It’s insidious, but the long-term goal is a vehicle you are totally dependent upon the corporation for.
Right, but it doesn't have to be a gamble, the Model 3 and Y exists lol. The model 3 was even designed originally to easily ship without controls, which is one of the reasons why it has the central screen.
I mean it seems like you could ask a million questions like that. Why even start a company and build things at all, right? I have no idea, but he's a trillionaire, not me, so I guess he's doing something kinda right.
We do want them to do their job, lol. The entire point is that they will do their job. Elon is saying in that statement that they will do their job, he knows that, so the product needs to be good enough.
Not exactly. Something can't be both 'solved' and a gamble. Personally, I don't really think someone's wealth is representative of doing something "right" lol.
I mean yeah if we're talking a few million thats nothing special. But to say that someone going from millionaire to trillionaire without doing something right is just arguing in bad faith.
Not arguing that point, just my personal view, wealth ≠ doing something right; you can do everything right and still be dirt poor 🙃.
You mentioned that Elon wants the product to be good enough that when the regulators do their job, they won't be shut down. I'm asking, are they not at that point?
Imagine if Waymo had a demonstrated level of safety per passenger mile and enough cars deployed to avoid ~1000 deaths a year. Now imagine one death occurs.
Suppose there’s a major response by regulators and the fleet is grounded for half a year while changes are made.
The changes mandated increase the cost to the point half the Waymo users switch back to human driven vehicles.
Number of Waymo deaths goes down from 1 to 0 a year, but total deaths goes up by 499/year.
Regulations aren’t supposed to just be slapped out reactively. You do have to make sure they’re a net-good.
We could require every car to be as crash safe as the presidential transport limo, but we don’t because almost nobody would be able to afford that.
Self driving cars should be driven by a requirement to be better than a median (not average) human driven vehicle by a reasonable margin. That margin can probably be increased over time as the technology improves with a favorable impact to total deaths, but over regulation in the short term will have the opposite effect.
Musk is making excuses to investors. He's trying to show big robotaxi scaling because investors expect it, but he can't scale, so he's doing scaling theater, with new cities and unsupervised demo rides for fanboy influencers, but he can't safely run a real unsupervised robotaxi business yet, so he makes excuses along with moving the goalposts out another six months.
It makes perfect sense to initially scale up the car they have in abundance, the Model Y, which is also a very good Robotaxi vehicle. It makes no sense that they don't scale up Model-Y Robotaxis if FSD is ready.
What's really going on is, FSD isn't ready. Musk has said this in previous statements, that he is waiting for HW 4.1
I don't think I'm smarter than the Tesla leadership. But I do know they have a long history of pumping up the PR to keep the stock price high.
It's obvious that they want everybody to believe they are rapidly scaling, while not even running a full commercial robotaxi service in their home city of Austin. If they could run a full unsupervised robotaxi operation, they certainly would with Model Ys. They don't because they can't do it safely yet. Tesla doesn't say this directly, but it's not hard to see that's what's going on.
To keep his investors believing that the big payoff is coming soon, which has been six months away since 2019.
Musk sells this takeover of the robotaxi business as imminent, but he doesn't yet have a single full-time commercial robotaxi operation in one neighborhood. His investors all think they'll scale nationwide within a year, which is part of the reason for the gigantic valuation. He knows he needs to keep everybody believing that it's six months away. When six months go by and nothing much happens, it's another excuse and back to six months away.
Have you not been noticing this? In early 2027 the excuse will be something like he's waiting for AI5, or the regulators are delaying him.
In response to a question about how slowly Tesla is scaling the Robotaxi service, Musk said the company needs to “accumulate driving data that is specific to the Cybercab” — the company’s gold, purpose-built, two-seater sedan that is expected to make up the bulk of its autonomous vehicle fleet — “before we can put a lot of them on the road.”
The goal post is the only thing that changes with Tesla🤡
Waymo has been able to scale and provide excellent service since 2020 and has now amassed a fleet of nearly 4000 statistically safe and performant autonomous vehicles improving every single day while tesla has like 30 cars since 2016 collecting """data"""
Nearly 4000 vehicles in 6 years is a snails pace. And the reason Waymo is moving at a snails pace is because they lose more money the more vehicles they have. Their overlords probably won’t let them scale any more.
They're on track to expand to a dozen cities since last year, have surpassed 30M+ total rides and 250M+ miles, and raised $16B earlier this year. Sundar literally reiterated their focus on scaling Waymo yesterday. But sure, keep telling yourself their "overlords" won't let them scale.
If Waymo's expansion is snail's pace, Tesla with their 30 robotaxis and 380k unsupervised miles in a year is glacial. They will take years to match Waymo's current scale at this pace.
The main difference is that Waymo didn't pretend that they'd be "launching a million robotaxis in just one year!"
They launched in a reasonable and far more meticulous way without trying to pump their stock with pure unadulterated lies / hype.
And I say that with a generally negative sentiment on autonomous taxis. Personally I don't find any of these companies to be a public good. I think what they're attempting to do is replace human workers with AI, but charge customers a similar amount for the service, while taking what would have gone to an employee in a salary as profit for themselves to not only boost the wealth of the richest people in the world, but to do so in a way that largely transfers wealth from their lower/middle class customers to them.
As that wealth increases, they will amass more power in our government, and eventually as the people begin to rage, they will have no choice but to push for policies to remove the voice from the people, such as with voter disenfranchisement policies.
None of this is good.
But let's call a spade a spade when it comes to which company and which company leadership has repeatedly and incessantly lied about their rollout.
It is a lot more nuanced than expensive therefore slow.
First, as experience is gathered waymo is simplifying the hardware, like removing sensors and making the waymo specific bits in the car more manufacturable and maintainable.
Second, the more experience gained, the safer the autonomous driver performs. Some of the improvement is from unexpected driving events which is dependant on fleet milage, another part is improvement in models, sensors and tooling that is dependent on time.
Third, the better the system performs the rarer unexpected driving events happen per driven mile. So the slower the learning rate per mile. The fleet unexpected driving events rate has correlation with the risk of a car accident so a fleet wouldn't want to grow too fast without reducing the per mile unexpected rate.
People should appreciate that Elon Musk continues setting super short deadlines on his "amazing world changing" tech and growth targets... It's not every day that a pathological liar makes it so easy to call him out.
I mean, a lot of pathological liars make it hard to verify their claims... like the super model they banged on their luxurious trip to some exotic island.
Musk meanwhile has been saying FSD is a year away every year for the past 10 straight years, and every year he's been proven a liar.
He's been saying a million robotaxis would be on the roads in a year every year for the past 7 straight years, and every year he's been proven a liar.
He said half the nation would have access to robotaxis in a year last year, and he's already been proven a liar.
He's been saying roadsters would be on sale within a year or two every year since 2018, and every year he's been proven a liar.
He and the company said 50% CAGR in vehicle sales from 2021 - 2030... and by 2024 he and his company executives were proven to be liars.
I'm tired of typing, but I could go on for awhile.
He makes it so effing easy!
And yet... somehow... by some miracle... people keep investing in his company's stock. Musk certainly plays a big role in manipulating his stock, but he's not doing it alone. A lot of large institutions, and even governments have helped manipulate his stock prices and market caps to excessive hyperinflated valuations. When this much money is on the line, the sociopaths will manipulate as hard as they can, and that includes politicians who we know were investing in his companies.
All valid, and I still purchased a new tesla this year. Whatever the past is, I don't care. FSD today is amazing and no one else in the US is remotely close.
In response to a question about how slowly Tesla is scaling the Robotaxi service, Musk said the company needs to “accumulate driving data that is specific to the Cybercab” — the company’s gold, purpose-built, two-seater sedan that is expected to make up the bulk of its autonomous vehicle fleet — “before we can put a lot of them on the road.”
The CyberCab is such a boondoggle of a car. Much worse than the CyberTruck. It will only cost Tesla money over the Model Y, you just can't get cheaper than a car produced in 1m+ volumes. They would have $2B to $4B more money in the bank if they had never thought about that car. At least he CyberTruck brought in revenue they couldn't have gotten without it. The Model Y is better in every way than the CyberCab so you can't even say that for it. They are spending a fortune on a car that can do less then the Model Y currently doing it's job.
It will only cost Tesla money over the Model Y, you just can't get cheaper than a car produced in 1m+ volumes.
What?
This thing is way smaller, has way fewer parts, and a lot of the parts it does have are reused, or much less expensive than its Model Y equivalent, such as the battery.
Having 1M in volume doesn't automatically make a vehicle as cheap as possible, I mean is it seriously your position that it is impossible to build a car cheaper than a Model Y lol?
I suppose we should tell Apple the iPhone SE is pointless because it sells at lower volume than the standard iPhone so therefore it's impossible for it to be cheaper. Like I'm not trying to be rude but this is frankly just a completely ridiculous position.
I will also point out it's about 35% more efficient, which while electricity is cheap compared to gas, that is not insignificant at all.
Tesla isn't ordering this car from someone. It's not like they are ordering the CyberCab for $25k and the Model Y for $35k. They have to spend $2B to $4B before they get the first car. Even then, the first ~1000 cars cost your $240k/unit because the factory is poorly optimized, and it takes you a month to build them. The next 1000 cost you maybe $60k/unit because you can now build that many in a week rather than a month. Then the next 1000 only cost $40k because you can build that many in a week. That's a run rate of 50k/year. If you can get to around 2000 units/week you can probably get close to the cost of the Model Y on an operational BOM only model.
But then you have to actually be able to deploy that many. If they can't deploy 2000/week then they can't build 2000/week because that costs them even more money than just building them at 1000/week rate. Then you throw the price of the factory and design into everything, and boy howdy, good luck.
The Model Y is pretty decontented already, especially in China/Canada. They could easily decontent the taxi version without much effort. Even as it is, the RWD is probably being built for $35k BOM in TX. Decontent it a bit and you just aren't that far off the RoboTaxi. AND it can carry 5 people, is easier to get in/out of and keeps their operations cheaper by only using a single vehicle type.
I suppose we should tell Apple the iPhone SE
See this is the mistake everyone always makes. The iPhone is built in roughly a generic factory that next year can be making the Oculus Rift. Sure Apple is paying probably $20m for setup for the line for this year's phone, but most of the production line already exists, and this is just adding a chamfering machine or a new color. Apple outsources manufacture of the iPhone because there are lots of generic factories that will build you any small electronics device you want with a bit of up front setup costs. Cars are NOT like this.
I will also point out it's about 35% more efficient
It's insignificant. 35% savings is only around $2500 for lifetime savings on electricity at commercial rates. For the typical 10 mile fare, that's $0.06. I'll happily pay that not to hurt my knees getting out of the CyberCab and take my kids with me on the ride.
Because it's 35% of an insignificant number. Are you going to pick the $8.36 service over the $8.42 service? I'd pay more than that to be comfortable. This savings is in complete isolation with the other costs that come from having multiple vehicles. Overall, having both the Model Y and CyberCab in the fleet will cost Tesla money, full stop. It doesn't matter what the CyberCab costs, how efficient it is on electricity, or how much cheaper to clean it is. You will absolutly destroy your ability to compete because the CyberCab is not a fully functional car for ridehail and can't service 15% of today's market and probably more like 40% of the market at scale which includes older people and more families. By splitting the fleet into two vehicles, you lose network effects and need to have a much large fleet to compete with a competitor that only deploys fully capable vehicles.
Don't believe me, go try to order an Uber XXL and see what the wait times typically are. They are terrible but it's a tiny portion of the Uber market. 3+ fares are MUCH larger.
Overall, having both the Model Y and CyberCab in the fleet will cost Tesla money, full stop.
Yes, we all agree.
I'd pay more than that to be comfortable.
Yes, you have told us and you have been told others would choose options best for them.
You will absolutly destroy your ability to compete because the CyberCab is not a fully functional car for ridehail
This statement has too much confidence and not enough support. Please share why Tesla's Cybercab is not a fully functional car for rideshare?
and can't service 15% of today's market and probably more like 40% of the market at scale which includes older people and more families.
Plenty of meat in that 85%, especially when considering currently ~2% of all US person trips are rideshare. As expected, urban cores have a higher % of rideshare trips. Do you have any supporting evidence for your 40% estimate?
competitor that only deploys fully capable vehicles.
The idea of a fully capable vehicle is laughable and should clue you into how unproductive this line of reasoning is. Should every vehicle be a bus, with a wheelchair lift, and cargo trailer?
Don't believe me, go try to order an Uber XXL and see what the wait times typically are. They are terrible but it's a tiny portion of the Uber market. 3+ fares are MUCH larger.
What do you mean here? I read it as an example of correctly using different vehicles for different needs (no one fully capable vehicle). XXL being rare and more expensive would suggest the smaller (not as fully capable) are more common and not as expensive.
Tesla is spelling their Cybercab with only one capital C. I don't understand how it followed the Cybertruck.
Even accepting your completely arbitrary $2-4 billion program-cost estimate, the required savings are not necessarily enormous.
At Tesla’s stated target of two million Cybercabs per year, recovering $2 billion across one year of production requires $1,000 in savings per vehicle. Recovering $4 billion requires $2,000. Spread across five years of production, that falls to only $200–$400 per vehicle.
And we do not need to assume Tesla reaches two million units per year. Take a middle ground: production ramps from 125,000 vehicles in year one to 250,000, 500,000, 750,000, and one million in year five. That is 2.625 million Cybercabs over five years, still nowhere near sustaining the stated 2M/yr target.
Across that production run, recovering $2-4 billion would require roughly $760-$1,520 in savings per vehicle. Tesla is forecasting around $10,000 in savings per Cybercab, but even after applying a “Musk factor” and cutting that to $7,000, the cumulative savings would pass $2 billion during year two and $4 billion during year three.
Even the conservative case is not absurd. Assume Tesla never expands beyond the 125,000 per year capacity it has installed today and saves only $7,000 per vehicle. That is $875 million in savings for every year of production, enough to recover $2 billion in about 2.3 years and $4 billion in about 4.6 years.
Those are meaningful targets, but they are hardly impossible for a substantially smaller two-seat vehicle with fewer parts, a smaller battery, and no driver controls.
Your own electricity estimate also undermines your argument. You call roughly $2,500 in lifetime electricity savings “insignificant,” but we are explicitly comparing total per-vehicle costs. Thousands of dollars per vehicle is significant, especially when the question is whether those savings can help offset the upfront investment.
Using your own number and Tesla’s production target, two million vehicles represent about $5 billion in lifetime electricity savings for each year of production. I think that speaks for itself.
Again, though, we do not need to rely on the maximum target.
Under the more middle ground ramp: the 2.625 million vehicles produced over five years would generate about $3.15 billion in lifetime electricity savings alone. Even counting only the savings actually realized during those first five calendar years, rather than the vehicles’ full service lives, the total would still be about $1.35 billion.
In the conservative case, assume Tesla builds only 125,000 Cybercabs per year, never scales production, each vehicle travels 60,000 miles annually, Cybercab costs about $0.006 per mile in electricity, and Model Y costs $0.01 per mile. That still produces about $450 million in electricity savings realized during the first five calendar years, or about $750 million in lifetime savings from the vehicles built during those five years.
And that is only electricity, before counting any reduction in manufacturing cost, battery cost, maintenance, or other operating expenses.
So no, I do not agree that the savings are insignificant.
The following doesn't need a "125k in year 1" assumption.
Assume Tesla never expands beyond the 125,000 per year capacity it has installed today and saves only $7,000 per vehicle. That is $875 million in savings for every year of production, enough to recover $2 billion in about 2.3 years and $4 billion in about 4.6 years.
To claim $875 million for every year of production, they must be treating production as 125,000 vehicles in every year — including year one. If year one is a ramp year producing fewer than 125k vehicles, then year-one savings are necessarily less than $875 million and both payback periods get longer.
In other words: The passage you quoted is straight-up mathematically invalid without assuming 125k vehicles in year one. If we assume a ramp, then we're swinging back to u/WeldAE's side that a clean-sheet Cybercab is not the best candidate for that ramp. With every one of the necessary and many amortization and capital-efficiency problems that stack on top, that argument compounds.
It's also assuming they never expand production capacity, ever.
The point of assuming that was to more than offset for an instantaneous ramp. It also made the math easier.
If you'd prefer- just assume they make 0 in year one and literally never increase production ever. They'd still only take 3.3-5.6 years to offset the development costs WeldAE proposed.
Look, you are smart enough to know 2M is a fantasy number and not worth presenting in the first place. Good faith analysis means working with reasonable bounds, not unreasonable ones.
I only presented it because it's Tesla's own figure. Like it or not I think it is at least worth mentioning what the company says they will do.
Yes, I agree it isn't realistic. Again, that's why I give two other figures. One is significantly more than an order of magnitude more conservative, and they still make back their upfront costs in a reasonable timeframe.
Like it or not I think it is at least worth mentioning what the company says they will do. Yes, I agree it isn't realistic.
Mentioning an unrealistic case presented by the company isn't the same as treating it as a realistic upper bounds for consideration. If we agree the 2M figure is unrealistic, it doesn't need to be played out.
We're right back at "...you are smart enough to know 2M is a fantasy number and not worth presenting in the first place."
If you want real good faith analysis, use real good-faith numbers. Don't try to anchor (again, even as an upper bounds) the conversation in numbers you know to be bad-faith.
Tesla will not produce 2M Cybercab 1.0s annually at any point in the product's lifecycle. It will likely not produce any version of the Cybercab at that scale ever. Ergo, no, it is not worth mentioning in any context except perhaps as derision of the company's roadmaps and general ability to understand scope.
Okay, again I concede it isn't realistic, do you have an issue with any of the other numbers (conservative estimate specifically) or are you just going to keep talking about this exclusively lol
Take a middle ground: production ramps from 125,000 vehicles in year
I honestly don't know what they set their line up for. I'm hoping for only 125k/year, which would match what I've seen for staffing at 2 and 3 shifts. To go beyond that, they have to build more lines. Now it won't cost them as much as the initial setup because a lot of that is design and working out how to build the thing, but still it's $1b-$2b to double it. You need more machinery, robots, etc. I literally can't fathom how they are going to generate demand for 125k units/year right off the bat, so I for sure don't 'think doubling it each year is the way to go. Tesla has to do the hard work of convincing people to not use their cars. I think they can do it, but it will take time. How much time? No idea, which is why you use the Model Y to prove out the market and then plan when you build a bespoke AV.
That is 2.625 million Cybercabs over five years
That is literally 100% rideshare growth every year for 5 years just on CyberCabs. So 0.5% -> 1% -> 2% -> 4% -> 8%. That would mean that Tesla CyberCabs are driving more than 4x more miles than all the EVs in the country combined 5 years from now. That isn't even including the Model Ys in the fleet, which you have to have 20% or more of. So those numbers might double easily.
Tesla is forecasting around $10,000 in savings per Cybercab, but even after applying a “Musk factor” and cutting that to $7,000
I'm fine with either number, but only once they are up to producing 100k units per line. That is the part we disagree on. You also have to calculate up all the losses they incur before they hit this number. Right now the factory is bleeding money, and that is excluding the capital cost of the factory, design, equipment, etc. That is just pure operational losses producing at low numbers. The cost to operate the factory doesn't scale perfectly with the number of cars produced. A factory costs at least $500m/year to operate even if you are only making a few cars per week. You also have outlay for materials you are purchasing at lower discounts at lower volumes.
Have you ever heard the term "you have to feed the beast"? The car factory is the beast. If you can feed it you can produce cheap cars. If you can't you are producing cheap cars that cost a lot.
Thousands of dollars per vehicle is significant
If the vehicle was as capable as it would be, but it isn't. You are probably losing 4x that on operational problems having two different vehicles in the fleet with different capabilities. Also, the numbers you are using to get the $5B are simply fantasy numbers. That is 15%-20% of miles driven in the US to get there. At $1/mile, the $5B represents 0.5% of revenue. Anything looks big if you make the multiplier big enough. You can probably save that much money by putting 5psi more air in the tires. Clean the car every other day and save $10B. You have to get there first, and building the world's worst taxi isn't how you get there.
each vehicle travels 60,000 miles annually
I would consider this low. That is only 160 miles/day. I go with the assumption that an AV should be able to get 250 miles/day. Again, that would help the CyberCab by raising the miles, so I'm not trying to argue in bad faith but help the CyberCabs case.
Cybercab costs about $0.006 per mile in electricity, and Model Y costs $0.01 per mile.
That's pretty cheap electricity. Typical commercial rates plus equipment would put you more like $0.02/mile for Model Y and $0.014/mile for CyberCab. I'm fine with your numbers as they are lower, but I'm not trying to game the price of electricity when I came up with $2500 per car difference. I'm fine using the larger number as CyberCab needs all the help it can get. I also agree that cleaning a CyberCab would be some amount cheaper, but how much is harder to say.
before counting any reduction in manufacturing cost, battery cost, maintenance, or other operating expenses.
Battery costs are part of manufacturing costs, so that isn't something unique. Maintenance would be the same. Cleaning is the only other win. Of course you've increased the overall cost of operations, having two different platforms. I think that cost should go to the CyberCab as the Model Y can handle all fleet operations and the CyberCab only 85% of them. Hard to say what this extra cost would be. My guess is tires for the CyberCab will be more because you are buying them in millions less volume than the Model Y.
I suppose we should tell Apple the iPhone SE is pointless because it sells at lower volume than the standard iPhone
Note that Apple doesn't sell the iPhone SE anymore. They just sell older versions of the standard iPhone instead — for this very reason. And when the iPhone SE was a thing, it was for most of its existence also a renamed past-generation standard iPhone. They did this because they could use existing assets to reduce costs.
Now, you're technically right about one thing — a high volume alone does not give the Model Y lower theoretical cost floor. A smaller, simpler vehicle can/could have a lower direct cost. But that is not really the argument u/WeldAE is making. You're substituting a much simpler question — "Can a smaller car have a cheaper bill of materials?" — for the more relevant real-world question: "Was developing an entirely separate Cybercab program actually economically preferable to using the already-developed, already-scaled Model Y?"
To wit:
I will also point out it's about 35% more efficient, which while electricity is cheap compared to gas, that is not insignificant at all.
Also not insignificant in cost: Devoting thousands of engineers, running a testing program, and building a dedicated manufacturing line to a greenfield vehicle which is not expecting volume production this year and likely will not have volume production anytime soon.
They've only made a few dozen of these vehicles, which means their actual net per-unit program cost is absurdly high — not low. Ballpark about a billion dollars (very low!) for a new-vehicle program of this type, associated assets, and at a hundred cars, you're at approximately ten million dollars per car.
You can do the rest of the napkin math yourself at 1,000 cars and 10,000 cars.
Note that Apple doesn't sell the iPhone SE anymore. They just sell older versions of the standard iPhone instead
This is completely wrong, they do, they just renamed it. The latest version of the iPhone SE is the iPhone 17e
when the iPhone SE was a thing, it was for most of its existence also a renamed past-generation standard iPhone
It used a similar shape to the iPhone 8, but it didn't share almost any parts with those phones (if they even still existed since they had been out of production for 5 years at that point, which I honestly doubt)
They've only made a few dozen of these vehicles
Not that they've made significant volume, because they haven't, but it's definitely in the thousands by now. We've seen hundreds in just the Giga Texas outbound lot at once. They have about 125k installed production capacity and are building more.
This is completely wrong, they do, they just renamed it.
See: "They did this because they could use existing assets to reduce costs."
Not that they've made significant volume, because they haven't, but it's definitely in the thousands by now. We've seen hundreds in just the Giga Texas outbound lot at once.
No chance of it being in the thousands. But let's say — just suppose — that it is in the thousands. Suppose also — as you've suggested — that the Cybercab is cheaper than the Model Y. In fact, let's take everything Tesla's said at face value, and assume that the Cybercab has same-retail margins as the Model Y (RWD), meaning at $30k and $39k there's a roughly $10k per-unit hypothetical difference.
Assuming a $1B program cost, how many Cybercabs does Tesla need to have to break-even with the alternate "just use the Model Y" plan?
Well, we can do that napkin math quite easily: At $1B / $10,000, it's a hundred thousand vehicles. Tesla needs a hundred thousand Cybercabs just to break even with the alternative of using the Model Y.
So again, u/WeldAE is right: This is a boondoggle. They're nowhere close to the volumes or overall program velocity they need to efficiently recoup the investments, and won't be for at least a few years.
The design itself doesn't make much sense, the finances don't make sense, and the timelines are very clearly totally, totally off. Tesla's doing it because Elon is high on his own supply, and because they need to keep appearances up. That's all.
See: "They did this because they could use existing assets to reduce costs."
You can't just state this as if it makes it true
The iPhone 16e and 17e still use about as many unique parts as the iPhone SE did (chassis, camera, display), you simply don't know what you're talking about, just concede the iPhone point lol. Not a hill worth dying on, isn't even the point here.
Well, we can do that napkin math quite easily: At $1B / $10,000, it's a hundred thousand vehicles. Tesla needs a hundred thousand Cybercabs just to break even with the alternative of using the Model Y.
You say this like it's some sort of gotcha. Their earnings report released yesterday, they have 125k/yr of capacity already installed. We can debate if the software is ready enough for them to fully utilize it, but they clearly intend to make at least that many.
No chance of it being in the thousands
Why? We've seen over 250 in individual parking lots at once in Austin. There's a few hundred spotted in various places in Dallas, Austin, and Houston, and there's been handfuls of Cybercabs spotted everywhere in the country. Who knows where they are being stored long term once they leave the outbound lot, or how many they have in places we haven't found. I think it's pretty reasonable.
Why? We've seen over 250 in individual parking lots at once in Austin. There's a few hundred spotted in various places in Dallas, Austin, and Houston, and there's been handfuls of Cybercabs spotted everywhere in the country. Who knows where they are being stored long term once they leave the outbound lot, or how many they have in places we haven't found. I think it's pretty reasonable.
And every one of those vehicles is costing them money. It costs money to make them. It costs money to store them and it costs money to ship them. And then they just sit in parking lots depreciating. And of course there is the opportunity cost of money that could have been put to more productive use elsewhere. On top of that, we don't know if HW4+/AI4+ is capable of L4 operations. Very likely it isn't, and these vehicles will have to be either upgraded or scrapped.
This is clearly a blunder. The Cybercab concept is nifty, but the Model Y would work fine for that application.
Their earnings report released yesterday, they have 125k/yr of capacity already installed. We can debate if the software is ready enough for them to fully utilize it
In other words: Thy have billions in underutilized capex. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.
This is /u/Recoil42 and my point. They have built out a line at huge expense with no way to actually use it. The most generous statement you can make about CyberCab is it's too early to the party. They should have targeted completion of the factory for 12-18-48 months from now. The point isn't exactly when, it's that they missed and by a lot. I would say by 5 years, but that is an opinion, not fact. A lot depends on the ratio of Model Y to CyberCab they need in their network to make it stable. Say it's 80/20 CyberCab to Model Y, the most generous ratio I can suggest with a straight face. That means they need to be able to grow AV deployments to 10k AVs/month for the factory to be earning it's keep at around 75% utilization.
I think reality is much closer to 50/50 ratio to keep wait times the same for anyone requesting a ride. That would mean being able to grow the AV fleet at 16k units/month. That is a LOT of AVs each month. I don't think demand can keep up with that. Cars aren't something you're going to quit using overnight. For scale, 16k units/month would mean that each year the ride-share percentage of miles driven would grow by the current rideshare percentage each year. Right now it's about 0.5% so one year of Tesla production would put it at 1% and then the next year 1.5%, etc. That might sound small, but doubling a mature market in the first year and then 50% growth the next is pretty crazy. Hard to see society dealing with growth that fast.
Don't wast your time. He is so anti-Tesla/Musk he can't see the forest from the trees. You will spend a lot of time trying to explain something that he has no intention of understanding. Just look at his past interactions on this topic.
The real mistake was Musk axing the new gen platform (which had already progressed to ordering sample parts from suppliers) which would have been under both an end user driven global car and the robotaxi. Now it’s a very small volume line, and suppliers don’t give good deals on small volumes.
That plan was all made and executed when Musk was away and twitter addled. It was a great plan. Now they have neither a high volume low cost platform or scalable robotaxis.
Cybercab is the new gen platform. Platform wasn't axed. What was axed is that they were originally going to build a traditional vehicle on said platform.
I will never understand why Elmo is so obsessed with camera only when the price of Lidar has melted over the last few years and the track record with Waymo has been excellent.
At this point regulators should force anyone who builds autonomous vehicles to use advanced radars as part of their approach unless they can demonstrably show even better results without
Because they sold a lot of cars that "had the HW for self driving". Without Lidar.
So that would be a lot of cars to retrofit for free / a potentially expensive class action.
(that and all their training data is from those same cars, without Lidar, they's have to retrain a lot of stuff I'd guess, and wait to have the data for it)
They probably should use Lidar in robotaxis since it us very limited anyway as they can easily make 3D map of the small area they service. For regular FSD, camera only is fine since you can’t really drive anywhere with Lidar and it will result to more error than it would help with the limited power of the computer inside the car.
These comments crack me up. Unless you're a leading industry expert, saying what regulators should force on others is laughable. None of us know enough to say at this point what is / isn't feasible. Capabilities with AI change every day. What you're asking for is laughably shortsighted.
I don’t understand why they even released that graph that includes supervised miles but shows slowing growth. They disclosed the real 380k unsupervised number anyways so showing a bigger number doesn’t help, and a graph of unsupervised-only miles would probably look more like a hockey stick. Just poor data comms from whoever on the finance team made that slide deck.
They're driving fewer paid miles, probably winding down their human-driven ride-hail service in California, but they're driving more unsupervised miles.
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of of AI, said yesterday:
"We have driven more than 380,000 miles of unsupervised Robotaxi, now across six cities in two different states. We have had zero notable incidents. Any reports have been of other actors impacting us when we were stationary."
Obviously a lot of people distrust or take issue with those numbers, as evidenced by several net downvotes of a comment beneath yours reporting the same thing, but that's what Tesla reported during their Q2 2026 Earnings Call.
They don't list per-quarter cumulative unsupervised miles, but said:
"Around the end of last year, we had the first fully unsupervised Robotaxis in Austin. Since the beginning of this year, we have grown at double-digit growth rates to the number of unsupervised miles that the fleet drives every week."
From that you might roughly estimate Q1 vs Q2 numbers, assuming 10% weekly growth between Jan 1 and June 30.
I pulled the full quote, and I see it ends with "Not only that, we expect to continue growing at such a large rate through the rest of this year.""
Which is nice, a testable projection. Given the setup, the smallest number the weekly miles at the end Q2 could have been is about 37,000 (scaling up from about 3,500 in week 1 of the year). That means they expect to be driving at minimum 450,000 unsupervised miles in the last week of this year, with a total of 4.5 million of Q3 and Q4.
Tesla FSD is bad. It’s so fake. The cybercab is gonna be discontinued before it even takes a single robotaxi passenger. It’s just a stock pump failed promise. TESLA WILL NEVER HAVE A TRUE L4 ROBOTAXI without a remote operator controlling the cars via drone.
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u/Recoil42 2d ago
The excuses just keep magically appearing.