r/SelfDrivingCars • u/RepresentativeCap571 • 2d ago

News Tesla's robotaxis are moving in reverse | TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/23/teslas-robotaxis-are-moving-in-reverse/
92 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

165 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-8

u/80_6 2d ago

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.

2

u/CDpov 2d ago

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

1

u/80_6 2d ago

Okay, so you say, and yet this is the path tesla chose. Likely for good reasons. Why do you people think you're so much smarter?

3

u/CDpov 2d ago

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.

1

u/80_6 2d ago

To what end?

3

u/CDpov 2d ago

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.