The Tesla Cybercab is a good-looking prototype that needed to be more than that

Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, could have taken the stage at last night’s “We, Robot” event and caused quite a stir.

He could have released the full safety data for the company’s Full Self-Driving feature that showed real progress for the driver assistance feature, contradicting all the crowdsourced data out there that made FSD look really bad.

He could announce that the Cybercab, a small two-seater soft seat with butterfly-wing doors, will be a geofenced, Level 4, fleet-owned vehicle, operating in a few select markets with attractive margins.

He could provide specific details about the Cybercab’s technology stack, including its sensors, vision system, and onboard processing power. And he could shock the industry and astonish many of his skeptics by adopting lidar, a laser sensor that serves as a key obsolete system in every other driverless car on Earth.

But he did none of those things. Instead, he put on what looked like a great show, complete with fake movie posters, a ton of delicious-looking food, and robot pirates. And he went back to the same old, tired promises of a fully autonomous car that was “only two years away.”

We’ve been down this road before. Many times.

“The prototype hardware working in the limited demo is cool, interesting, and worth commenting on,” Phil Koopman, an AV expert at Carnegie Mellon, wrote in his newsletter this morning. “But it’s not the production, and the hardware is not the limit of autonomous vehicles. Software is the long pole in the tent.”

At first glance, it may seem like the event did the trick. There were plenty of Tesla fans who were very impressed with what they saw last night and were ready to declare “game over” for all the other players in the field. The Robovan surprised many with its Art Deco style. And the good vibes extended to the company’s leading investors, some of whom participated in Musk’s theme park experience and walked away changed forever.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who was in attendance, dismissed any drop in the stock after the event — Tesla was trading up nearly 9 points in early trading Friday — as “knee-jerk” that would eventually correct itself. “We strongly disagree with the idea that last night was a disappointment,” he wrote on Friday, “as we can argue with seeing the Cybercab with our own eyes and the great development at Optimus that we shared with throughout the night.”

It seems lost on some people just how much things have changed since 2016, when Musk first promised that Full Self-Driving was “just two years away.” Many seem to be stuck in the outdated mindset that autonomous driving was an easy problem to solve and that fully self-driving cars were on the verge of ruling the world.

Since then, interest rates have risen, buckets of capital to fund ventures have dried up, and most of the big players working in this technology have since rescheduled their timelines to account for how long it will take for self-driving cars to prove they can be safer than humans. Even Waymo, far from the leader in the space, is taking things slowly, one city at a time. It will not promise the world; the company is still trying to find major roads.

Musk promises the opposite. He said Tesla plans to introduce fully autonomous driving in Texas and California next year, with the Cybercab entering production in 2026. Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles with “unsupervised” Full Self-Driving will arrive first. But he promised that people can even buy a Cybercab for “less than $30,000.” Homeowners may be like shepherds, shepherding their flock of small driverless cars that roam the streets.

Last night, his tone changed, as images of parking lots changed to green gardens projected on the giant screens above him. (I call this “reverse Joni Mitchell-ing.”)

“We want to have a happy, exciting future,” he said, “so that if you were to look into the shiny ball and see that future, you’d be like, ‘Yeah, I wish I was here right now.'”

It was good to hear Mr. “Dark MAGA” sets a bright vision for the future, but after the event, it’s unclear how we’ll get there. We have no details on how he will overcome the major obstacles in his path. Here’s a quick summary of some of the unresolved issues:

• Legal authorization. Tesla will need to get a permit from the California DMV to use fully self-driving cars on public roads. And in order to do that, it will need to demonstrate that its vehicles can operate safely – which so far, the company has not done. And producing a completely wheelless Cybercab on the steering wheel would require a waiver from the federal government. That is a multi-month process, and success is far from guaranteed.
• Responsibility. What happens when a driverless Tesla crashes? Who takes legal responsibility? Until now, Tesla has actively avoided accepting liability for its driver-assistance accidents. And Musk said he would continue to avoid debt unless there was some “change in the design” of the car.
• Remote assistance. What happens when a driverless Tesla gets stuck somewhere? Or are you disabled? Some AV operators, such as Waymo and Cruise, have procedures in place to use remote operators to try to move the vehicle off the road. And if all else fails, they send a team of technicians who come out and manually drive the car. How do you do that with a car without a steering wheel and pedals?
• Repair of ships. Tesla briefly showed an image of a snake-like robot vacuum cleaning crumbs from the back seat of a Cybercab. But the maintenance of ships is very involved. Who will clean the cameras in the winter or charge the car when the battery dies?
• Emergency detection. Some robotics companies have struggled to respond to emergency vehicles, unexpected detours, and other potential lawsuits. Tesla was investigated by the federal government for more than a dozen incidents in which its Autopilot vehicles collided with stationary emergency vehicles.

This is just scratching the surface. Kyle Vogt, the former CEO of Cruise, sent to X a complete list of his questions for Tesla, many of which were not answered at all. And this is coming from a guy who got fired from his company for a rescue response to one of those hard-to-predict cases (a human driver hit a pedestrian, sending him into the path of a Cruise robot).

It seems unlikely that Musk will meet the same fate as Vogt, despite fumbling the ball badly. We’ve already seen the kinds of death and destruction caused by his company’s push for autonomous technology. And so far, he has been successful in avoiding those consequences.

But when the driver is gone, along with the steering wheel and other controls, there’s no one left to blame but the guy who sold it.