Elon Musk Three new Tesla high-tech products were unveiled at a highly anticipated event in California on Thursday night – including a stunning autonomous passenger van.
Musk reached the stage The long-awaited driverless “cybercab” Tesla was expected to perform at the Warner Bros. Studios in the evening titled “We, Robot.”
But the never-before-seen 20-person “Robovan” and the latest generation Tesla’s humanoid robot also made their debut during the performance, which was live-streamed with over 3.6 million viewers at one point.
Tesla deployed 20 two-door, fully autonomous “Cybercabs” to shuttle attendees around the studio while dozens of its Optimus humanoid robots served guests drinks and played rock-paper-scissors.
“The autonomous future is here,” Musk said. “Tonight we have 50 fully autonomous cars. You’ll see Model Ys and Cybercabs. All driverless.”
Notably, the two-door “CyberCab” comes without a steering wheel, pedals or charging port. The electric vehicle features inductive charging capabilities and gull-wing doors.
“There’s no steering wheel or pedals so I hope it’s good,” Musk joked on stage.
The Tesla CEO said self-driving taxis will be introduced “before 2027” and will be available for less than $30,000 and have an operating cost of 20 cents per mile.
Musk said, “We expect to be in production with the ‘Cybercab’… maybe – OK, I’m a little optimistic about the time frame – but in 2026. Before 2027, let me put it this way. Should,” Musk said, acknowledging his myriad broken promises for an earlier roll-out by 2020.
His idea for CyberCab is to make them available through Tesla’s own app, where owners of the taxis can rent entire fleets of driverless EVs.
But the prototypes unveiled on Thursday are not yet road-ready because they still require supervision by an actual human — much like the self-driving mode available on existing Teslas on the market.
Musk said of the company’s expectations, “We will move from supervised full self-driving to unsupervised full self-driving, where… you can go to sleep and wake up at your destination.”
Tesla’s autonomous driving technology differs from its competitors who already operate driverless robotaxis in select cities today. This technology is more cost-effective in the long run but experts say it is riskier and will take longer to get operational.
Tesla’s strategy relies entirely on a combination of cameras and artificial intelligence to make driving decisions, while competitors such as Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox, General Motors’ Cruise and several Chinese companies employ a similar strategy as well, using radar, lidar and Use additional techniques such as complex mapping.
Robovans will run on the same technology.
Musk also unveiled the latest generation of Tesla’s Optimus robot as he tries to change Tesla’s image away from just an auto maker to that of an AI robotics company.
He said he hopes faceless robot helpers will cost less than a $20,000 to $30,000 car, so anyone can own one.
“So what can it do? It will be able to do anything you want,” Musk told the crowd. “So it could be a teacher or looking after your kids. It can walk your dog, mow your lawn, bring groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks, whatever you can think of, it’ll do.”
“I think it will be the biggest product of any kind ever.”
