No steering wheel (or pedals), no problem?
Tesla shared a tantalizing tidbit ahead of an Austin, Tex., event in which the automaker is expected to provide new details about driverless Cybercabs on Thursday night.
“No steering wheel, no pedals,” the company wrote on X on Wednesday.
Multi-billionaire owner Elon Musk chimed in, writing on his X account: “A Storm of Cybercabs.”
The laconic messages came as fans and investors have been eagerly awaiting Thursday’s event, following Tesla’s reveal of a design for the autonomous taxis nearly two years ago.
Musk has said the Cybercabs will debut as driverless two-seaters with butterfly doors and sans steering wheel and pedals – making them wholly reliant on self-driving technology.
Musk fanboys have taken to social media to share video clips of Cybercab vehicles driving down public streets in Austin – seemingly missing a steering wheel and driver.
One clip showed a gold metallic Cybercab pulling over to let two passengers put their luggage in the trunk and then sit in the car. It only partially opened the passenger-side door, seemingly to avoid hitting a traffic cone in the way.
That would mark a significant benchmark for the company, which has been testing robotaxis in several markets around the country – but all have been equipped with traditional steering controls with a human driver on-board.
If Tesla reveals a fully autonomous Cybercab at its Thursday event, it could help the struggling automaker’s stock bounce back. Shares in Tesla are down 13% so far this year.
Musk has billed the Cybercab as a key facet of the company’s long-term path to growth, as it has struggled with slumping sales of its electric cars.
Musk – the richest person in the world, with a net worth of $915 billion, according to Forbes – has said the company will transform into a broader tech firm focusing on artificial intelligence and humanoid robots.
Investors are hopeful Musk’s firm will announce an imminent rollout of the Cybercabs onto city streets, as rival Waymo races ahead in the driverless taxi space.
Musk – whose SpaceX went public in a historic IPO earlier this year – is known for giving confident prediction about pie-in-the-sky goals.
In 2020, he had said he was “highly confident” humans would land on Mars before 2026. More recently, he said he believes humans will set foot on the red planet in 10 to 15 years.
And since 2016, Musk has been promising the imminent arrival of a self-driving Tesla that can take a passenger coast-to-coast across without any human intervention.
In April, Musk said Tesla had “started production” on its Cybercabs and shared a video showing a robotaxi driving off the floor at the company’s Gigafactory in Austin.
All Tesla models currently have the hardware capability to run the company’s Full Self-Driving technology.
In spite of the name, it requires a human driver to remain behind the wheel and alert, ready to take control if needed. It can take drivers “almost anywhere” with “minimal intervention,” according to the company.
Tesla currently has around 200 vehicles in the US that are registered as “unsupervised,” meaning they can operate without a human driver in the vehicle in specific areas of certain cities where autonomous technology is allowed, according to a Robotaxi tracker.
The vehicles have cruised in cities including Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa, the tracker found.
Google’s Waymo has been leading the way, currently operating roughly 4,000 driverless robotaxis in 14 cities around the country.
