Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded on X to a cost comparison showing that $1 million buys eight Waymo Ojai robotaxis at an estimated $125,000 each versus approximately 55 Cybercabs at an estimated $18,000 apiece.
The comment came hours before the company’s invite-only Cybercab launch event in Austin, scheduled to take place later on Thursday.
The event begins at 5:45 p.m. Eastern time.
The image, posted by X user Nic Cruz Patane earlier this week, lines up eight Ojai vehicles at an estimated $125,000 apiece, per Morgan Stanley — against approximately 55 Cybercabs at an estimated $18,000 each, according to Ark Invest estimates.
For the same capital outlay, Tesla could deploy nearly seven times as many vehicles.
“And this doesn’t even take into account the operational efficiency of Cybercab,” Musk wrote on Thursday, adding a further dimension to the cost argument.
What the Graphic Shows
The image places two fleets side by side.
The two price estimates sit at opposite ends of the analyst spectrum and come from firms with sharply different views on each company.
Morgan Stanley’s $125,000 figure for the Ojai — which includes the Zeekr-built base vehicle and Waymo’s sixth-generation autonomous hardware — appeared alongside the Ojai’s rider launch in May, when Sherwood News reported the estimate against roughly $200,000 for the Jaguar I-Pace the Ojai replaces.
Other analysts have placed the figure lower.
Investor Gary Black estimated the fully equipped Ojai at $75,000 delivered, splitting the cost as $40,000 for the base vehicle, $10,000 for sensors, $14,000 for compute and $10,000 for integration and shipping.
US customs filings place the ex-factory value of the Ojai chassis at roughly $38,000 to $38,500.
A 102.5% tariff on Chinese-made EVs brings the landed chassis cost to about $78,000 before adding Waymo’s Gen 6 hardware, which the company has disclosed at approximately $25,000.
Ark Invest’s $18,000 estimate for the Cybercab represents a landed production cost rather than a consumer sale price.
Tesla has set a consumer price of under $30,000, with a $25,000 starting price circulated after Musk refined the figure during Tesla’s Q3 2024 earnings call.
Musk confirmed in February that Tesla intends to sell the Cybercab for $30,000 or less by 2027, shortly after the first unit rolled off the Giga Texas production line.
Using Black’s $75,000 Ojai figure against Tesla’s $25,000 consumer price would yield a ratio of three to one rather than seven to one.
Cybercab Launch
The event, set to take place in downtown Austin, marks the first time Tesla has showcased a production Cybercab to riders outside the company.
Austin riders may be able to hail a Cybercab through the existing Robotaxi app as early as the week following the event, though the company has not confirmed the timeline for the public launch of the model in its ride-hailing service.
The Cybercab is a two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals, built to run the same Full Self-Driving software as the Model Ys already carrying passengers in Austin.
The first production unit came off the Giga Texas line on February 17 and volume production followed in April, with Tesla beginning engineering tests on Austin public roads on June 30.
Tesla expanded the Austin robotaxi service area on Monday — just three days before the launch.
Operating Cost Debate
Musk’s reference to operational efficiency points to a running argument between the two companies’ backers.
Ark Invest’s ‘Big Ideas 2026’ report projected a fully loaded operating cost of $0.20 per mile for the Cybercab at scale by 2030, compared with $0.40 per mile for Waymo’s Gen 6 fleet.
Musk called that projection “probably true” in January.
Earlier Morgan Stanley estimates said Tesla’s robotaxi operating cost stood at $0.81 per mile compared to $1.36 to $1.43 for Waymo — a gap the bank expected to narrow once Waymo’s sixth-generation hardware scales.
Energy consumption contributes to the difference.
Images surfaced last month of a Waymo Jaguar I-Pace dashboard showing consumption of 104.4 kWh per 100 miles, more than six times the Cybercab’s estimated rate.
The I-Pace’s EPA-rated consumption sits at about 44 kWh per 100 miles before the weight and computing load of the autonomy stack are added.
TD Cowen analyst Itay Michaeli, who holds a Buy rating and $460 price target on Tesla, projected the Cybercab could reach an operating cost of approximately 30 cents per mile after testing FSD Version 14 and touring Giga Texas last November.
Fleet Scale Remains the Gap
Cost per vehicle is one metric. Fleet size is another.
Waymo delivers more than 500,000 paid rides per week across 14 US metro areas and is targeting one million weekly rides by the end of 2026.
A $16 billion funding round completed in February valued the company at $110 billion.
Hundreds of Ojais were already in Waymo’s commercial fleet at the time of its all-rider launch.
Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet is far smaller.
The service spans seven US markets — Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Tampa and the Bay Area — but crowdsourced data from the Robotaxi Tracker placed the unsupervised fleet at roughly 54 distinct vehicles over a two-week sample ending August 20.
Texas registration data showed 270 vehicles registered for ride-hailing after Tesla added 79 in a single day in late August, though registration is not deployment.
Decompiled code from an upcoming version of the Robotaxi app revealed a virtual booking queue and high-demand warnings — features that acknowledge a fleet too small to guarantee on-demand availability.
AV expert Alex Roy, speaking on TD Cowen’s recent ‘Internet Bus Tour,’ described Waymo and Tesla as approaching the problem from opposite ends, with Waymo leading on safety and rollout scale and Tesla holding a cost advantage.
Tesla drew the largest allocation of around 5,000 robotaxis from Nevada regulators ahead of its planned Las Vegas deployment, though its Cybercab chief engineer told regulators the company expects to field around 2,500 within the year.
Waymo was cleared for up to 1,000 vehicles in the same market.
