Tesla said it is aiming to deliver its first Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year, but Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said the “vast majority” of the two-seat robotaxis will remain Tesla-owned and be sold as a ride service.
Executives gave no price for the vehicle and did not say whether the first buyers would be individuals or businesses.
“In short, we’re trying to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year, 2026,” Lars Moravy, Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Engineering, said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
Moravy was answering a shareholder question, read out by Head of Investor Relations Travis Axelrod, asking when the Cybercab would “be available for customer purchase/ownership.”
“Obviously, we’re producing them in our line in Texas, but all of those are currently going to our own internal Robotaxi fleet,” Moravy said. “And as Tesla grows, we’ll mainly deliver fully designed autonomous vehicles to our customers. And Cybercab will be the first.”
He said Tesla would “start small this year” and learn about “delivery and ownership and fleet management of autonomous vehicles in customer hands” before scaling.
‘Transport as a Service’
Musk then narrowed the picture.
“Cybercab is primarily going to be something that is offered as like transport as a service whereas our other cars would be more the cars that you’d want to own like the 3 and the Y and whatnot, and Roadster, obviously,” he said.
“But the vast majority of the Cybercab stuff will be essentially Tesla-owned and transport as a service.”
Neither executive gave a number of Cybercabs to be sold, a price or a list of markets.
Tesla’s shareholder update, released before the call, did not mention Cybercab sales. In its outlook section, it said deliveries and deployments would depend on demand, supply chain readiness and “allocation decisions between sale to customers and use for our owned and operated fleet.”
A Business Sign-Up
Tesla’s own support pages point buyers toward commercial use. “If you are interested in purchasing a fleet or an individual Cybercab vehicle for commercial purposes, fill out the form and a representative will contact you,” the company says in its Cybercab FAQ, in answer to the question “Can I purchase a Cybercab vehicle?”
The FAQ does not say whether Tesla will sell the vehicle for private, non-commercial use.
The only public channel Tesla has opened for buyers is aimed at companies.
An interest form on Tesla’s website, titled “Help Us Build Our Robotaxi Network,” asks for a company name and a deployment region. Applicants choose between “Cybercab fleet vehicle purchasing,” “Mobility hubs and infrastructure,” “Event collaboration” and “Other.”
The form went live in early September, around the Cybercab’s Austin launch. Tesla has not opened a consumer reservation or order page for the vehicle.
Owners of other Tesla models may get a different route into the network. Ashok Elluswamy, Vice President of AI Software, said on the call that “somewhere around Q2 next year” Tesla expects to “turn on some of the first customer vehicles to be part of the Robotaxi fleet.” That refers to privately owned Teslas joining the robotaxi service, not to Cybercab sales.
The $30,000 Promise
The comments leave open part of what Musk promised when he unveiled the Cybercab in October 2024.
“And you will be able to buy one. And we expect the cost to be below $30,000,” Musk said at the event. He described a business model in which a ride-hailing driver could “manage, I don’t know, 10, 20 cars,” like “a shepherd tends their flock.”
His “before 2027” timeline referred to production. “We expect to be in production with the Cybercab,” he said, “in 2026. So, yeah, before 2027, let me put it that way.” Production at Gigafactory Texas began this year.
Tech reviewer Marques Brownlee responded at the time that Tesla would not be able to sell the Cybercab to customers for $30,000 before 2027. “If they do, I will shave my head on camera,” he said.
When Tesla built the first production Cybercab at Gigafactory Texas on February 17, Musk returned to the bet on X. “Gonna happen,” he wrote, replying to a post about Brownlee. In another reply that day, he wrote that Brownlee “made the bet of his own accord.”
Asked by an X user that day whether he was saying Tesla would specifically sell a Cybercab to a customer for $30,000 or less before 2027, Musk replied: “Yes.”
Nothing said on Wednesday confirmed the $30,000 price, and the call did not address the bet. A sale to a commercial buyer before the end of the year would still fall within the bet’s timeframe, but Tesla has not said what any Cybercab will cost.
Fleet Growing in Austin
Tesla said in its update that it began providing robotaxi rides with Cybercabs in Austin on September 3.
“The Cybercab fleet in Austin, for example, has grown by a factor of 10 since launch about a month ago,” Musk said on the call.
Tesla’s Robotaxi account said on October 10 that it had “scaled to 300+ Cybercabs serving Austin,” and Elluswamy said the vehicle was coming to Dallas “soon.”
Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said the Cybercab “is available only in Austin” but that Tesla plans “to bring it out in some other cities before the end of this year.”
Tesla lists installed Cybercab capacity at its Texas plant at more than 125,000 vehicles a year. Taneja said the key was to ensure “we have all the regulatory approvals where we can start deploying the Cybercabs as fast as we can produce them.”
Asked by Wolfe Research analyst Emmanuel Rosner about the ramp, Moravy said that figure is “more of a rate at which we’re capable of running today” and that “the actual capacity of that vehicle line is significantly higher.”
“Right now, we’re building at the rate that the Robotaxi service needs the vehicles,” he said.
Taneja said Tesla was not yet at its goal of $0.30 per mile for robotaxi operations but saw “a path to get to that.”
The results came hours after Tesla launched a robotaxi safety website showing that most of its driverless miles have been logged since August.
