Tesla has announced on Thursday that production of its upcoming Cybercab model is scheduled to begin in April 2026.
Speaking at the Annual Shareholder Meeting event, CEO Elon Musk revealed the timeline, while reaffirming that production of the model, which has no steering wheel and no pedals, will be “unlike any other car.”
The robotaxi service, which began in Austin last June, is preparing to expand to Miami, Dallas, Phoenix and Las Vegas, the company said.
The company has shared several images of the build on Giga Texas, where production is set to start in about six months.
The Cybercab, which has recently been spotted testing on public roads for the first time in California, is expected to be used in the company’s fully driverless ride-hailing service, known as the Robotaxi.
Cybercab Production
The vehicle is designed both to minimize cost per mile when operating autonomously and to be produced in the shortest time possible.
Musk said the manufacturing approach is “closer to a high volume consumer electronics device than it is a car manufacturing line.”
The company will debut the recently patented ‘Unboxed’ manufacturing process in Cybercab production.
With the ‘Unboxed Process,’ Tesla aims to work on different sections of the vehicle separately, only later combining them in final assembly.
The company expects to achieve production of a unit every 10 seconds, with Musk admitting that while it “may ultimately take a few years to get there, it’s theoretically possible to get to a five-second production time.”
“And so what that would mean is, you could get on a line that would normally produce, say, 500,000 cars a year, at a one-minute cycle time, like Model Y,” the CEO explained, adding that “this would be maybe as much as 2 or 3 million.”
A 5 million-unit yearly production could “theoretically” be reached if Tesla can get to the five-second production time.
Responding to a shareholder who questioned if Tesla was confident that every Cybercab produced would be deployed, Musk said they aim for regulatory approval and the rate of production to go hand-in-hand.
“I think the rate at which we receive regulatory approval will roughly match the rate of cybercap production,” he stated.
Robotaxi Regulatory Approval
While admitting that “it’ll be maybe a little tight,” the CEO said he’d “like to thank Waymo for paving the [regulatory] path here. It was very helpful.”
Google-backed Waymo became the first company to deploy self-driving vehicles back in 2020.
Waymo and Tesla take sharply different approaches to autonomous driving.
While Waymo uses LiDAR (light detection and ranging sensors), Tesla relies solely on camera-based vision and completely rejects it.
At the same time, Musk believes that, as autonomous ride-hailing services expand across several cities in the US, regulatory agents will “have fewer and fewer reasons to say no.”
“And then you’ve got this, you know, you’ve got the accident statistics at scale, and you can show that autonomous miles save lives,” he added, noting that there are “unequivocal, you know, billions of miles to prove it.”
“Then I think it’s hard for regulators to say no,” he concluded.
Since Tesla deployed its ride-hailing service in late June in Austin, with an initial fleet of Model Ys modified with the Robotaxi FSD, it has reported four incidents to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
According to VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy in the latest earnings call, the company has covered over 250,000 miles of the service in Austin and has crossed “more than a million miles” in the Bay Area — where a person is present in the driver’s seat.
The service has experienced roughly one crash for every 312,500 miles driven.
The company is also hiring an insurance claims specialist to handle incidents involving its autonomous ride-hailing vehicles.
Expansion + Safety Driver Removal
While noting that “every Tesla car is capable of full self-driving,” Musk announced on Thursday that the next cities to receive the service will be Miami (Florida), Dallas (Texas), Phoenix (Arizona) and Las Vegas (Nevada).
The company recently listed a job posting for Vehicle Operators in Colorado, marking the seventh state where it is expected to launch the service.
Earlier this summer, a fully driverless vehicle had already been spotted in Miami — with not even a safety operator in the passenger seat, as it currently happens during rides in Austin.
In Austin, where the service already covers about 80% of the city, Musk reaffirmed the previously announced goal to remove safety riders by the end of the year.
Just a few weeks ago, the company had backtracked on this target, with Musk saying that the company planned to remove the safety drivers from its Robotaxi vehicles “within a few months.”
