For now, Tesla will build far fewer than the 38,000 vehicles per week initially planned.
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Tesla made it clear this week: the Cybercab has started production. But how quickly will self-driving taxis be produced and how many will the company make?
Tesla posted on CEO Elon Musk’s X social media site on Thursday, saying, “Cybercab in production now at Giga Texas,” referring to a Tesla factory near Austin, Texas. The post shows a gleaming Cybercab rolling out of the factory and onto the streets. Then came another X post from the Tesla Robotaxi account that showed a video of a row of identical Cybercabs merging on a highway.
It’s been two months since the first Cybercab was produced, and more than a year and a half since Tesla launched its first autonomous vehicle Robotaxi in October 2024. At the time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the production target was 2 million Cybercabs per year, or about 38,000 per week.
The world’s richest person was much more tempered in his aspirations during Tesla’s earnings call for the first quarter of the year. Musk said the early production stages of Cybercab will be “very slow” due to the time needed to organize the supply chain and production. He said production would continue to “accelerate” and eventually “become exponential,” but added a caveat, “to the best of our ability.”
Musk said: “The limiting factor for expansion is very rigorous validation, ensuring that things are completely safe. We don’t want to have a single accidental injury with the expansion of Robotaxi.”
A Tesla representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
NHTSA is investigating 3.2 million Tesla vehicles with fully autonomous driving assistance, citing concerns that Tesla’s camera-based system failed to detect common road conditions that led to several crashes. Tesla says its Full Self-Driving system allows a vehicle to automatically steer, brake and accelerate while a human is in the driver’s seat. The person can intervene instantly if necessary.
Currently, Tesla operates limited Robotaxi service in three Texas cities – Dallas, Houston and Austin – with its Model Y. These vehicles are autonomous but have a steering wheel and pedals. The company eventually plans to fill its entire fleet, in Texas and elsewhere in the United States, with Cybercabs, which may not have steering wheels or pedals.
The global driverless taxi market is expected to grow at an annual rate of 99%, reaching about $147 billion by 2033, according to research firm Grand View Research. In the United States, Waymo – owned by Google parent company Alphabet – dominates with services in 10 major US cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix. Amazon-owned Zoox operates in Las Vegas and San Francisco and plans to add Austin and Miami to its roster.
Tesla is far behind the competition
Tesla has a mountain to climb to catch up with its competitors, says CNET senior editor Abrar Al-Heeti, who once took a ride in a retrofitted self-driving Tesla in Vegas.
“It’s a highly competitive market that is evolving quickly,” Al-Heeti said. “There is still a lot of uncertainty and trepidation around Elon Musk’s approach where the Cybercab relies solely on cameras for navigation, rather than a combination of cameras, lidar and radar like Tesla’s competitors.”
Autonomous vehicles currently rely on three major technologies to determine their environment: cameras, lidar and radar. Waymo and Cruise rely on lidar, or “light detection and ranging,” which creates three-dimensional images of the car’s surroundings. Radar, which has been around since World War II, uses radio waves that bounce off objects to determine their location.
Driverless cars are still a niche market, but Al-Heeti says they could eventually dominate the taxi sector, although that could take several years.
“There are still many obstacles left from a logistical, technical and regulatory point of view,” says Al-Heeti. “Not to mention the distrust of many riders and riders who are not yet convinced that autonomous journeys are the safest or most practical option.”
