The Cybercab is Tesla’s ‘fork in the road’ moment

But that may not matter much to Tesla, which believes scaling its robotaxi network requires the Cybercab.  

Tesla designed the Cybercab around cost. It’s smaller, lighter, and has a lower-capacity battery pack than any other Tesla. Fewer raw materials – especially on the battery side – make it cheaper to build. The cheaper it is to build, the faster Tesla can potentially turn a profit once it’s deployed. 

That math has Tesla’s most ardent fans giddy. They look at Tesla’s ability to build dozens of Cybercabs for roughly the same amount of money Waymo spends to purchase and outfit fewer than 10 of its newest “Ojai” vans and see it as proof that the robotaxi war is already won.  

Musk seems to agree. In a reply to a post that included a graphical representation of this argument, he wrote, “this doesn’t even take into account the operational efficiency of Cybercab.”  

There are caveats worth considering. Tesla has, to date, only operated its robotaxi network within a geofence in each city. While some are larger than others, and the company has kept expanding some of them, Musk himself once said: “If you need a geofenced area, you don’t have real self-driving.”  

Then there’s the challenge of operating the network at scale. 

Tesla has so far benefited from having a small network in just a few cities. That naturally means its self-driving software encounters fewer edge cases than Waymo, which has 4,000 robotaxis on the road. Fewer trips and fewer edge cases also mean fewer chances for riders to spot problems and post them on social media or report them to regulators or journalists. 

Tesla has also benefited from the fact that its fleet has consisted of Model Y SUVs, which are harder to distinguish on the road than a bright white Jaguar I-Pace kitted out with sensors. That will change with the Cybercabs. If Tesla’s software isn’t up to the task, its failures will be much harder to miss when they happen in shiny gold cars.