At Tesla’s “We, Robot” event last night at Warner Brothers studios in Los Angeles, CEO Elon Musk showed off the Cybercab to the public for the first time, a self-driving robotaxi that Musk unveiled by riding in it down the lot towards the stage. Despite the hype and impressive show of technological wizardry, markets and analysts were not all kind to the company, making the stock price wobble in the wake of the demonstration.
The Cybercab features the same silhouette as Tesla’s four-door iterations like the Model Y and the Model 3, except it features only two doors, and goes with the Cybertruck’s brushed-aluminum look instead of a traditional paint job. “You can think of it as individualized mass transit,” Musk declared on stage as a promotional video showing people taking trips with the vehicle played. The richest man in the world according to Bloomberg promised that the car, which has no steering wheel or pedals, would eventually have lower operating costs on a per-mile basis than a bus, at around 20 cents per mile versus a dollar, respectively. Musk claimed that the vehicles would be on the road “before 2027” with a cost “below $30,000.” According to the presentation, they would be available for single trips like a taxi, or could be bought outright by consumers. As a taxi service, Musk stated that the autonomous Cybercab fleet would be joined by modified Tesla Model Ys.
Musk followed up with a question: “what happens if you need a vehicle that is bigger than a Model Y?” Out came the Robovan, a proposed solution for larger groups of people (up to 20, Musk claims), as the Cybercab apparently only carries two passengers at a time. The South-African-born financier promised an even lower operating cost per mile, perhaps 5 or 10 cents, and drew the audience’s attention to the vehicle’s futuristic styling: “can you imagine going down the streets and you see this coming towards you?” Musk closed the presentation with a platoon of humanoid robots walking autonomously, this time tantalizing his audience with a space fantasy reference: “you could have your own personal R2D2 C3PO.” Here too, the so-called PayPal mafia alum offered a surprisingly low, albeit vague, estimate for the cost of this unprecedented technology, setting the bar at “I dunno, twenty, thirty thousand dollars.”
Despite the apparently impressive technology being displayed, Tesla stock has sunk over 8 percent as of this afternoon in the wake of the product reveal, putting the stock at 15% lower than where it was at this time last year and wiping $50 billion off of Tesla’s balance sheet overnight. A number of market analysts focusing on Tesla expressed doubts about many of Musk’s claims, mostly as it relates to the ambitious launch dates and pricing. The CEO of Green Hills Software, a notex skeptic of Tesla and Musk, opined that the Cybercab demo looked more like a “1950s Disneyland ride” than real gamechanger in transportation. Analyst Paul Miller, from Forrester research, claimed the Cybercab’s stated price would be “extremely difficult” for Tesla to achieve. Indeed, lower cost options across Tesla’s current fleet currently bottom out at around $40,000 new, which on its face begs the question of how a brand-new model could get below that threshold. Other analysts found claims of full autonomous driving for Cybercab to be hyped up, as a research note from the firm Jefferies noted a lack of verifiable proof in the presentation that the advancements needed to meet the vast complexity of managing a fleet of autonomous vehicles had indeed been achieved.
Even with the dip in the company’s stock today, Tesla still boasts a market cap of $695 billion.
