Tesla stated that it is preparing to introduce its bright golden Cybercab to new markets beyond Austin, with the goal of "literally taking over every aspect of land transportation."
The company's Chief Financial Officer, Vaibhav Taneja, stated during the third-quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday: "We start by transporting people from one place to another, but in essence, we hope to have any form of transportation available on Earth."
Tesla has previously showcased a concept version of a multi-passenger vehicle model named “Robovan”, but it is not yet clear whether this exaggerated statement about “Taneja” indicates that the company is developing other types of transportation vehicles.
It was made clearer during the conference call that the expansion of Cybercab will begin in Dallas next month and will extend to other cities by the end of this year. Tesla is currently operating a small fleet of robot taxi versions of Model Y SUV in Dallas, Houston, as well as Miami, Orlando, and Tampa in Florida. The company also stated that it will start selling Cybercab to fleet operators by the end of this year.
A larger scale of expansion by Cybercab could potentially lead to direct competition with the current leader in the US robot taxi market, Waymo. Waymo has deployed over 4,000 vehicles in more than a dozen cities. Tesla has always stated that Cybercab has lower manufacturing costs and is easier to produce, which should enable it to compete on price with Waymo and other robot taxi operators. However, the company must first achieve true scale outside of Austin before it can prove this.
Tesla stated that it is ready because the mileage covered by its autonomous vehicles has increased significantly in recent weeks. Nevertheless, Tesla did not disclose how much revenue the overall robot taxi service has generated on Wednesday. Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, said that this new car-hailing service will not become significant in the company's overall financial figures until the second quarter of 2027, "and it may become a big deal by the third or fourth quarter of next year."
Tesla also revised its letter to shareholders, further obscuring the already limited visibility of its robot taxi business to the public.
In Tesla's second-quarter letter to shareholders, the company included a chart showing "cumulative mileage of paid robot taxis." Upon closer inspection of this chart, it can be seen that the data has decreased by 36% compared to the first quarter of this year. In the new letter released on Wednesday, Tesla changed this chart to "cumulative mileage of unmonitored robot taxis" – which is a simpler indicator used to show how far the fleet vehicles have traveled, regardless of whether there are paying passengers in the cars or not.
No more clear information was obtained during the conference call. When asked about the mileage of the paid robot taxis, Taneja stated that the company “noticed an improvement in utilization,” but did not provide specific figures.
On the contrary, most of the comments about Taneja focus on Tesla's plans to expand the scale of Cybercab. He praised Tesla's engineering team for creating a car model that, according to the manufacturing team, is "very easy to manufacture and can be produced quickly."
“They believe that in terms of scalability, this is one of the products that is easiest to expand production of,” he said, “so scalability won’t be too much of a challenge.”
Taneja indicates that the real challenge may lie in Tesla's need to secure "all regulatory approvals" so that the company can "deploy as soon as possible the Cybercab we are capable of producing." This is consistent with Musk's previous statements. Musk has long claimed that the biggest obstacle to Tesla's robot taxi plan is "regulatory approval," rather than technological progress.
However, Musk has always been rather vague about what specific approvals he believes are necessary. The company has indeed encountered regulatory obstacles this year. In September, just a few hours after Tesla officially launched the Cybercab in Austin, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the United States initiated an investigation to verify whether the model met current federal motor vehicle safety standards.
All automobile manufacturers certify that their vehicles meet these standards, and Tesla also claims that Cybercab complies with the requirements. However, it lacks some features that are currently required by the standards, such as a brake pedal and rearview mirrors. NHTSA has proposed to eliminate some of these requirements, but it may still take at least a few months before this rule change is implemented.
However, not all Tesla executives agreed with this during the call on Wednesday.
When asked about the remaining bottlenecks for the wider rollout of robot taxis, Ashok Elluswamy, Vice President of Autonomous Driving at Tesla, stated that these bottlenecks “are not entirely regulatory issues.”
"This is driven by technology," he said, "We initially set the service hours for the robot taxis from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., then extended them to 10 p.m. to 11 p.m., and soon we will be extending them to 2 a.m. Therefore, we are gradually expanding the available hours for the robot taxis, which depends on the capabilities of the AI software."
This may also be the reason why Tesla's service is not currently operating on highways and is still subject to restrictions under certain conditions. However, it has been photographed multiple times in Austin operating during heavy rain – a situation that is largely avoided by the Waymo robotic taxis. On Wednesday, Elluswamy stated that Tesla plans to resolve more such complex driving scenarios by the end of this year before further expanding its services.
"We just want to ensure that no single safety incident occurs. That's our operating principle. Even if there is the slightest risk, we are not willing to take it," he said.
