Elon Musk touts a $30,000 Tesla Cybercab and Robovan at a Robotaxi event

After a decade of unfulfilled promises regarding self-driving vehicles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk praised the company’s Cybercab concept on Thursday evening and presented a low, silver two-seater without steering wheels or pedals.

As Musk rode onto the stage in a cybercab nearly an hour into the company’s “We, Robot” event, he said the company had 21 of those vehicles and a total of 50 “autonomous” cars on site at Warner Bros. studio in Burbank , California, where Tesla held its invitation-only event.

Musk didn’t specify where exactly Tesla plans to produce the cars, but said consumers could buy a Tesla Cybercab for less than $30,000. He said the company hopes to produce the Cybercab before 2027

He also said he expects Tesla to introduce “unsupervised FSD” in the company’s Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles in Texas and California next year.

FSD stands for “Full Self-Driving” and is Tesla’s premium driver assistance system, which is now available in a “monitored” version for Tesla electric vehicles. FSD currently requires a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time. Earlier this year, Tesla added “supervised” to the product name.

“It will be a glorious future,” Musk said on Thursday evening.

Musk also revealed plans to produce an autonomous, electric robovan that can carry up to 20 people or be used to transport goods. He said it will be “a solution for high density,” such as transporting a sports team.

He said Cybercab and Robovan would feature inductive charging, meaning these autonomous vehicles could roll to a station to charge without needing to be plugged in.

Musk has touted Tesla’s work on autonomous cars for years and promised they would come to market. Along the way, he repeatedly spun a fantastical vision for shareholders while making and missing his own deadlines.

In 2015, Musk told shareholders that Tesla cars would achieve “full autonomy” within three years. They didn’t do that. In 2016, Musk said that a Tesla car would be able to complete a cross-country trip without human intervention before the end of 2017. That never happened. And in 2019, Musk said in a call with institutional investors that would help him raise more than $2 billion that Tesla would have 1 million robotaxi-enabled vehicles on the road in 2020, each capable of 100 hours of driving per vehicle Week could complete money for their owners.

In April of this year, Musk told investors that autonomy was the future of the company.

“If someone doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I don’t think they should be an investor in the company,” he said in a call with analysts. “We will, and we do.”

At Thursday night’s event, which he had previously described as a “product launch,” Musk welcomed attendees to the “party” and said they would be able to take test drives in the autonomous vehicles on-site, in the enclosed environment of the film studio, many of them.

It was Tesla’s first product launch since the company first unveiled the design of its Cybertruck in 2019. The boxy steel pickup was delivered to customers in late 2023 and has since been the subject of five voluntary recalls in the United States

REGARD: Video of the Robotaxi event