Tesla has finally revealed its highly anticipated robotaxi, which is fully self-driving with no steering wheel or pedals.
CEO Elon Musk unveiled the vehicle Thursday during the "We, Robot" event at Warner Bros. Discovery studio in California. He arrived at the stage after being driven around the backlot in a two-door prototype of the Cybercab, telling the crowd that it is going to change everything we know about using a car.
"We'll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving... where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination," he said. "It's going to be a glorious future."
In an autonomous world, Musk said cars like the Cybercab will effectively be "a comfortable little lounge" where people can do whatever they want until they reach their destination.
"With autonomy, you get your time back," he continued. "If you think about the cumulative time that people spend in a car and the time that they will get back that they can now spend, well, I guess on their phones or watching a movie or doing work or whatever you want to do."
And that future is not so far off, if you believe Musk. He estimated that the vehicles would become available "before 2027" for anyone to purchase, for commercial or personal use, at a cost "below $30,000."
"Elon Musk sees this as something that Uber fleet operators or taxi services would buy in bulk and use to sort of ferry people around different cities," explained ABC Tech Reporter Mike Dobuski. "He says that this could potentially reshape the way we get around. It could transition parking lots into parks."
Tesla also revealed the Robovan, an autonomous vehicle that uses the same technology as the Cybercab, only much larger. It seats 20 and can be adapted for personal or commercial use, such as a school bus, RV or cargo transport.
But what many feel was lacking from the big reveal was assurance from Tesla that its Full Self-Driving software, which it has been selling for years, is actually reliable.
Musk has previously faced criticism for failing to demonstrate that Tesla's system can travel safely without a human driver ready to step in to prevent crashes. On Thursday, he said unsupervised Full Self-Driving would be up and running next year in the company's Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in Texas and California.
Still, investors were not convinced and Tesla shares closed down nearly 9% on Friday, CBNC reported.
"As expected, like prior Tesla product unveils, the event was light on the details, and instead emphasized the vision underpinning Tesla’s growth endeavors in AI/AV [autonomous vehicles]," analysts at Barclays noted, per CNBC.