Tesla: Sales Of Self-Driving Cybercab Coming Soon To Invitees: $20/hr?

Tesla has announced that it will begin selling its 2-seat, self-driving Cybercab to those on a special invite list, possibly as soon as next month. The vehicle will cost $30,000 plus a mandatory $300/month self-driving subscription. It will only operate within the defined service areas of Tesla robotaxi service, which are urban zones in a selection of cities, mostly in Texas.

This is sooner than I, and most others expected, though it is not clear how many people will be on the special invite list, which clouds the issue. I will break down the math below. It’s also different from the plan outlined just a few weeks ago on the Tesla earnings call, when Tesla was asked when they would enable unsupervised self-driving in existing private Teslas.

Travis Axelrod: When can we anticipate FSD unsupervised in customer cars?…

Ashok Elluswamy: Yes. Like I mentioned earlier, the software for Cybercabs and Model Y is the same, like -- and pretty soon, we’ll be able to release the same software as part of the v15 release to customers. So the only additional requirement is to make sure that, for example, the customer model-wise can be part of the geofences and the fleet management that Tesla has for it to be fully autonomous. We suspect somewhere around Q2 next year is when we can turn on some of the first customer vehicles to be part of the Robotaxi fleet.

They also said, though, that they hoped to sell Cybercabs to customers in 2026, though mostly they would be for Tesla use. It was typically read that since customer cars would only be joining the fleet, that Cybercabs would only work that way as well, but this announcement describes a plan where they are for “personal use.” This is also complicated by the legal issues I described earlier this week. In fact, you can’t put this car into the Tesla fleet or hire it out, or use it commercially. If you loan it to friends, they might do something that can get it disabled.