Tesla Starts Cybercab Production: A New Era for TSLA

Tesla (TSLA ) has gone a long way since the first Tesla Roadster demonstrated that electric vehicles (EVs) can be powerful and “cool”, instead of glorified golf carts.

The company is today a major automaker, with several of its models ranking among the global best sellers. It is also a “cult stock”, with a very active and enthusiastic following among retail investors.

However, it is also true that for a few years, Tesla has somewhat over-promised and under-delivered. For example, the Tesla Semi truck is still not for sale.

Nowhere has this tendency to push “Elon time” for delivery deadlines been truer than with self-driving capacity. The company has been expecting to deliver to market a complete autonomous driving experience in just 1-2 years for a long period of time, starting as early as 2016-2018, or ten years ago.

The latest push for this concept “coming soon” was in October 2024, when, during the “We Robot” event, Tesla announced the upcoming release of robotaxis with an art deco style that might or might not have been inspired by the I, Robot movie.

Source: X

The idea was to soon produce a fully autonomous two-seater with no steering wheel, and the Robovan, which will have up to 20 seats and will be designed for regular transportation of more people at a lower price.

After two years, even the more positive Tesla fans started to wonder if these products would finally be made in the real world and beyond demonstration events.

So it came as a good surprise that Tesla announced that it has finally kicked off the mass production of Tesla Cybercab at its groundbreaking Cybercab robotaxi at Giga Texas. This could be groundbreaking news for Tesla shareholders, as it could radically redraw the finances and economics of the company. And potentially revolutionize how transportation is done all over the world.

Tesla Autonomous Technology

Une approche unique

Tesla is far from the only company racing to develop fully autonomous driving capacities. However, Tesla has taken a very different strategy than its competitors early on, which might prove a decisive advantage.

Multi-capteurs versus caméras

All of Tesla’s competitors rely on a wide array of sensors, such as radar, LIDAR (radar-like detection using lasers), and microphones, for their self-driving vehicles.

This provides a lot more data to the AI driving the car, but also makes any autonomous vehicles very complex and expensive to build. It can also make the required AI models more complex or unstable, as different input types might contradict each other.

Au lieu de cela, Tesla utilise uniquement au Les données visuelles des caméras. Cela rend le robot-taxi Tesla beaucoup plus semblable aux conducteurs humains et exploite le fait que les routes sont conçues pour que ces données soient suffisantes pour une conduite sûre.

This is why the robotaxi unveiled in 2024 can realistically be in the $30,000 range, where, just by itself, the LIDAR system of most other autonomous cars would cost more than that.

Collecte de données et formation à l'IA

Another key difference is in the collection of data for training the self-driving AI. All the other autonomous driving companies had to build a fleet of custom vehicles modified with the added sensors and computers, and then test them on real streets with paid employees behind the wheel.

Il s’agit d’une approche coûteuse qui limite naturellement le volume total de données, car chaque kilomètre parcouru nécessite que quelqu’un soit payé pour conduire une voiture tout aussi coûteuse.

Tesla collecte les données de chaque voiture Tesla jamais vendue, chacune équipée des 9 caméras qui seraient installées sur un robotaxi autonome. Cela a donné à Tesla un énorme avantage dans la collecte de données. Un avantage si énorme qu'il fait ressembler les données collectées par tous ses concurrents combinés à une erreur d'arrondi.

Source: ARK Investir

Le Cybercab de Tesla

Ready For Primetime?

Now, with the advantage of simpler and cheaper sensors and more data, it could look like a fully autonomous vehicle would already be on the road. But in practice, Tesla is still struggling to reach the level of safety that would let its software be as safe as humans.

Still, the announced Cybercab will entirely omit traditional controls such as steering wheels and pedals. So it seems that Tesla is confident that it will be able to deploy a safe driverless Cybercab in the streets and be authorized to do so very soon.

For now, only some of its “robotaxis” have been operating in limited geofenced areas. It should be noted that moving forward, Cybercab branding will replace robotaxis, as Tesla tried but failed to trademark the term “Robotaxi” at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The new look of the Cybercab model has been unveiled, and it will have glossy gold paint and look a little like a more rounded Cybertruck, moving away from the matte-finished model presented at the We, Robot event in 2024.

Source: TechOperator

At the first announcement in 2024, Musk said Tesla would produce 2 million units a year of Cybercab in full production capacity, which would be approximately 38,000 vehicles per week.

In practice, in these early production stages, it’s likely to be more like hundreds per week.

Regulators Reactions

Deploying steering wheel-less vehicles on the US roads will, of course, require regulators’ approval to do so.

It is not clear if recent progress in Tesla’s FSD (Full Self Driving) software could be enough to justify a change in regulators’ stances. For now, current motor vehicle safety standards generally assume the presence of a human driver.

Other autonomous vehicle companies like Waymo and Cruise have historically needed these NHTSA’s exemptions (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) as their vehicles did not meet all Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) like safety, bumper, and theft prevention standards. This gave them a 2,500-vehicle limit per year, greatly limiting the potential of mass deployment.

Instead, Cybercab was designed to comply with all existing FMVSS standards on its own, so no waiver is needed, and no production limit is to be expected. It can be noted that the earlier  Cybercab test spotted at the factory’s crash-test area did carry temporary steering wheels and pedals to meet current federal regulations during the data-collection phases.

The steering-wheel-free units are likely preparing for a small initial fleet, probably for Austin pilot operations or further validation.

Later, larger deployment, justifying the entry into mass production, will require a regulatory change that is yet to be seen.

Source: Joe Tegtmeyer

Tesla: A Changing Company

Leadership Shifts

In the past few months and weeks, a lot of Tesla’s leadership linked to the Cybercab has left the company, just before the announcement of mass manufacturing being launched. For example:

• Mark Lupkey, the manufacturing operations leader
• Victor Nechita, the Cybercab’s vehicle program manager.
• Thomas Dmytryk, the director who built Tesla’s over-the-air (OTA) update system and Robotaxi ride-hailing infrastructure.

It creates this strange situation where Tesla has lost every original program manager of the Cybercab just before launch.

At the same time, it might be more of a personal and career move-motivated series of departures than reflecting any real issue at Tesla. As some commentators noticed:

“With Musk stating that there won’t be any additional vehicle models, just AI and robots, it’s understandable why vehicle production people might leave and seek other opportunities.”

A Mobility Company?

The shift of leadership away from experienced automotive experts could indeed reflect the future of Tesla. The automaker is actively looking to not add any further individual vehicle models to its line-up.

Instead, the focus is now partially on Cybercab, but not just this two-seater. The long-awaited Tesla Semi is also seemingly coming. It promises to deliver up to 500 miles of range with around 400 miles in real-world testing.

The truck is expected to burn through 35% less energy than its electric rivals, Freightliner and Volvo, leading to operating costs of only 23 cents per mile. In addition, Tesla Semi delivers 1,000 horsepower, versus Freightliner’s 536 hp and Volvo’s VNR 455 hp.

The truck can recover up to 70% of its range in about 30 minutes using Tesla‘s Megachargers, which the company is currently deploying.

Tesla’s semi business model is announced to partially depart from traditional semi-truck sales.Instead, a “Tesla Semi as a Service” is now being offered by the company Alyath to remove the upfront capital barriers of fleet electrification.

So it could be that in the upcoming years, Tesla evolves from an automotive company to a truck manufacturing + Cybercab operating company.

If (and this is still an if) Cybercab is approved quickly, the forecast of a multi-trillion-dollar market for autonomous taxis pourrait devenir une réalité.

Meanwhile, the semi truck market is a $154B market, expected to grow 5.6% CAGR to $266B by 2035. Tesla could become the leader of this market if it led the electrification of the commercial fleet the way it did for smaller vehicles.

Altogether, the success of Tesla Semi and the arrival of true robotaxis on the market could give Tesla the possibility to pivot away from the increasingly competitive and crowded EV market, and into a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity.

And in the background, progress on the humanoid robot Optimus is also being made.

A SpaceX + Tesla Merger?

Of course, when talking of Tesla, the focus should be on the company’s leader: Elon Musk. Recently, the world’s richest man has been making massive moves inside his corporate empire.

notable, xAI, Elon’s AI company, which owns the X.com social media, has merged with SpaceX, the dominant leader in reusable rockets and space-based Internet (Starlink). And SpaceX is preparing for a massive IPO, potentially the largest ever made, with a valuation expected in the 1 trillion US dollars.

And the border between xAI, SpaceX, and Tesla has always been porous:

• L'extérieur du Cybertruck est fabriqué à partir du même alliage d'acier inoxydable exclusif que le Starship de SpaceX.

• Les équipes d'ingénierie des matériaux de Tesla et de SpaceX travaillent souvent ensemble et organisent parfois même des réunions conjointesLes problèmes de fabrication dans l’une des deux entreprises ont également parfois été résolus par les ingénieurs travaillant dans l’autre.
  • Low-latency, space-based Internet Starlink constellation could be integrated into Tesla vehicles, especially le Starlink Mini et les futurs robotaxis et/ou Optimus.
  • xAI progress in artificial intelligence and AI data centers is likely going to be instrumental in making Tesla’s FSD fully functional.
  • The orbital constellation of AI data centers imagined by SpaceX could also help train Tesla’s AI models, but this is more of a long-term possibility.
  • Both companies share the same company jet. In 2016, Tesla paid SpaceX approximately $1.1 million for the use of Tesla’s corporate jet.

So the big question for markets and investors is to see if a SpaceX-Tesla merger is on the horizon.

In principle, this should not be an issue, as illustrated by the recent approval of the xAI-SpaceX merger by its shareholders. And this should not be an issue for competition regulators as well, as both companies operate in complementary but different sectors.

However, it is yet to be seen if this is even going to be proposed, and in that case, if Tesla’s shareholders will vote in favor of such a mega merger.

Most likely, it would boost the valuation of Tesla and potentially trigger the infamous $1 trillion Tesla pay package to Elon Musk. For it to happen, Tesla (Or Tesla+SpaceX?) needs to meet many thresholds:

• Market capitalization threshold of $2T to $8.5T.
• EBITDA milestones starting at $50 billion and scaling up to $400 billion.
• 20 million Tesla vehicles delivered cumulatively.
• 10 million active FSD subscriptions.
• 1 million units of the “Optimus” robot.
• 1 million self-driving Robotaxis in commercial operation.

If this pay package were delivered, it could greatly increase Elon Musk’s control over the company, which, depending on who you ask, will be a good or bad thing for the company. It is even possible that the company will end up being taken back to private listing in the long run.

Investing In Cybercab

The mass production and commercial launch of Cybercab could be the most important turning point in the history of Tesla, a company that has already changed the automotive industry several times.

This is because if it works, it will mean that the FSD system is finally mature enough for large-scale approval by regulators, making Tesla the first company to achieve complete autonomous driving outside of geofenced areas.

In that case, Tesla would suddenly become a company renting travel with its Cybercabs at a fraction of the price of direct car ownership. This would make it able to ultimately directly generate hundreds of billions of revenues, if not trillions.

However, if it fails, it could prove a massive blow to the company. And the risk of stubborn regulators and previously failed FSD deadlines makes it a very real possibility.

In the background, Tesla Semi, Optimus, and a potential merger with the space-telecom-AI company SpaceX could help the company expand even further, but here too, too speculative projections and potentially missed deadlines are a risk.

Overall, the launch of mass production of Cybercab is still very good news for Tesla’s shareholders, as it reflects that the company’s robotaxis program is finally maturing toward the commercial stage.

But how fast it could benefit the bottom line of the company will be dependent on regulators, which is as much a matter of politics as of technology, making it hard to predict in the short term.

Actualités Tesla (TSLA) Actualités et développements boursiers