Tesla’s Cybercab has a long way to go to beat Waymo

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Molly Boigon (0:28)

Hello, and welcome to the Automotive News Shift Podcast, where we bring you the latest on automotive technology, trends and transformation.

I'm Molly Boigon, tech and innovation reporter at Automotive News. Our guest today is Mike Nefkens, CEO of HERE Technologies. We spoke about how incumbent map companies such as HERE are competing with the big tech upstarts, Google and Apple.

Mike Nefkens (0:54)

The good news for us is the map is back. So that's number one.

Molly Boigon (0:57)

But first, let's talk about the week. Tesla finally made good on its plan to launch its robo taxi, the Cybercab, without human controls. And within a single day, NHTSA opened a probe into the new model. Joining me now to talk about it is Laurence Iliff, who covers Tesla for us at Automotive News.

Lonnie, welcome back to Shift.

Laurence Iliff (1:17)

It's great to be here.

Molly Boigon (1:19)

So big week for tech and innovation news. How significant is this launch for Tesla? And what did it actually look like compared to what we've heard from Elon Musk over the last several years about this launch?

Laurence Iliff (1:31)

I mean, symbolically, it's like extremely important, right? Elon Musk has been talking about creating a completely autonomous vehicle that could be used as a robotaxi or a personal vehicle for years. And in fact, one decision that he made a few years ago was rather than to make a $25,000 economy car that would launch Tesla into making 10 million or 20 million cars a year, right? That it would capture a third of the car industry.

He decided to go in a different direction, right? And so rather than mass produce EVs for the masses and build a factory in Mexico, he decided no, autonomy is the future. And this is it. This is the car. It has two doors. It's supposed to be very inexpensive to produce, you know, less than $30,000 to sell, right? So to produce it would be less. It has a very minimalist manufacturing process to save money. And so the Cybercab is extremely important vehicle for Tesla. They say it's going to be their number one volume vehicle in the future. Millions all over the world replace, you know, public transportation. So symbolically, it's a very big deal. I think with Elon Musk, as we've seen for 10 years, the symbolism and the reality, there's always a big gap. A year ago, they launched a different RoboTaxi, which was the Model Y with human controls, obviously. But as a RoboTaxi in June of 2025, Elon Musk said they were going to be covering half of the United States with this ride hailing service by the end of 2025

But they were still stuck in Austin with the pilot project. And so now here we go again, Austin, the Cybercab. I just looked at a RoboTaxi tracker, which is kind of a crowdsourced tracker. And there's like 175 Tesla RoboTaxis in Austin. So it's grown a lot, you know, from where it started with a couple dozen. But I still think people are kind of taking the grain of salt to see whether this is really going to scale or not.

Molly Boigon (3:49)

What do you make of the fact that Elon has been making such a big deal about RoboTaxis as the future of the industry and as a future direction of Tesla, but that he didn't even come to the launch? I thought that was really interesting and maybe a little surprising.

Laurence Iliff (4:02)

It's interesting because on the day of the launch, if you watch social media, what everybody was talking about was not about the Cybercab, because there was no live stream. There was no Elon Musk. There was no media. There were a bunch of influencers who signed non-disclosure agreements and they went to an event and everybody was just waiting like, what's the news? What's going on? Like, what does this mean?

And there was a lot of disappointment, and then the influencers got to ride in the Cybercab, and then open to the public the next day. But a lot of people were like, no Elon Musk, no live stream, no hype. It's just kind of, I don't know, it kind of fizzled a little bit.

Molly Boigon (4:47)

Should have become an influencer, Lonnie.

Laurence Iliff (4:49)