// TECHCRUNCH — FINANZA
Tesla is prepping a Cybercab onslaught
Tesla says it is preparing to launch its shiny gold Cybercab in new markets outside its home of Austin, Texas, in a bid to “literally take over every part of terrestrial transportation.”
“We’re starting with getting people from one place to the other, but we want to basically own transportation of any kind on Earth,” Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call Wednesday.
Tesla has previously shown a concept version of a multi-passenger vehicle it calls the “Robovan,” but it’s unclear if Taneja’s bombastic comments mean the company is working on other types of transportation.
What was clearer on the call is that Tesla’s Cybercab expansion will begin in Dallas next month and spread to other cities by the end of this year. Tesla already operates robotaxi versions of its Model Y SUV in small fleets in Dallas, Houston, and the Florida cities of Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. The company also said on its earnings call that it will start selling Cybercabs to fleet operators by the end of this year.
Broader expansion of the Cybercab could set up a real fight with Waymo, which is currently the market leader for robotaxis in the United States, with more than 4,000 of them deployed across more than a dozen cities. Tesla has argued that its Cybercab is cheaper and easier to build, which should allow it to undercut Waymo and other robotaxi operators on price. But the company has to reach real scale outside Austin in order to prove that point.
Tesla said it’s ready thanks to a dramatic increase in the number of miles its self-driving cars have traveled in recent weeks. While that may be true, Tesla was mum on Wednesday about how much money the overall robotaxi effort is bringing in. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the new ride-hailing business won’t be noticeable in the company’s overall financial figures until the second quarter of 2027, “and probably a big deal by Q3 or Q4 of next year.”
Tesla also made a change to its letter to shareholders that further obscures what little visibility there was into its robotaxi business.
In Tesla’s second-quarter letter, the company included a chart for “Cumulative Paid Robotaxi Miles.” A close read of that chart showed a 36% decline from the first quarter of the year. In the new letter released on Wednesday, Tesla changed that chart to show “Cumulative Unsupervised Robotaxi Miles” — simpler indicator of how far the fleet cars are driving, whether or not they have paying riders on board.
There wasn’t much more clarity on the call, either. When asked about paid robotaxi miles traveled, Taneja said the company is “seeing utilization improving,” but didn’t offer specifics.
Instead, Taneja kept most of his comments generally focused on Tesla’s plans to scale the Cybercab. That included praise for Tesla’s engineering team for creating a vehicle that, according to the manufacturing team, is very easy to build — and build quickly.