On Cybercab (w/ Timothy B. Lee)

Last night Tesla finally unveiled Cybercab, the centerpiece of Elon Musk’s all-out push to lead the future of autonomous driving. As you might expect from a Tesla launch, responses ranged from unbridled optimism and to eyebrow-arched skepticism.

But before we talk about the reactions, what actually happened? In a nutshell, Musk did a short demo of a futuristic, two-seat robotaxi prototype—which features neither a steering wheel nor pedals—at the Warner Bros. Lot in Burbank, CA, followed by a brief speech to hype the technology. Though the presentation was light on details, Musk did say he expects the fully autonomous Cybercab will cost less than $30,000 and hit production lines “before 2027.”

Perhaps more incredibly, he also claimed that current Model 3 and Model Y owners in California and Texas will have access to unsupervised FSD next year.

There were so many surprising moments at the We, Robot event—hello, 20-person Robovan mini-bus!—that we felt it needed an entire episode of the Ride AI podcast to dissect it all.

For a full breakdown of last night’s news, our host Ed Niedermeyer was joined by Timothy B. Lee, the author of the Understanding AI newsletter, to discuss the significance of Tesla’s AV unveiling and what it means for the self-driving competition. Listen to their discussion below.

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If you’re not familiar with Tim’s work, we strongly recommend subscribing to his newsletter, which explains how AI works and how it’s changing our world. His most recent piece, about how Waymo took the lead over Tesla in driverless cars, is both timely and insightful.

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