The Tesla Cybercab is a cool looking prototype that needed to be much more

Tesla CEO Elon Musk could have taken the stage at the “We, Robot” event last night and allayed many fears.

He could have released comprehensive safety data for the company's full self-driving feature that showed real advances in driver assistance functionality and contradicted all the crowdsourced data out there, which made FSD look truly terrible.

He could have announced that the Cybercab, a sleek little two-seater with butterfly doors, would be a geofenced, Level 4 fleet vehicle used in a few select markets with impressive-looking profit margins.

He could have provided some details about the Cybercab's technology stack, including its sensors, vision system, and onboard computing power. And he could have shocked the industry and surprised many of his doubters by choosing lidar, the laser sensor that serves as a crucial redundant system for every other self-driving vehicle on Earth.

But he didn't do any of that. Instead, he put on what looked like a great show, complete with fake movie posters, lots of delicious-looking food, and robot bartenders. And he fell back on the same old, tired promises of a fully autonomous vehicle that was “just two years away.”

We've been down this road before. Many times.

“Prototype hardware that works in a limited demo is cool, interesting, and good to comment on,” Phil Koopman, an AV expert at Carnegie Mellon, wrote in his newsletter this morning. “But it’s not production, and hardware isn’t the limit for autonomous vehicles. Software is the long stick in the tent.”

At first glance it seems as if the event was the deciding factor. There were many Tesla fans who were completely impressed by what they saw last night and were ready to declare that the game was “over” for all other players in the field. The Robovan impressed many with its Art Deco style. And the positivity spread to the company's most optimistic investors, some of whom attended Musk's theme park experience and came away forever changed.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who was present, dismissed any share price decline following the incident – Tesla was down nearly 9 points in early trading on Friday – as a “knee-jerk reaction” that would eventually correct itself. “We strongly disagree with the idea that last night was a disappointment,” he wrote Friday, “as we would argue the opposite if we saw Cybercab with our own eyes and the massive improvements in Optimus that we have brought to it interacted throughout the evening.”

Some people don't seem to realize how much things have changed since 2016, when Musk first promised that full autonomous driving was just “two years away.” Many seem stuck in the outdated mindset that autonomous driving is an easy problem to solve and that fully autonomous cars are on the verge of taking over the world.

Since then, interest rates have skyrocketed, buckets of ample venture capital have dried up, and most major players working on the technology have since reconfigured their timelines to account for how long it will take for self-driving cars to prove it can be safer than humans. Even Waymo, by far the leader in this space, is taking things very slowly, one city at a time. It cannot promise the world; The company is still trying to figure out highways.

Musk promises the opposite. He said Tesla plans to introduce fully autonomous driving in Texas and California next year, with the Cybercab expected to enter production by 2026. Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles with “unsupervised” fully self-driving would be first in line. But he promised that people could even buy the Cybercab for a price of “less than $30,000.” Potential owners would be like shepherds tending their herd of small driverless taxis and roaming the streets.

Last night his pitch seemed utopian as the giant screens above him showed images of parking lots transformed into green gardens. (I call this “reverse Joni Mitchell-ing.”)

“We want to have a fun, exciting future,” he said. “If you could look into a crystal ball and see that future, you would say, 'Yes, I wish I could be there now.'”

It was nice to hear Mr. “Dark MAGA” articulate a brighter vision for the future, but after the event it’s even more unclear how we’ll get there. We have no details about how he will overcome the enormous obstacles in his path. Here is a quick overview of some of the issues that remained unresolved:

• Official approval. Tesla must obtain approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to operate fully self-driving vehicles on public roads. And to do this, the company must demonstrate that its vehicles can operate safely – something the company has not done so far. And in order to produce a Cybercab without a steering wheel, exemptions from the federal government are required. This is a process that takes several months and success is by no means guaranteed.
• Liability. What happens if a driverless Tesla crashes? Who takes legal responsibility? To date, Tesla has actively avoided accepting liability for its driver assistance accidents. And Musk said he would continue to avoid liability unless there was something “endemic to the design” of the vehicle.
• Remote support. What happens if a driverless Tesla gets stuck somewhere? Or is disabled? Other AV operators like Waymo and Cruise have procedures that allow remote operators to attempt to move the vehicle out of the way. And when all else fails, they send teams of technicians to manually control the vehicle. How do you do this on a vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals?
• Fleet maintenance. Tesla briefly showed an image of a snake-like robot vacuuming some crumbs from the back seat of the Cybercab. But fleet maintenance is even more complex. Who cleans the cameras in winter or charges the vehicle when the battery is empty?
• Emergency detection. Other robotaxi companies have struggled to respond to emergency vehicles, unexpected detours, and other edge cases that might arise. Tesla was under investigation by the federal government for more than a dozen incidents in which its vehicles using Autopilot collided with stationary emergency vehicles.

This only scratches the surface. Kyle Vogt, Cruise's former CEO, posted a fairly extensive list of his own questions to Tesla on X, most of which went completely unanswered. And this is coming from a man who was forced out of his own company for botching the response to one of those hard-to-predict edge cases (a human driver hitting a pedestrian and throwing her into the path of one of Cruise's robotaxis). .

It seems unlikely that Musk will suffer a similar fate to Vogt, despite how much he fumbles the ball. We've already seen the kinds of death and destruction that resulted from his company's aggressive push into autonomous technology. And so far he has managed to avoid these consequences.

But once the driver disappears along with the steering wheel and other controls, there is no one to blame but the seller.