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Tesla’s Cybercab goes into production — so why is Musk tapping the brakes?
Transportation Close Transportation Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Transportation News Close News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All News Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Tech Tesla’s Cybercab goes into production — so why is Musk tapping the brakes? The billionaire CEO is starting to realize that he needs to solve autonomy before he can have a robotaxi business. The billionaire CEO is starting to realize that he needs to solve autonomy before he can have a robotaxi business. by Andrew J. Hawkins Close Andrew J. Hawkins Transportation editor Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Andrew J. Hawkins Apr 24, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC Link Share Gift Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Tesla Andrew J. Hawkins Close Andrew J. Hawkins Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Andrew J. Hawkins is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State. Tesla’s Cybercab is now in production at the company’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, but Elon Musk is sounding unusually cautious about the rollout. The robotaxi’s start of production was announced Thursday on X, with Tesla posting a video shot from inside a steering wheel-less Cybercab as it drove out of the factory with the caption, “Purpose built for autonomy.” The company made a few initial Cybercabs back in February , but continuous production only started this month. But with the company’s robotaxi plans creeping along much slower than expected, many Tesla watchers are left scratching their heads about the future — especially as Musk reins in his bombastic tone. In an earnings call this week , Musk sounded uncharacteristically pessimistic about Tesla’s robotaxi expansion plans. And he offered no new details about the company’s recent expansion to Dallas and Houston. (Each city only has two vehicles a week after the launch.) “The limiting factor for expansion is really rigorous validation, making sure things are completely safe,” he said in response to questions about the slower-than-expected rollout. “We don’t want to have a single accidental injury with the expansion of Robotaxi, and we have, to the credit of the team, not had a single one to date.” But we don’t know if that’s exactly true. Tesla has reported 14 crash incidents involving its robotaxis to the federal government since the service launched in Austin, Texas, a year ago. And unlike other robotaxi operators that provide details about the nature of each crash and any injuries that occurred, Tesla routinely redacts that information. Still, it was weird to hear Musk sound so downbeat about Tesla’s robotaxi experiment. In the past, the billionaire CEO could barely contain himself when talking about the company’s autonomous future, consistently promising that unsupervised Full Self-Driving, in which the driver would be able to let the car drive for them without any interventions, was just around the corner. His supporters point to the success of Autopilot, and then FSD (Supervised), as evidence that while his promises may not exactly line up with reality , he is still at the forefront of a societal shift from human-powered vehicles to ones piloted by AI. He’s even making an army of worker bots to prove the point that the technology is formally agnostic. But there have been hundreds of crashes involving Tesla vehicles using FSD and Autopilot, and dozens of deaths. Multiple government agencies have investigated the company’s claims around self-driving, and FSD appears to be on the cusp of a major recall . So perhaps knowing all this, Musk decided to rein in the overpromises and sound a bit more realistic about what’s to come. He acknowledged that the Cybercab’s production would be slow going until the end of the year. “Whenever you have a new product with a completely new supply chain, new everything, it’s always a stretched-out S curve, so you should expect that initial production of Cybercab and Semi will be very slow, but then ramping up, and going exponential towards the end of the year and certainly next year,” he said. “In fact, we’ll be ramping up production of all vehicles, in all factories, to the best of our ability through the balance of this year.” “Whenever you have a new product with a completely new supply chain, new everything, it’s always a stretched-out S curve.” — Elon musk Last year, Musk said that by the end of 2025, 50 percent of the US population would have access to Tesla’s Robotaxi service, describing the expansion has “hyper exponential.” But as of today, the company is operating in only a handf
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