Musk says Tesla will begin production of the Cybercab in April

Tesla will begin production of the Cybercab, a self-driving electric car without pedals or a steering wheel, next April at its factory in Austin, Texas, CEO Elon Musk said during the company’s shareholder meeting on Thursday.

His comments on Cybercab came just moments after shareholders overwhelmingly approved a compensation package for Musk that could be worth up to $1 trillion in company stock — the largest in the company’s history.

“We have the first car specifically designed for full, unsupervised autonomous driving to be a robotaxi called the Cybercab — it doesn’t even have pedals or a steering wheel,” Musk said, adding that there will be no side mirrors either. “It has been greatly optimized to achieve the lowest cost per mile in autonomous driving mode and production is taking place here at this plant, and we will start production in April next year.”

Tesla has yet to prove that its cars are capable of driving themselves on a large scale without safety oversight, despite years of promises.

Musk’s comments appear to contradict Tesla CEO Robyn Denholm, who recently told Bloomberg that the Cybercab will include a steering wheel and pedals as a backup plan. Tesla once planned to make a version of the Cybercab with a wheel and pedals, but Musk nixed the idea and instead chose to make highly simplified versions of its cheapest cars.

Musk talked about how the Cybercab would be produced, claiming that the manufacturing line would take a 10-second cycle, a massive speedup from the one-minute cycle time to assemble the Model Y. Musk said this could mean producing between two and three million Cybercabs a year.

“So these will be everywhere in the future,” he said.

Tesla first revealed the Cybercab in October 2024 during a splashy “We, Robot” event at Warner Bros. Studios. Discovery in California with a promise to eventually sell the vehicles for personal use.

Since then, Tesla has launched a very rudimentary robotaxi service, but not with the proposed Cybercab. The service, which launched in June in certain parts of Austin, uses Model Y SUVs equipped with what Musk described as a new “uncensored” version of Tesla’s full self-driving software. A Tesla employee sits in the passenger seat on these self-driving rides.

Putting a Cybercab — or any vehicle on the road without standard equipment like a steering wheel — will require federal regulatory approval. Earlier this year, Amazon-backed Zoox was able to secure an exemption, and until then had only been offering its specially designed robotaxis on public roads. Zoox is still seeking an exemption that would allow it to operate a commercial robotaxi service.

The regulatory process for these exemptions is long and difficult. For example, General Motors tried and failed to get approval for its custom-designed Cruise Origin vehicle. Waymo, the dominant provider of robotaxi services in the United States, has stuck with its modified Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, which still have traditional controls. Waymo is also developing a vehicle with Zeekr.

Musk did not seem impressed by the possibility of regulators thwarting his plans and thanked Waymo for “paving the way.”

“I believe we will be able to deploy all the e-taxis we produce,” he said in response to a shareholder question at the annual meeting. “Once it becomes so normal in cities, it will become so…regulators will have less and less reasons to say no.”