Elon Musk Plays a Familiar Song: Robot Cars Are Coming

Elon Musk , dressed in a leather jacket in front of adoring fans, looked like an ageing rock star on stage playing one of his greatest hits.

Robot cars are coming. 

Those fans at Thursday’s event swooned as they always have as he pushed out timelines for delivering robot cars and showed what those vehicles could look like. But outside the Hollywood-area venue, it wasn’t exactly clear that everyone believed his vision for the future is as near as he says.

Tesla stock fell almost 9% Friday amid investors frustrated with the continued lack of details for how the company is going to make the very complicated transition from maker of cars to maker of robots.

In essence, Thursday night’s much-hyped product reveal became something of a Rorschach test: Supporters, who point to everything Musk has accomplished with electric cars and other industries, heard a glorious future with driverless cars and humanoid robots. Critics—mindful of previous missed goals and maybe peeved by his contentious politics —saw more smoke and mirrors.

“Let’s not get nuanced here,” the chief executive told the crowd as they peppered Musk with questions, a reminder that even among the faithful, time is ticking for him to play some new notes. And to deliver a big hit.

What he did show was cool. A two-seat car with doors that swung upward to open, inspired, in part, by the sci-fi movie “Demolition Man.”

Though as Musk talked about the vehicle, it wasn’t clear he had settled on a formal name. On stage, he called it the “Cybercab,” while the company released details on its website calling it the “Robotaxi.”

Whatever the name, the straight lines of the small car resembled what might be the offspring of the Cybertruck , the pickup the company brought out last year after some delays, and the new Roadster that was first revealed in 2017 and has yet to come to market. Those delays are examples of “ Elon Standard Time ,” or his practice of setting a target only to miss it.

Robot cars are coming. 

The Cybercab/Robotaxi reveal also included what Musk says will be Tesla’s autonomous van, an art deco-inspired vehicle that resembled a giant toaster with an interior meant to feel like a spaceship and enough room for 20 passengers.

Like the small car, the van lacked a steering wheel—the sort of doodads currently required under regulations, though exceptions can be granted. The car could begin production “probably” in 2026, Musk said. He didn’t even suggest when the van might come.

The nearest timeline was deploying fully self-driving cars, through the company’s current offerings, next year in Texas and California.

Musk has been predicting driverless cars being just around the corner for several years, including in 2016 when he said Tesla would demonstrate a car driving itself from Los Angeles to New York City in 2017. That didn’t happen.

In 2019, he said he expected his robot taxis would arrive in 2020 . That didn’t happen.

But Tesla has pushed the envelope with its driver-assist system that is essentially a glorified cruise control—adjusting speed, keeping within a lane and other manoeuvres—but can’t technically drive the car itself. Tesla says the person behind the wheel is responsible for everything, though some drivers grow overconfident in its true abilities and act like the car is autonomous.

Musk likes to talk about how Tesla vehicles are collecting valuable real-world data that is used to train its AI systems.

After building Tesla into the world’s leading electric-car company, Musk in recent years has tried to position its future on robotics, saying it is focused on solving self-driving technology. “That’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero,” Musk said in 2022.

Despite that rhetoric, Tesla is behind in deploying cars on roadways without drivers. Alphabet ’s Waymo has deployed fully autonomous vehicles in places such as San Francisco, where paying customers can take its vehicles around the city without anyone sitting behind the wheel.

On Thursday night, Tesla demonstrated 50 vehicles, including the new two-seater, driving autonomously on private property of the Warner Bros. studios where Musk held his party for investors and supporters.

Detractors were quick to pounce.

“After over 10 years of Full Self-Driving development, Tesla is limited to a 20-30 acre geofenced 5mph 1950s Disneyland ride on a preprogrammed, premapped and heavily rehearsed route with no traffic and no pedestrians,” Dan O’Dowd , a critic of Tesla and founder of a rival software company, said in a statement. “Tesla robotaxi is nothing more than the latest work of fiction to come out of the Warner Bros. Studio.”

But Thursday night wasn’t about impressing the O’Dowds of the world. And maybe not even those watching on the livestreams through Musk’s social-media platform X—which counted more than 9 million views by Friday evening.

The real target were the hundreds of attendees at the event who spent the evening riding around in the cars and posting fawning videos of their experiences on social media, in turn, helping the event go even more viral and generating even more attention for the idea that Tesla is paving the way for a robot future.

Robot cars are coming. 

Not only did party attendees enjoy rides, but they were entertained by the latest versions of Tesla’s humanoid robots Optimus, which Musk has said could one day add $25 trillion to the company’s market value.

Former Tesla board member Steve Jurvetson posted a video of himself playing rock, paper, scissors with one of the robots. “Optimus just beat me in rock paper scissors!” he tweeted .

Others shared videos of robots pouring drinks and dancing.

“The markets won’t get what happened last night at @tesla ,” Robert Scoble, a blogger and former Microsoft tech evangelist, posted on X. “I couldn’t be more impressed. @elonmusk laid out a bunch for next decade. I have been to a lot of product launches and never have been to one like this.”

Some even compared the evening to when the late Steve Jobs unveiled Apple ’s first iPhone, marking the beginning of a new technology era. It was an idea that Musk was quick to endorse.

“Yes, this marks a fork in the road,” he tweeted afterward.

Robot cars are coming.