Tesla preps wider Cybercab rollout beyond Austin

“We’re starting with getting people from one place to the other, but we want to basically own transportation of any kind on Earth,” Taneja said on Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call Wednesday. Tesla has previously shown a concept multi-passenger “Robovan,” though it’s unclear whether Taneja’s comment signals work on transportation beyond cars. The company also said it will begin selling Cybercabs to fleet operators by year-end. It already runs robotaxi versions of its Model Y in small fleets across Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa.

The expansion sets up a direct fight with Waymo, the current US robotaxi leader with more than 4,000 vehicles across more than a dozen cities. Tesla argues the Cybercab is cheaper and easier to build, which it says should let it undercut rivals on price — but it still needs to scale well past Austin to prove that. Tesla said it’s ready, citing a sharp recent rise in self-driving miles, though it declined to disclose how much revenue the robotaxi business is generating. CEO Elon Musk said the ride-hailing business won’t show up meaningfully in the company’s financials until the second quarter of 2027, “and probably a big deal by Q3 or Q4 of next year.”

Tesla also changed how it reports progress: its second-quarter shareholder letter showed a “Cumulative Paid Robotaxi Miles” chart that revealed a 36% decline from the first quarter; the new letter instead shows “Cumulative Unsupervised Robotaxi Miles,” a simpler measure of distance driven regardless of paying riders. Taneja said utilization is “improving” without specifics, and pointed to regulatory approval — not manufacturing, which he called one of Tesla’s easiest products to scale — as the bigger constraint on the rollout. The Cybercab is still missing features like a brake pedal and side mirrors that current federal standards require, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation in September into whether the vehicle complies; a possible rule change removing those requirements remains at least a few months away. Not every executive agreed with Taneja’s framing: Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of autonomy, said the remaining bottlenecks are “not purely regulatory” but “technology driven,” pointing to the gradual expansion of service hours as evidence that AI capability, not approvals, is pacing the rollout.

Why it matters

Tesla is betting its robotaxi expansion can outrun Waymo on cost and manufacturing speed, but a federal safety investigation and an internal disagreement over what’s actually slowing the rollout suggest the bigger race may be against its own technology and regulators, not just competitors.