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Tesla Inc. shares were down roughly 3% in premarket trading Friday following a Cybercab launch that The Wall Street Journal business columnist Tim Higgins said fell short of Elon Musk’s promised “storm” of robotaxis.
“Maybe less of a storm and more of a drizzle,” Higgins told CNBC. He nevertheless called putting Cybercabs on Austin streets without anyone behind the wheel “a big deal.”
Cybercab Launch Falls Short of the Hype
Musk had teased a “storm of Cybercabs” ahead of Thursday’s launch. CNBC said roughly two million people were waiting on X for an expected livestream that never happened.
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Tesla instead held a closed event in Austin and officially added its purpose-built Cybercab to its Robotaxi network, offering rides to the public in limited parts of the city.
Tesla executives outlined plans for dynamic ride pricing and promised what they called a “first-class experience at coach price.” Texas records showed 45 Cybercabs registered ahead of the launch.
But Tesla gave little indication of how quickly those 45 vehicles could turn into the much larger fleet Musk has promised.
“It did probably not live up to the hype,” Higgins said.
Tesla’s Camera Bet Could Decide How Fast Cybercab Scales
Higgins said Tesla’s biggest challenge now is proving its autonomous driving system can work reliably enough to support a much larger Cybercab fleet.
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Unlike Waymo and Zoox, Tesla has largely avoided lidar, relying instead on cameras to interpret the road. Higgins described that as one of Musk’s biggest bets and a core part of his first-principles approach to autonomy.
The logic, Higgins said, is that humans do not need laser sensors to drive, so cars should eventually be able to navigate using vision alone. Experts he speaks with generally believe camera-based autonomy may ultimately work, Higgins said, but the approach has “clearly provided challenges up to this point.”
Asked whether falling lidar costs could eventually push Musk to change course, Higgins said that would be “very surprising” given how deeply Tesla has built its system around cameras.
If the technology works, Tesla’s manufacturing scale could become a major advantage. Higgins said bulls are betting Musk can eventually “pump out millions of these things very quickly.”
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The bear case is that getting there becomes a “many, many-year slog.”
“The big question is how much does it scale and how quickly does it scale,” Higgins said.
Traders Doubt a Mass-Market Cybercab Is Close
Prediction-market traders remain skeptical Cybercab will become a consumer product this year.
Polymarket gives Tesla a 14% chance of selling at least one Cybercab to a retail customer for $30,000 or less by Dec. 31. The market has attracted more than $52,000 in trading volume.
For investors, the question is no longer just whether Cybercab can drive itself. It is whether Tesla can make the technology reliable enough to turn a handful of vehicles in Austin into the scale Musk has promised.
Image: Shutterstock
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