Tesla to Sell Cybercabs to Fleets by Year-End as It Targets Waymo

By Daniel Okafor

Tesla will start selling its gold Cybercab to fleet operators by the end of this year, and will launch the vehicle in Dallas next month before spreading to other cities before January. The company laid out the timeline on its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja framed the ambition in sweeping terms. "We're starting with getting people from one place to the other, but we want to basically own transportation of any kind on Earth," he said. He added that Tesla wants to "literally take over every part of terrestrial transportation."

Tesla has previously shown a concept of a multi-passenger vehicle it calls the "Robovan." It remains unclear whether Taneja's comments mean the company is building other types of transportation.

What does the expansion look like?

Tesla already runs robotaxi versions of its Model Y SUV in small fleets in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa. The Cybercab, the purpose-built two-seater unveiled without a steering wheel, starts its own rollout in Dallas next month.

The plan sets up a direct fight with Waymo, the U.S. robotaxi market leader. Waymo has more than 4,000 robotaxis deployed across more than a dozen cities. Tesla argues the Cybercab is cheaper and easier to build, which should let it undercut Waymo and other operators on price. The company still has to reach real scale outside Austin to prove that claim.

Tesla says it is ready because the number of miles its self-driving cars have traveled has risen sharply in recent weeks. But executives said little about revenue.

When does the money arrive?

CEO Elon Musk said the ride-hailing business will not be noticeable in Tesla's financial figures until the second quarter of 2027, "and probably a big deal by Q3 or Q4 of next year."

The company also changed a key metric in its shareholder letter. The second-quarter letter included a chart titled "Cumulative Paid Robotaxi Miles," which showed a 36% decline from the first quarter. The new letter, released Wednesday, replaced it with "Cumulative Unsupised Robotaxi Miles" — a simpler indicator of how far the cars drive, whether or not paying riders are on board.

On the call, Taneja said the company is "seeing utilization improving" when asked about paid miles, but offered no specifics.

Is manufacturing or regulation the bottleneck?

Taneja spent most of his remarks on scaling. He praised the engineering team for building a vehicle that, according to the manufacturing team, is very easy to build — and build quickly.

"They think this is one of the easiest products for them to scale in terms of manufacturing," he said. "So scaling would not be that much of a challenge."

The harder part, he said, is securing "all the regulatory approvals" so Tesla can "start deploying the Cybercabs as fast as we can produce them." Musk has long made the same argument, claiming regulatory approval, not technical progress, is the biggest barrier to the robotaxi plans. He has been vague about which approvals, specifically, are needed.

One hurdle is real. In September, hours after Tesla formally launched the Cybercab in Austin, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into whether the vehicle complies with federal motor vehicle safety standards. Automakers self-certify compliance, and Tesla claims the Cybercab meets the rules. But the vehicle lacks features the standards require, including a brake pedal and side mirrors. NHTSA has proposed removing some of those requirements, though that rule change is likely at least a few months away.

Not every executive agreed that regulation is the constraint. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's vice president overseeing autonomy, said the remaining bottlenecks are "not purely regulatory."

"It's technology driven," he said. "We had initially had the robotaxi service from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., and then expanded to 10 p.m. to 11 p.m, now it's going to be pretty soon, [to] 2 a.m. So we're slowly expanding the availability of robotaxi, and that is driven by the capability of the AI software."

Tesla's service still does not operate on highways or in certain conditions, although the cars have been spotted in heavy rain in Austin many times — conditions Waymo's robotaxis have largely avoided. Elluswamy said Tesla plans to tackle more of these driving scenarios by the end of this year before scaling further.

"We just want to make sure that there's not a single safety incident. That is our operating principle. And even if there's the slightest possible risk at all, we don't like take on that risk," he said.

The gap between the rhetoric of "owning terrestrial transportation" and a revenue line that Musk himself says will stay invisible until 2027 leaves investors with one concrete benchmark: whether the Cybercab reaches fleet sales and new cities on schedule before NHTSA rules on the brake pedal and the mirrors.