On Cybercab (w/ Timothy B. Lee + Ed Niedermeyer)

Last night Tesla finally unveiled Cybercab, the self-driving centerpiece of Elon Musk’s all-out push to lead the future of autonomous driving. And as you might expect from a Tesla launch, responses ranged from fanboy-ish optimism to eyebrow-arched skepticism.

But before we talk about the reactions, what actually happened? In a nutshell, Musk did a short demo of a futuristic, two-seat robotaxi prototype—which features neither a steering wheel nor pedals—at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, CA, followed by a brief speech. Though his presentation was light on details about the technology, Musk did say he expects the fully autonomous Cybercab will cost less than $30,000 and hit production lines “before 2027.”

Perhaps more incredibly, he also claimed that current Model 3 and Model Y owners in California and Texas will have access to unsupervised FSD next year.

There were so many surprising moments at the We, Robot event—hello, 20-person Robovan mini-bus!—that we felt we needed an entire episode of the Ride AI podcast to dissect them all.

For a full breakdown of last night’s news, our host Ed Niedermeyer was joined by Timothy B. Lee, the author of the Understanding AI newsletter, to discuss the significance of Tesla’s AV unveiling and what it means for the self-driving competition. Listen to their discussion below.

P.S. If you’re not familiar with Tim’s work, we strongly recommend subscribing to his newsletter, which explains how AI works and how it’s changing our world. His most recent piece, about how Waymo took the lead over Tesla in driverless cars, is characteristically timely and insightful.

In the future, you can expect more content from Tim and Ed on the pod and in other formats. Stay tuned.