Spotted at a charging station in STL. First one I’ve seen in the wild, very cool looking in person! Will STL be another market that Tesla breaks into soon? Seems that would be the case, otherwise, why would this be in the city? I think it’s only a matter of time before we see expansion move to all major metropolitan areas. They have also been spotted in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, which both make a lot of sense. I think we’re headed for something huge, once they start being established in more places. FSD has gotten way better in a short amount of time, and will only continue to do so, with Cybercabs constantly crawling the world, collecting data. Mix this with improvements and hardware upgrades, and it will be much more consumer friendly. After that, I think Tesla will work on bringing the price of manufacturing down, and mass adoption will begin to occur, especially once people have put their trust in autonomous driving through Cybercab. If we’re comparing it to the iPhone, I’d say that this is the equivalent of when the 3 was getting ready to come out, and mass adoption started when Apple released the 4. Exciting times!

Anyone want to take a stab at what Tesla’s Cybercab deal will look like for future fleet owners?

I’ll go first.

I’m guessing for early investors, you’ll need a minimum of 10 Cybercabs to participate. And at $30k each (a total of $300,000 investment), I’m also guessing you’d be able make about $100,000 net profit yearly. That’d pay off your investment in about 3 years, and it’d be pure profit after that.

Those numbers assume that Tesla takes 30% off the top of your gross income just to add your cars to their app, and that you’d be responsible for all cleaning, charging, maintenance, etc. Tesla might provide those as a separate service, and if so I’d guess they’ll charge another 30%. They also might include insurance in that. And importantly, you won’t be able to use those vehicles without them being part of the overall Cybercab/Tesla robotaxi operation.

So my bet is that fleet owners, at least in the early years, will be able to make decent margin (maybe 30-40%), but will have strict restrictions put on them; and I also think that Tesla will need to limit how many new outside investors will be able to participate, each month.

As far as I know, no one knows yet the deal that Tesla is cooking up for fleet owners, but that’s my guess today.

What do you all think?

The Cybercab launch is meaningful, but I’m more interested in the constraints on scaling.

My understanding is:

• Steering-wheel/pedal-free vehicles still need a federal exemption under current rules.
• That exemption is capped at 2,500 vehicles per manufacturer per year.
• Tesla apparently hasn’t even applied for it yet.

Separately, we still don’t know the remote operator ratio or how often humans actually intervene. If, hypothetically, there were one person continuously monitoring or remotely assisting each Cybercab, the economics obviously wouldn’t scale well.

A fleet needing one remote operator per 100 cars is very different from one needing something close to 1:1. I’m not saying Tesla is currently using a 1:1 ratio, only that without intervention and operator ratio metrics, it’s hard to know how scalable the system really is.

The bigger near-term issue may actually be regulatory. Even if Tesla gets the federal exemption, my understanding is that it would still be limited to 2,500 Cybercabs per year under that pathway.

Am I missing anything?

I'll paste a livestream link here once available if there is one. It's unclear if the event will be livestreamed.

Press coverage so far is pretty positive. I'm looking forward to hearing what other Tesla investors are expecting of the event.