The video the panel played on this week's episode showed small gold two-seaters moving through Austin after Tesla's Cybercab event there — "a river of golden EVs flooding the streets," as the host put it. The car has no steering wheel and no pedals, and doors that lift upward rather than swing out, which set off a run of jokes about the "three-comma club" from the television comedy Silicon Valley.
One panelist who had seen the cars in person said that what he had failed to take in at the time was how much was simply gone. The missing steering wheel was obvious. The missing rear-view mirrors were not. "The number of components they've taken out of the car is driving down the cost," he said. There is no driver, but there is also, in his account, a large amount of car that no longer has to be built.
Cheaper because there is less of it
The panel worked through the subtractions. A conventional cab carries an airbag for every seat; with two seats, another panelist said, Tesla halves that bill. On the drivetrain, one of them offered a figure he uses often: a typical internal-combustion car has around 2,000 moving parts in its drivetrain, and a Tesla has 17. Open the hood of a petrol car, another said, and then look at the equivalent space in a Cybercab, and it feels like perhaps a tenth as many things. That is why the car dealers are unhappy, one added — there is no first service to come back for.
The two-seat cabin drew the obvious objection, and the panel's answer was arithmetic rather than engineering. The average load in an Uber is about 1.2 people, one panelist said; if six people need to travel, send three Cybercabs and let them follow each other. Tesla's own Cybercab support page says which vehicle a rider gets initially depends on availability and party size, with Cybercab rides offered in limited areas of Austin and its Model Y robotaxi service running separately elsewhere. The page also sets rider rules that a private car does not have: nobody under thirteen, and thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds must be accompanied by an adult.
One panelist read the whole design as the remains of an earlier plan. Tesla had long teased a Model 2, a $25,000 car that never launched. His best reading is that the project became the robotaxi instead: once the sale value of a car drops below some threshold, he argued, it makes more sense to monetize it through autonomous rides than to sell it. "This will turn transportation into an API," he said.
"Buy 10 of them and put them on the streets"
The price is the part that makes the panel's central idea possible. Musk wants to sell these at $30,000 each so that people can buy them, one panelist said, and the entrepreneurial move looked obvious to him: "buy 10 of them and put them on the streets in your local town, have them earn revenue for you." Tesla's support page says the company accepts inquiries about buying individual vehicles or fleets for commercial use; it does not publish a price.
Asked what he made of it, Salim Ismail called it classic exponential-organization behavior — decentralized, interface-driven, leveraging assets the company does not own. If Musk can get people to buy the cabs and turn them into millions of micro-franchises, he said, the loyalty that follows will be "unbelievable," with the vertically integrated stack behind it.
Another panelist put the appeal in price per mile: the cost of getting around falling by another order of magnitude, from a couple of dollars a mile today to twenty cents. He wants it soon for personal reasons — he has told his son Milan he will never need a driver's license, and reckons he has about two years to win the argument.
The rider evidence so far is thinner than the forecast. The host showed a report from an early Austin rider saying Cybercab trips were running roughly 50% cheaper than Uber for comparable journeys, and describing the rides as smoother and cleaner, with audio and seat settings syncing automatically from a passenger profile. Tesla's page describes the smaller version of that: climate and media preferences carry from one trip to the next. The host also recalled Nevada clearing Tesla for 5,000 vehicles in Las Vegas over the next twelve months, and said the competition would be crowded out.
Owning the car is not the whole job
Much of the segment was about everything that surrounds the vehicle. The panel kept returning to New York's yellow cabs, and to why they smell the way they do: the medallion is valuable, the car never stops moving, one driver hands it to the next, and someone has to take it home in the middle of the night. A Cybercab, one panelist said, spends that dead time driving itself somewhere to be cleaned — it could be out in Queens — and comes back pristine. He allowed that these cars are also brand new, which may be part of why the experience feels, as he put it, night and day better.
Breakdowns got a shorter answer. A Cybertruck comes and tows it away, one suggested; the others joked about DoorDashers turning up to help if a door is wedged open, and about crushing the car into a cube and sending it back to the smelter.
On manufacturing, the host argued the winner will be whoever can mass-produce fastest, and that this favors Musk — "the guy that builds the machines that build the machines." He put the new Waymos at over $100,000 and the Cybercab at or below $30,000. Two panelists recalled touring the Gigafactory, walking nearly a mile beside a car from mounds of scrap aluminum through the smelter and the Model Y press to a finished vehicle. One qualified the prediction: China is dumping into Europe, so this is not a US-only race, and buyers will have all of them available for the foreseeable future. On that, the panel agreed on one thing — the end user wins.
The objections, and the forecasts
The camera-only design has critics. Companies whose cars keep steering wheels, pedals and lidar are questioning whether a vehicle with cameras alone is safe enough, one panelist noted, and he expects a fight in the courts over which cities allow the technology. The panel's Boston jokes ran for a while on that theme.
Their larger predictions stayed predictions. One panelist expects entire inner-city areas to bar human drivers on efficiency and pedestrian-safety grounds, and thinks cities are near that tipping point; nowhere has done it. Another argued robotaxis will be the "gateway drug" to accepting other robots on city streets, and offered his favorite illustration rather than a statistic: the transit system in a medium-sized American town, buses full at rush hour and running close to empty the rest of the day, a standing loss. Some small towns, he said, had already discussed scrapping transit and paying for Uber instead. What he expects from cheap autonomy is mobility for people who cannot drive at all — blind and disabled riders, students, anyone who has been drinking.
The contrast arrived in the same segment. Uber and the UK company Wayve launched autonomous rides in London on September 3, using Ford Mustang Mach-Es fitted with Wayve's AI Driver. UberX, Electric and Comfort passengers may be matched with one at no extra charge and can decline it. The fleet is small to start, expansion depends on readiness, regulation and demand, and a trained, TfL-licensed private-hire driver sits in the car for every trip. Asked whether he had seen them yet, Emad Mostaque said they were just starting to roll out, and that he was looking forward to his first ride.