Tesla CEO Elon Musk on the Cybercab: You will be able to buy one for below $30,000

🎥 Oct 10, 2024 📺 CNBC Television ⏱ 4m

Tesla hosts its 'We, Robot' event on Thursday at Warner Bros. Discovery's movie studio in Burbank, California. Elon Musk ...

Watch on YouTube

About Elon Musk

Elon Musk recently oversaw SpaceX’s public listing on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, which he said was the largest initial public offering in the history of capital markets. During the event, Musk stated that he had originally given SpaceX “less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all” and recalled telling people, “Look, we’re probably going to fail, but you know, we should give it a try because if we don’t… we will never be a truly spacefaring civilization.” He described SpaceX’s mission as “to take the fiction out of science fiction” and said the company aims to make humanity multi-planetary, adding, “We want to be able to take anyone who wants to go to the moon, anyone who wants to go to Mars… not just a few astronauts.” The IPO was widely reported to have made Musk the world’s first trillionaire. In addition to the IPO, Musk discussed SpaceX’s plans to build AI satellites and space-based data centers. In an interview with SpaceX employees in Bastrop, Texas, he said that the company’s AI satellite is “actually much simpler than a Starlink satellite” and noted that the current reference design calls for Nvidia Rubin chips. He also spoke about a “terrafab” facility that he said would be approximately 100 million square feet, roughly 10 times the size of Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas, and discussed using a mass driver on the moon to launch materials into deep space. Separately, Musk oversaw the final delivery of Tesla’s Model S and Model X vehicles, which he called a “bittersweet moment,” emphasizing that those cars “showed that an electric car could actually be the best car of any period.”

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Elon Musk's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (3 segments)

✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution

Elon Musk0:00

So we want, with autonomy, you get your time back. This is a very big deal. So it's not just a safety thing; it'll save lives, a lot of lives, and prevent injuries. I think we'll see autonomous cars become 10 times safer than a human. I mean, think of times past where there used to be an elevator operator in every elevator. But once in a while, they get tired and accidentally shear somebody in half. So now we have automated elevators. You just get in an elevator and press a button, and you don't even think about it, and it just takes you to the floor. If you did see an elevator operator with a big relay switch, you'd be like, that's weird. Now, that's how cars will be. And it's not just the lives saved and injuries, but think about the cumulative time that people spend in a car and the time they will get back that they can now spend, well, I guess on their phones, or watching a movie, or doing work, or whatever you want to do. You can think of the car in an autonomous world as being like a little lounge. You're just sitting in a comfortable little lounge, and you can do whatever you want while you're in this comfortable little lounge, and when you get out, you will be at your destination. So yeah, it's going to be awesome.

So in fact, we think the cost of autonomous transport will be so low that you can think of it like individualized mass transit. The average cost of a bus per mile for a city, not the ticket price because that's subsidized, but the average price is about a dollar a mile. Whereas the cost of a Cybercab, we think probably over time from the operating cost is probably going to be around 20 cents a mile, and price including taxes and everything else probably ends up being 30 or 40 cents a mile. So yes, and you will be able to buy one. Yes, exactly. And we expect the cost to be below $30,000. And I think there'll be an interesting business model where, let's say somebody is an Uber or Lyft driver today, they can actually sort of manage a fleet of cars, like manage 10 or 20 cars, and just sort of take care of them like a shepherd tends their flock. You have your flock of cars and you're the shepherd, and you take care of your flock of cars. I think that would be pretty cool. And it's going to be a glorious future. It's going to be really something special. So, available? Yes. Good. All excellent questions.

So we do expect actually to start fully autonomous, unsupervised FSD in Texas and California next year. And that's obviously with the Model 3 and Model Y. And then we expect to be in production with the Cybercab, which is really highly optimized for autonomous transport, in probably... well, I tend to be a little optimistic with time frames, but in 2026. So yeah, before 2027, let me put it that way. And we'll make this vehicle in very high volume. But well before that, you will experience the robotic taxi via the Model 3 and Model Y program, and Model S and X too. But the Model 3 and Y will achieve unsupervised full self-driving.