Tesla Plans Cybercab Sales by Year-End as Quarterly Profit Falls 43%
Tesla says it will begin selling its steering-wheel-free Cybercab by the end of 2026, even as regulators probe the vehicle and profit drops 43%.
Tesla said Wednesday it intends to start selling its Cybercab, a two-seat autonomous vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals, to customers by the end of this year, even as federal safety regulators investigate whether the car complies with US vehicle standards. The announcement came on the electric carmaker’s third-quarter earnings call, where the company also reported that net income fell 43% from a year earlier as spending on artificial intelligence, robots and chips climbed.
What Tesla said about the Cybercab
Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of engineering, told analysts that every Cybercab built so far has gone into the company’s own robotaxi fleet, but that Tesla aims to get the vehicle into customers’ hands before the year is out, TechCrunch reported. He said the company would start small and expand as it learns how delivery, ownership and fleet management work for driverless cars.
Tesla first raised the idea of selling the gold-colored two-seater to outside buyers at a Cybercab event in Austin, Texas, in September, and posted an interest form for prospective robotaxi buyers. Until Wednesday, it was unclear whether the company would follow through.
Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, signaled that individual ownership is not the main goal. “Cybercab is primarily going to be something that is offered as like transport as a service,” he said on the call, according to TechCrunch. Musk said most of the vehicles would be owned and operated by Tesla, while models such as the Model 3 and Model Y remain aimed at personal buyers.
Other details from the call, as summarized by Yahoo Finance and The Next Web, included:
- Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla’s AI software work, said Cybercab rides will launch in Dallas next month.
- Musk said the Cybercab fleet in Austin grew roughly tenfold in about a month.
- Moravy said the Cybercab uses 50% fewer parts than any previous Tesla, with listed production-line capacity above 125,000 vehicles a year.
- Musk said the robotaxi business should start to show up noticeably in Tesla’s financial results in the second quarter of 2027.
A regulatory cloud
The sales plan faces a significant hurdle. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the federal auto safety regulator, opened an investigation into the Cybercab in September, hours after the vehicles began operating on public streets in Austin. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, the rules that every car sold in the US must meet, require features such as brake pedals and mirrors. Automakers certify their own compliance, and Tesla did so for the Cybercab.
NHTSA has said it will “examine the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the Cybercab,” according to TechCrunch. The Department of Transportation has separately proposed dropping manual-control requirements for vehicles designed to drive themselves, but the outcome of the investigation could decide whether anyone can legally operate the car. Tesla has not publicly conceded any compliance problem.
The timeline also creates an unusual situation for existing Tesla owners. Musk said an unsupervised version of Full Self-Driving, Tesla’s driver-assistance software that currently requires a human to stay alert and ready to take over, would reach customer cars around the second quarter of next year. In April, he had said it would “probably” arrive in the fourth quarter of 2026, The Next Web noted. If both timelines hold, fleet buyers could operate driverless Cybercabs before owners get the same capability in their own vehicles.
Profit slides as spending surges
Tesla reported third-quarter revenue of $28.05 billion, roughly flat from a year earlier, while net income dropped to $787 million from $1.37 billion, The Next Web reported. Operating expenses rose 39% to $4.78 billion, driven by research and development, and operating income fell 56% to $718 million. Capital spending more than doubled to $4.73 billion in the quarter, and Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s chief financial officer, put full-year capital expenditure at about $20 billion.
Automotive revenue fell 3% to $20.56 billion, and energy revenue dropped 16% to $2.88 billion, which Tesla partly attributed to tariff-related customer refunds. Services and other revenue, a category that includes Supercharging, insurance and the robotaxi operation, rose 33% to $4.61 billion. Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles and reported its largest order backlog in four years, with battery supply cited as the main constraint. Shares fell more than 3% in after-hours trading, according to CNBC as cited by The Next Web.
Paid Full Self-Driving customers topped 1.7 million globally, and more than 75% of new cars delivered in North America came with a paid FSD signup, according to Yahoo Finance’s summary of the call.
What comes next
Beyond robotaxis, Tesla said it has begun building Optimus, its humanoid robot, on production lines in Fremont, California. Musk described the effort as “early production” and warned the ramp would be “somewhat bumpy,” saying it would take at least a year to reach a rate of 20,000 robots a week. The company expects to start delivering Optimus units to outside businesses around the end of next year.
Tesla also outlined plans for Terafab, its in-house chip manufacturing project, with an initial test chip expected around mid-2027 and volume production targeted for the third quarter of 2028, Yahoo Finance reported. The company has secured the ability to borrow up to $30 billion but does not plan to draw on it this year, Taneja said.
For now, the Cybercab’s commercial future may hinge less on Tesla’s production lines than on how NHTSA’s investigation is resolved.
