- After unveiling its concept for a robotaxi call the Cybercab, Tesla pulled a "one more thing" moment on Thursday.
- It also revealed the Robovan, a 20-seat bus that Tesla says will be able to drive autonomously.
- Tesla didn't offer a price or release date like it did for the Cybercab.
At Tesla's We, Robot event in Los Angeles on Thursday, the automaker revealed a surprise new vehicle: the Robovan.
It's an odd-looking, dustbuster-like bus that Tesla claims will be capable of driving autonomously. The event was ostensibly all about revealing the Cybercab, an autonomous taxi that Tesla has hyped up for years. The Robovan, meanwhile, was a surprise last-minute addition.
"What happens if you need a vehicle that is bigger than a Model Y?," Tesla CEO Elon Musk said as the Robovan made its surprise entrance. He said it can carry up to 20 people—a sports team, for example—or transport goods.
The presentation was scant on hard details about the vehicle's capabilities, price or release date. So a lot of the important stuff is still a mystery. What we do know is that the pod-like vehicle has sliding glass doors, a bright interior and carriage-style rows of seating that face one another. It has a 1930s Art-Deco vibe that's a strong departure from the design language of the Cybertruck and Cybercab.
The Robovan's wheels are tucked inboard, giving the appearance that it is almost floating a few inches above the ground. Like the Cybercab, it does not appear to have a steering wheel.
"One of the things that we want to do, and you've seen this with the Cybertruck, is we want to change the look of the roads," Musk said of the Robovan. "The future should look like the future."
"We're going to make this, and it's going to look like that," he said.
In renderings it posted online, Tesla imagined the Robovan as a school bus, repair van and food truck.
The idea of a self-driving van isn't new. Cruise, General Motors' driverless-taxi outfit, planned to deploy a similar pod called the Origin. It scrapped those plans due to what it called regulatory uncertainty around its design. Zoox, the Amazon-owned autonomous-vehicle company, is focusing its efforts on a bidirectional electric pod.
It's important to note here that this Tesla doesn't exactly have the strongest track record of following through on new vehicles it announces. Rather, it has a reputation for hyping up vehicles and technologies that never arrive—or come way later than expected. The automaker paraded out the Roadster supercar in a similarly surprising way at the reveal event for the Semi truck back in 2017. The Roadster still isn't in production, four years after Tesla said it would launch.
Not to mention, deploying self-driving vehicles is technically challenging and expensive. Tesla has been working on autonomy for years and has consistently missed Musk's ambitious milestones for when self-driving Teslas would arrive. Meanwhile, both Google's Waymo and General Motors' Cruise have managed to deploy driverless taxis to U.S. roads.
Musk said the Cybercab—a smaller, two-seat vehicle—would launch before 2027 with a price of "below $30,000." He did not provide a date or pricing for the Robovan.
Gallery: Tesla Robovan
