At Tesla’s We, Robot event in Los Angeles on Thursday night, Elon Musk showed off a prototype of the Robovan
The Robovan will be an electric, self-driving car about the size of a bus that will be used to move people around places with many people. Musk says it can carry up to 20 people and things at once.
Thursday night, Musk said, “We’re going to make this, and it’s going to look like that.” The Robovan was rolling toward the center of the stage. And that’s all Musk would say. We’re not even sure how much of it is true.
Musk didn’t say when the Robovan would come out, how much it would cost, or how Tesla would make it. It does look pretty cool, though.
Some parts of the Robovan look like a bus from The Jetsons, and parts look like a toaster from the 1950s. Its sides are made of silver metal with black accents. Light strips run parallel to the ground along its sides, and doors slide out from the middle. There are chairs and space to stand inside, and the windows are all tinted. It drives itself, so there is no turning wheel.
Musk said, “One of our goals is to change how the roads look. We’ve already done this with the Cybertruck.” He said something old again: “The future should look like the future.”
It looks like other robotaxes made for a specific reason, like those made by Zoox and Cruise. Elon Musk’s car is much bigger. A Robobus like this has been made by WeRide in China.
Still, the Robovan that was shown on Thursday is just a prototype. It’s impossible to know what the real thing will look like or when it will come out, no matter what Musk says.
Tesla kept a lot of information about the designs of the cars it showed off on Thursday’s secret. The only real clue we had came from Tesla’s 2023 Investor Day, where the company showed off two new cars that looked like they were meant to be mass-produced: One smaller car that looks like the Cybercab and one bigger car that we think is probably the Robovan.
At that time, the plan was to make 20 million cars annually by 2030. For that to happen, Tesla would have to make and sell 15 times as many cars starting in 2022.
At the event on Thursday, Musk didn’t discuss any plans to build new factories or change how factories work so that they can make the Cybercab or the Robovan. He also didn’t say much about when the Robovan would be made, but he did say that the Cybercab would begin production in 2026 or 2027.