Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) shares fell roughly 3% in premarket trading Friday after its long-anticipated Cybercab launch left analysts and observers questioning whether the robotaxi program can deliver on Elon Musk’s promises.
Wall Street Journal business columnist Tim Higgins appeared on CNBC and offered a pointed assessment of the event, describing it as “maybe less of a storm and more of a drizzle.”
Musk had previously teased a “storm of Cybercabs” ahead of Thursday’s launch, building significant anticipation among Tesla investors and followers on social media.
Approximately two million people were reportedly waiting on X for an expected livestream of the event, according to CNBC, but that broadcast never materialized.
Instead, Tesla held a closed event in Austin, Texas, officially adding its purpose-built Cybercab to its Robotaxi network and offering rides to the public across limited parts of the city.
Texas records showed just 45 Cybercabs registered ahead of the launch, and Tesla gave little indication of how quickly that number could grow into the large-scale fleet Musk has long promised.
Tesla executives outlined plans for dynamic ride pricing during the event and promised what they called a “first-class experience at coach price,” but Higgins acknowledged the launch “did probably not live up to the hype.”
Higgins identified Tesla’s camera-only autonomous driving approach as one of Musk’s most consequential bets, noting the company has largely avoided lidar technology relied upon by competitors such as Waymo and Zoox.
The underlying logic, Higgins explained, is that humans do not need laser sensors to drive, meaning cars should ultimately be capable of navigating using vision alone, though he noted the approach has “clearly provided challenges up to this point.”
Experts Higgins consults with generally believe camera-based autonomy may ultimately work, but asked whether falling lidar costs could push Musk to reconsider, Higgins said such a shift would be “very surprising” given how deeply Tesla has built its entire system around cameras.
If the technology proves reliable, Tesla’s manufacturing scale could become a significant competitive advantage, with market bulls betting Musk can eventually “pump out millions of these things very quickly.”
The bear case, however, is that reaching that level of production becomes a “many, many-year slog,” with Higgins framing the central issue simply: “The big question is how much does it scale and how quickly does it scale.”
Prediction-market platform Polymarket currently gives Tesla only a 14% chance of selling at least one Cybercab to a retail customer for $30,000 or less before December 31, with the market attracting more than $52,000 in trading volume.
For investors, the stakes have shifted beyond whether the Cybercab can drive itself, toward whether Tesla can build reliability and scale fast enough to justify the ambitions Musk has attached to the program.
Despite the muted rollout, Higgins acknowledged that deploying driverless vehicles on public streets in Austin without anyone behind the wheel remains “a big deal” in the broader context of autonomous vehicle development.
