News
Who will forego owning a car when Tesla’s ride-sharing service becomes available?
Picture this: no car payment, no car insurance, no circling the block looking for parking and no depreciation. Foregoing car ownership sounds pretty great. Why is it then that so many Americans insist on having a car? Simply stated: freedom.
Somewhere after the years of public transit, biking many miles or begging your parents for a ride, most of us got our own set of wheels. For some of us, it came in the form of a $900 death trap of a car that shook violently above 55 miles per hour. For others, an uncool but reliable toaster of a car. The car world as we have known it has always meant that unless you live and work in a major city with great public transportation, a personally owned vehicle is about the only convenient way to travel from point A to point B on a regular basis. This is especially true for families. If you’ve never been on a bus or subway with a baby in a stroller, spare yourself the circus. It’s also true depending on exactly which neighborhood you live in, even if you are in a major city. Taxicabs, where available, are far more convenient than public transportation, but certainly aren’t widely available outside of the most densely populated metro areas and at least to me, have always been cost prohibitive to use for any more than a special occasion. To reiterate the point, we all like freedom. And convenience. We like to go where we want to when we want to, without standing on a bus or watching a train timetable.
Ride-sharing services such as Lyft and Uber have upended the traditional taxicab model and, in many markets, undercut the price while providing a superior service. I certainly enjoyed riding in a flawlessly clean Kia Optima Hybrid Saturday night with a chatty and friendly driver far more than the high mileage, stale smelling, yellow Crown Vics that pass as taxis in Philly. The before and after experience are far better as well. Smart phone apps tell you who will be picking you up, in which kind of car, and exactly how far away they are. Cabs still require being flagged down and the joke’s on you when the 5th one passes you by with the “vacant” indicator light in use but passengers in the rear. Afterwards, you get notified that your credit card was charged in some amount that you had already been prepared for. In a taxi, you either pull out cash when you see the ever-surprising sum due or watch the driver give you an attitude for using their in-car credit card machine.
Trends are already developing among young adults to move into thriving urban areas, work nearby and pass up owning their own wheels. A lot of reasons contribute but the ease of using ride-sharing services is certainly one of them. What I’d like to explore here is whether or not this trend will grow – both among young adults as well as others – as autonomous vehicles come to market and bring with them the possibility that ride-sharing services will be even more common and affordable. I offer below a few categories of people and my assessment on whether or not they may give up a car in favor of autonomous vehicle ride-sharing.
TARGET: YOUNG, SINGLE, URBAN DWELLER. ANSWER: YES.
These folks are already the group that are giving up cars today, so surely they’ll continue to do so when that option becomes cheaper and even more widely available.
TARGET: YOUNG, SINGLE, ANYWHERE ELSE DWELLER; ANSWER: PROBABLY.
These folks will share many of attributes of those who forego car ownership today. They will, on average, have student loan debt to tackle and plenty of familiarity with smart phones.
TARGET: TWO ADULT HOUSEHOLD WITH NO KIDS. ANSWER: MAYBE.
This group of folks may be willing to forego one car in the household. Depending on their age and familiarity with today’s ride-sharing offerings, they could be the perfect target to give up one car. This demographic is the one I belong to. Having jobs in opposite directions makes owning two cars the most convenient option, but outside of the work commute, the second car never moves.
TARGET: TWO PARENT FAMILY. ANSWER: PROBABLY NOT.
Children are required to ride in car seats for quite a few years these days. For that reason alone, I would imagine ride-sharing to be more trouble than it’s worth. If, like the two-adult household with no kids one car is solely used as a commuter, that one could probably be given up. But the way I understand today’s modern family to work, either parent has to be ready to spring into action with little notice if daycare gets shut down due to snow or Junior gets sick in school.
TARGET: MATURE ADULTS. ANSWER: HOPEFULLY.
This is where I’d really like to see ride-sharing take off. If you are fortunate enough to make it to old age, your eyes or reflexes may not join you in their youthful form. The mature adults I’ve been close with have all wanted to continue driving beyond the point that in their individual circumstances, was probably wise. I get it. Freedom. When you’re a feisty octogenarian with an old habit of going to the grocery store daily (a holdover for the decades when you hid your smoking habit from everyone) it must be impossible to imagine yourself sans keys. If we can invent these cars, surely we can also invent easy ways of calling one up for a customer who isn’t particularly interested in owning or operating a smart device. (A telephone dialing service, perhaps – especially helpful for those with vision problems.)
AS FOR ME?
I just got done telling my better half that due to his short commute and our never using our second car outside of the work day, we could easily ditch car number two and have him Uber to work. The conversation was short-lived, as I have the longer commute and he has no interest in handing over the Model S fob to me on a permanent basis. In theory though, might it work? Yes. Would I end up doing it? Probably no. I’d be more inclined to owning an autonomous Tesla and letting it work for me such that the overall cost of owning and operating it was comparable to using a ride-sharing service in place of owning one.
The why is simple: freedom.
News
Tesla pulls back the curtain on Cybercab mass production
Tesla’s Cybercab drives itself off the Gigafactory Texas line in a striking new production video.
Tesla has provided a first look from inside a production Cybercab as it drove itself off the assembly line at Gigafactory Texas. The video footage, posted on X, opens on the factory floor with robotic arms and assembly equipment visible through the Cybercab windshield, and follows the car through a branded tunnel marked “Cybercab”, before autonomously navigating itself to a holding lot.
The first Cybercab rolled off the Giga Texas production line on February 17, 2026, with Musk writing on X, “Congratulations to the Tesla team on making the first production Cybercab.” April marked the official shift to volume production. The Giga Texas line is being prepared to produce hundreds of units per week, with 60 units already spotted on the Gigafactory campus earlier this month.
Purpose-built for autonomy
Cybercab in production now at Giga Texas pic.twitter.com/Y9qG3KyWBa
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 23, 2026
The Cybercab was first revealed publicly at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024 at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, where 20 pre-production units gave attendees rides around the studio lot. Musk said he believed the average operating cost would be around $0.20 per mile, and that buyers would be able to purchase one for under $30,000. The two-seat design is deliberate. Musk noted that 90 percent of miles driven involve one or two people, making a compact two-passenger vehicle the most efficient configuration for a fleet-scale robotaxi. Eliminating rear seats also removes complexity and cost, supporting that sub-$30,000 target.
Tesla’s annual production goal is 2 million Cybercabs per year once several factories reach full design capacity. The Cybercab has no steering wheel, no pedals, and relies entirely on Tesla’s vision-based FSD system. What the video shows is the first evidence of that system working not as a demo, but as a production reality, driving itself off the line and into the world.
🚗 Our first ride in Tesla Cybercab last October: pic.twitter.com/kGqIqgJPRn https://t.co/BITCXFhbVd
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2025
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Tesla pulls back the curtain on Cybercab mass production
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
