Elon Musk’s Cybercab recycles a decade of broken promises
Bold promises may no longer be enough for an extremist CEO who can’t deliver
On Thursday night, Elon Musk took to a stage erected on a movie set on the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, California to show off the autonomous future Tesla claims to be building. After riding in a Cybercab, showing off a prototype Robovan, and making a bunch of bold claims with little to back them up, Musk deployed a common catchphrase. “The future should look like the future,” he declared.
It’s a phrase his biographer Walter Isaacson claims he took from one of his sons. For Musk, it signals a dissatisfaction not just with the technological state of our society, but with its aesthetic quality as well. In his mind, the future must resemble 1980s-era science fiction films like Blade Runner or Back to the Future. That’s why the Cybertruck puts image above function by covering the vehicle in boxy, stainless steel panels prone to corrosion. The Cybercab prototypes on display at the event had some curves, but shared the Cybertruck’s headlight design and metallic exterior to present the picture of the future Musk has in mind.
Despite delaying the Cybercab unveiling for two months, Musk had little more than aesthetic to show. When pressed for concrete details, he could only say production would start “before 2027,” and noted he has a tendency to overestimate his timelines. More than anything, the event felt like a rehashing of the broken promises and failed transport visions the Tesla CEO has spent the past decade flogging to the public and investors to keep his company’s valuation and his personal image as a futurist inventor afloat.
When considered alongside Musk’s embrace of far-right politics and conspiracy theories, the Cybercab event may prove to be one of the final nails in the coffin of his once untouchable reputation.
Replaying the failures
Over the mere 20 minutes Musk was on stage, he cycled through a list of talking points he’s been using to justify the transportation projects he’s promoted over the past decade. He claimed that the existing transport system sucks as he showed videos of crowded subway trains and cars idling in traffic. He followed that with visualizations of parking lots turning into green space, claiming autonomous vehicles — specifically Cybercabs — would allow parking lots to be turned into parks and forests. His robotaxis would be 10 to 30 times safer than humans, he asserted without evidence, and would solve the problem of increasingly unaffordable cars.
Paris Marx
If you’ve been following the hype around autonomous cars and Musk’s long list of failed transport endeavors, those statements won’t sound novel — what’s surprising is to hear him still using the same lines after failing to deliver so many times. Musk has been promising fully self-driving vehicles are only a year or two away since 2015, the year after Tesla started rolling out its Autopilot system. Many of Musk’s lines were common to hear in the mid-2010s when companies working on autonomous vehicles claimed they would dominate the roads and fix virtually all of our transport woes within a short span of years — something they not only did not achieve, but will never do. But his statements also reek of the failed vision for the Boring Company.
Several years after rolling out Autopilot, Musk was stuck in traffic and fired off a few dumb tweets claiming he was going to fix it with tunnels. From that emerged the concept for the Boring Company in 2017, which Musk initially claimed would be a tunnel-based transport system for cars consisting of on-street vehicle elevators, automated movement, many layers of tunnels to add capacity that wouldn’t be possible on the surface. When critics pointed out that not everyone owns a car, he even released a video mock up of a pod-like vehicle that would allow pedestrians to use the system too. None of that was ever realized.
At the core of Musk’s vision for the Boring Company and autonomously driven robotaxis is the notion of “individualized mass transit.” In 2017, he told Wired he hated mass transit. “It’s a pain in the ass,” he said, claiming no one likes buses or trains because there’s full of “a bunch of random strangers” that could include serial killers — a rich person’s delusion if I’ve ever heard one. Instead, he claimed everyone would prefer individualized transport, refusing to accept that individualized instead of collective mobility is at the root of what he hates so much about modern transportation: all that traffic.
His vision assumes that if we could just build enough tunnels or, at an earlier point in his career, double-decker highways and replace pesky humans with incredibly talented computer drivers, all the contradictions of automobility will be solved. But that’s nothing more than a technocratic fantasy that keeps car-oriented societies trapped and unable to address their current problems. As the meme goes, Silicon Valley has a long history of reinventing the city bus with everything from microtransit to Boring Company pods to Musk’s new prototype Robovan. They keep coming back to versions of what’s existed forever, without being able to accept their new tech spin doesn’t make it any better.
Paris Marx
If we want to solve traffic congestion, along with so many other transport issues, redirecting our efforts and investments from cars — whether driven by humans or computers — to collective forms of mobility like buses, subways systems, and trains (with plenty of room for bicycles and pedestrians too) is the only way to do it. But there’s not nearly as much hype-fueled speculation or investor profits in those more mundane ways of actually addressing the problem.
A decade of deception
For all the big promises, the Boring Company hasn’t amounted to much. Canceled projects litter the United States and the only one that’s opened is the Vegas Loop that takes people around the Las Vegas Convention Center in a paved tunnel with Tesla vehicles piloted by human drivers. It’s not a real transportation system, but more like a Tesla promotional venture or even a Disneyland ride for the Tesla cult.
Musk has proven time and again that he can’t deliver on his transport ambitions, in part because they’re rooted in his fantasies rather than any proper understanding of the problem. The Boring Company and Hyperloop projects are a dud that, if anything, helped cripple real transport improvements. The Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems are facing increasing scrutiny from regulators as the number of crashes and deaths attributed to them continues to grow. The Cybertruck has proven to be a disappointment, while the Tesla Semi still isn’t in volume production and the new Roadster doesn’t even have a production timeline despite being announced in 2017.
Paris Marx
For years, Musk’s star power and Tesla’s share price depended on his ability to make grand pronouncements he’d never be held to account for. The company promised it was getting into battery swapping in 2015 to juice the number of regulatory credits it would receive. It shared a fraudulent self-driving video in 2016 to fuel excitement. Musk showed off fake solar roof tiles that same year — once again on a studio lot — to push shareholders to approve a self-serving acquisition of SolarCity. And that’s not even to mention all the times he’s promised the imminent arrival of self-driving vehicles and that he’s taking humanity to Mars.
It didn’t matter how outlandish the claim, for far too long Musk could get away with the deception and outright fraud. All those lies created a lot of wealth for himself and the investors plowing into his companies, while also providing plenty of fodder for news articles and magazine articles praising his genius. But that may finally be changing. In recent years, people have become more skeptical of the exaggerations made by tech companies and investors have been demanding tangible evidence of progress.
Paris Marx
On top of that, Musk’s open embrace of extreme right-wing political figures like Donald Trump and conspiracy theories around issues like migration and voter fraud have turned off a growing number of people who once supported him. He still has a dedicated cult following, but reports suggest he’s alienating Tesla customers and he’s lost Democrats, many of whom eagerly supported him in years past, with just 6% responding they had positive feelings about him in a recent poll. He recently told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he thinks he’ll be arrested if Kamala Harris wins the US presidency in November, but that may be the least of his worries.
The fall of Elon Musk
Back in 2019, Musk announced a million robotaxis would be on the road in 2020. They never arrived then, and likely won’t this time either. Tesla’s share price dropped 8% when markets opened the morning after the event, signaling investors are getting fed up with his lies as the company struggles to sell cars to customers who have plenty of other options. For a long time, it looked like Tesla would become the automotive startup that would make it. But plagued by a self-obsessed CEO, continued complaints of poor build quality, and an inability to deliver new products on time or on budget, its days may be numbered.
Elon Musk got used to getting by with bold statements and flashy visuals that might never go anywhere. But his ability to lie his way to success was premised on the goodwill he’d built up with the public and investors knowing they were still going to make their money at the end of the day. His descent into billionaire grievance politics and his decision to lash out at a world that expects him to play by the same rules that apply to everyone else may kill that goodwill once and for all. His fall can’t come soon enough, but will open more space for a future that looks nothing like the one he has in mind.
If you want to know more about those failed transport projects, I wrote a whole book about them called Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. Grab a copy!
