Tesla says its Cybercab robotaxi goes to Dallas next month as profit falls 43%

Tesla will take its Cybercab robotaxi service to Dallas next month, the company’s executives said on Wednesday, as they tried to keep investors’ attention on driverless cars and robots in a quarter when profit fell sharply.

“In fact, next month we’ll be launching in Dallas,” Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla’s self-driving software work, told analysts on the call after the results. He said the same software would scale to other cities. The Cybercab, a purpose-built two-seat robotaxi, joined Tesla’s fleet in Austin about a month ago, and Tesla says its robotaxis have covered nearly 2 million miles without a safety driver.

Finance chief Vaibhav Taneja said more cities were planned “before the end of this year”.

Owners will have to wait

For people who already own a Tesla, the timeline is longer. Elluswamy said the company expected to let the first customer-owned cars join the robotaxi network around the middle of next year. “We suspect somewhere around Q2 next year is when we can turn on some of the first customer vehicles,” he said. Unsupervised driving for those cars is expected to be limited to robotaxi zones at first.

Lars Moravy, who runs vehicle engineering, said Tesla was “trying to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year, 2026”. Elon Musk, though, said he expected most of them to stay with Tesla. “The vast majority of the Cybercab stuff will be essentially Tesla-owned and transport as a service,” he said.

Paid Full Self-Driving subscriptions, which count upfront purchases, rose 67% from a year earlier to 1.74 million.

Optimus line in Fremont

Musk said “the vast majority of a million unit production line” for the Optimus humanoid robot has arrived at the Fremont factory in California. He cautioned that it would take “at least a year, maybe a little longer” to reach about 20,000 robots a week, and said Tesla’s next AI chip, AI5, should go into Optimus around April “if things go according to plan”.

The cost of the push

All of this is expensive. Research and development spending rose 69% to $2.76 billion, driven by Optimus, the Cybercab and Tesla’s AI work. Net profit fell 43% to $787 million on revenue of $28.05 billion, flat on a year ago. Operating margin was just 2.6%.

There were brighter spots in the car business. Margins on vehicle sales, excluding regulatory credits, improved to 18.1%, and deliveries of 486,532 were better than analysts had expected. Tesla said in its shareholder letter that “battery availability continued to be the limiting factor in increasing auto volumes in the quarter”, and that it ended the quarter with “the largest backlog for our passenger vehicles in four years”.

Tesla expects to spend more than $25 billion on capital projects this year. Its shares moved little in after-hours trading.