Elon Musk had an eventful 2024, with his strong push into right-wing politics and using his X social media platform and considerable influence to help Donald Trump win the presidential election.
Putting politics aside for a moment, it’s worth focusing on another of Musk’s pastimes: making promises about Tesla.
The Tesla CEO’s promises — and repeated missed deadlines — have become a major thread in Tesla’s history. And they’ve always had an awe-inspiring quality that captured investors’ imaginations and helped boost Tesla’s stock value, giving the company a $1.3 trillion valuation. There was his claim in 2015 that Tesla vehicles would be self-driving in two years, that driverless road trips would be possible by the end of 2017, and that Tesla owners would be able to earn money through a ride mass without driver. -Greeting network in 2020.
And while Tesla has cemented its place in the history books thanks to building and selling millions of electric vehicles, none of the above promises (or many others) have come true.
But that hasn’t stopped Musk from making more promises in 2024. Here’s a rundown of those promises and when he expects them to come true.
EV $25,000
It wasn’t until 2024 that Musk pledged to unveil a $25,000 EV, then scrapped it in April to prioritize a robotaxis prototype — a decision that led to mass layoffs as Tesla pursued its “next phase of growth”.
Musk has commented on whether the affordable EV would ever come to market. But during Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call, Musk said the idea of building a $25,000 car with a steering wheel and pedals is “nonsense” and “stupid.” He said the only car he would sell at that price point would be the Cybercab.
During the call, an analyst asked if Tesla would make a lower-cost EV that isn’t a Cybercab, and Musk replied that all of the company’s cars moving forward would be autonomous. He also said that of the 7 million vehicles Tesla has built to date, the “vast majority” are “capable of autonomy” and that Tesla is “currently producing on order 35,000 autonomous vehicles per week.” Musk is clearly using a loose definition of autonomy here, because Tesla still doesn’t make vehicles that are safe to operate without a human behind the wheel.
(rollback: Musk first promised in 2016, in a since-deleted post on Tesla’s website, that “All Tesla cars now in production have full self-driving hardware” and that only a software update would be needed to turned regular old Teslas into self-driving cars. That didn’t happen, and Tesla has had to upgrade cars with older hardware.)
It’s also worth noting that during that earnings call, Musk said he expects vehicle growth to reach 20% to 30% in 2025 due to “lower-cost vehicles” and “the advent of autonomy.”
Start production on the Cybercab by 2025 or 2026
Tesla unveiled 20 Cybercab prototypes at a glitzy Hollywood event in October, and Musk took the opportunity to share some plans for the vehicles, as well as Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. FSD is Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system that can perform many automated driving tasks, but still requires a human to remain attentive behind the wheel and take over if necessary.
Musk told customers that one day they could buy a robotaxi — a two-door, two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals — for less than $30,000. He also said Cybercab’s average operating cost will drop over time to just $0.20 per mile. And he said Tesla would begin production on purpose-built AVs in 2025 or 2026.
(rollback: Musk said in 2022 that Tesla would mass-produce robotaxis by 2024. Before that, in 2019, he said that Tesla would have one million robotaxis on the road by 2020. Musk has promised that Tesla would choose “next year” full self-driving. at least 2016.)
A few weeks later, during Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call, Musk said that Tesla would reach “volume production in ’26” and that the company eventually “was targeting at least 2 million units per year of the Cybercab.”
Current federal regulations requiring vehicles to be built with certain safety standards, such as manual human controls, could be obstacles for Tesla to mass-produce its Cybercabs. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently proposed new rules that would speed up exemptions for such vehicles, but they would require companies to share more data with the agency, such as crash reporting. Today, automakers are required to report crashes when ADAS, or autonomous driving technology, is involved.
Musk has opposed the rule before, and President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is said to be exploring removing it.
Robot in development
During Tesla’s robotax unveiling, the company also showed investors a Robovan prototype. At the time Musk didn’t share any concrete plans for the vehicle, but in November he tweeted on X that the Robovan is in development, along with “a few other things.”
(Flashback: In 2016, Musk said Tesla would begin building a minivan using the Model X chassis within two to three years.)
‘Unsupervised FSD’ and Autonomous Barrage in 2025
At the event, Musk also promised that Model 3 and Model Y owners will be able to use an “unsupervised” version of FSD in California and Texas in 2025.
It wasn’t and still isn’t clear what Musk meant by “unsupervised” FSD. Today, Tesla’s FSD is still not fully autonomous, and to clear up any confusion, Tesla this year began referring to the software as “supervised FSD.” Removing supervision could mean that Tesla plans to remove the driver, or it could mean that Tesla plans to offer a Level 3 autonomous system that allows drivers to take their hands and eyes off of it for part of their journey.
During Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call, Musk took the promise of unattended FSD a step further. He said he hopes to launch a service that will allow people to hail self-driving Teslas in California and Texas in 2025. He also claimed that Tesla had begun testing the service in the Bay Area with employees.
(Context: There are several levels of permits required to test and deploy autonomous vehicles in California. Tesla has had a permit to test AVs with a safety driver in the front seat since 2015, but the Department of Motor Vehicles told TechCrunch in October that Tesla last reported using that permit in 2019.)
It’s not clear whether Tesla plans to roll out this service with a flurry of robot taxis or with existing Tesla Model 3 and Model Y owners. Tesla’s first-quarter earnings presentation included a mockup of an upcoming Tesla app for ride-hailing, and the company has for years teased the idea of a ride-hailing network using Teslas that have been updated to drive fully autonomously. The idea is similar to Uber, only Tesla owners would add their properly equipped self-driving vehicles to the driver’s app to earn extra money when the cars are not in use. Tesla would get 25% to 30% of the revenue.
Finally, during Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call, Musk said Tesla was in talks with a “major automaker” to license FSD, but so far has not announced any deal. such.
‘Over a thousand Optimus robots working at Tesla’ in 2025
Musk has made some promises about Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot. During Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting, Musk promised that Tesla would go into “limited production” of Optimus next year, with “over 1,000 or several thousand Optimus robots working at Tesla” by 2025. He also said that he expects Optimus to be on sale by 2026. In a post on X, the billionaire executive added that he expects to have more Optimus robots available for use by other companies in the year 2026.
He did not specify whether the robots would work fully autonomously, or if they would be remotely controlled by humans, as they were during the Tesla robotax unveiling event in October.
(Context: While humanoid robots are improving to the point of being able to autonomously perform specific tasks, many experts say that generalized robotics is still years away due to a lack of training data.)
In addition to the production promises, Musk also predicted that Optimus could one day increase Tesla’s market cap to $25 trillion. That’s roughly seven times the current market values of Apple and Nvidia. At the end of December, Tesla’s market cap was about $1.42 trillion, which is almost a 160% increase from its market value of $550 billion before Trump won the presidential election.
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