No. of Recommendations: 6
If FSD works, it will work for Cybercabs, but it will also work for all the other Tesla cars, so there will be a big base right off the bat, and then of course there will be massive sales increases (and, probably, margin increases) for regular Tesla cars which people will want to own because of FSD.
Jumping in on this one point, which is not necessarily correct.
Trivially, Cybercab has some physical differences from the rest of the existing - which might be necessary for taxi services to function economically which many (most?) Teslas do not have. It's got a front bumper, automatic doors, a smaller cabin that can be entirely seen from the interior camera (no rear seat footwells out of view), and (presumably) HW5.
Perhaps more importantly, the Cybercab is supposedly going to be much cheaper than the Model Y (which has an ATP of about $55K, making it a more expensive choice to put into a rideshare fleet). So what works economically for a $25K car may not work for one that costs twice as much, especially since that's one of the main features that Tesla has identified that differentiates their service from Waymo's.
And then there's the big operational question of whether a system that works for fleet-owned cars can allow individual car owners to have true self-driving. No Level 5 car exists today. Waymo, and now Tesla, are bridging the gap between what cars are capable of doing and what a Level 5 system needs by lots of support systems - remote operators (but not drivers), teams of folks that can go out to the cars when necessary, where the system can simply decline to go certain places or into certain situations, etc. It's entirely possible that Tesla might get to a system that can work if it's supported by that support system, but not without it. You could end up in a situation where it can make sense to use the system for a pay-for ridesharing system: where the fleet is small, the service area is concentrated (and defined by the fleet operator), and the operator gets to set operating parameters on how the system is used.......but where it doesn't make economic sense to allow a million existing Tesla drivers get to have Level 5 access just for their personal use.
Of course, Tesla has promised those folks they would have Level 5 access when it was ready, but that might end up being a very expensive negative proposition for them - so it wouldn't shock me if the Cybercab launched as a TaaS operation and Tesla never flipped the "switch" that Musk has referred to as the metaphorical activation of Level 5 driving on all existing Teslas.
