The Cybercab is Tesla’s ‘fork in the road’ moment
The Cybercab is Tesla’s ‘fork in the road’ moment
Cybercab 是特斯拉的“十字路口”时刻
Today could be the day Tesla changes forever. In a couple of hours, Tesla will “launch” the Cybercab — a small, gold, two-seater sedan with no steering wheel or pedals that uses cameras and AI to navigate the world — in its hometown of Austin, Texas. 今天可能是特斯拉彻底改变的一天。几个小时后，特斯拉将在其总部所在地得克萨斯州奥斯汀“发布” Cybercab——这是一款小巧的金色双座轿车，没有方向盘或踏板，依靠摄像头和人工智能在现实世界中导航。
The company hasn’t said what the launch will entail, exactly. It could be a few cars offering rides in a small area downtown, or a far grander affair in both size and scope. Tesla certainly wants you to believe it’s the latter. In the runup to the event, Tesla staged dozens — perhaps more — of its Cybercabs around Austin and in many other U.S. cities. At the time this story was published, 420 autonomous vehicles were registered in Texas, according to the state’s automated vehicle tracker. 该公司尚未明确此次发布会的具体内容。它可能只是在市中心小范围内提供几辆车的乘车体验，也可能是一场规模和影响都宏大得多的活动。特斯拉显然希望你相信是后者。在活动筹备期间，特斯拉在奥斯汀及美国其他许多城市部署了数十辆（甚至更多）Cybercab。截至本文发布时，根据得克萨斯州的自动驾驶车辆追踪系统显示，该州已注册了 420 辆自动驾驶汽车。
Ashok Elluswamy, the head of Tesla AI, recently said in a post on X that the “streets won’t be the same anymore.” When another user wrote that Tesla is “about to flood Austin,” CEO Elon Musk replied: “Yes.” On Wednesday night, Musk posted a seemingly AI-generated photo of the Cybercab consuming the city alongside a massive dust storm. “A Storm of Cybercabs,” Musk wrote in another post. 特斯拉人工智能负责人 Ashok Elluswamy 最近在 X 上发文称，“街道将不再是原来的样子了”。当另一位用户写道特斯拉“即将淹没奥斯汀”时，首席执行官埃隆·马斯克回复道：“是的。”周三晚上，马斯克发布了一张看似由人工智能生成的照片，画面中 Cybercab 伴随着巨大的沙尘暴席卷了这座城市。马斯克在另一篇帖子中写道：“Cybercab 风暴。”
These gravitas-laced posts mark a departure from the company’s go-slow-and-safe messaging in the months leading up to the event. Musk and other Tesla executives had previously professed they were taking a cautious approach to its robotaxis in the name of safety, though at times they seemed more concerned about public perception of a potential failure. 这些充满严肃意味的帖子标志着该公司与活动前几个月所宣扬的“稳扎稳打、安全第一”的基调有所不同。马斯克和其他特斯拉高管此前曾声称，为了安全起见，他们对机器人出租车采取了谨慎的态度，尽管有时他们似乎更担心公众对潜在失败的看法。
Of course, Tesla’s launch strategy isn’t as meaningful as the outcome. Tesla’s ability to successfully build a robotaxi network around the Cybercab would provide the first tangible evidence that it has transitioned from an automaker with some side projects to an AI and robotics company. 当然，特斯拉的发布策略远不如最终结果重要。特斯拉是否有能力围绕 Cybercab 成功构建一个机器人出租车网络，将成为其从一家拥有副业的汽车制造商转型为人工智能和机器人公司的首个切实证据。
There’s a trope Musk favors that is apt for this moment: the fork in the road. It was the subject of an email he sent to Twitter employees in 2022 when he gave them an ultimatum to stay or leave. He invoked it again in early 2025 when he encouraged federal government employees to leave as part of his job leading DOGE, before he truly started wrecking house. Musk loves the metaphor so much that he commissioned a 30-foot-tall sculpture of a literal fork on a literal road for Burning Man in 2022, before moving the sculpture to a Tesla office. 马斯克偏爱一个非常适合当下的比喻：十字路口（fork in the road）。2022 年，他在给 Twitter 员工的一封邮件中提到了这个概念，当时他给员工下了留任或离职的最后通牒。2025 年初，在他领导政府效率部（DOGE）并开始大刀阔斧改革之前，他再次引用了这个比喻，鼓励联邦政府雇员离职。马斯克非常喜欢这个隐喻，以至于他在 2022 年为“火人节”专门定制了一座 30 英尺高的、立在真实道路上的叉子雕塑，后来又将这座雕塑搬到了特斯拉办公室。
The Cybercab is Tesla’s fork in the road. This is either the moment the company begins to transform urban transportation as we know it, or the moment that reveals that, despite its many efforts, Tesla really is just an automaker after all. Cybercab 就是特斯拉的“十字路口”。这要么是该公司开始彻底改变我们所认知的城市交通的时刻，要么是揭示出尽管付出了诸多努力，特斯拉终究只是一家汽车制造商的时刻。
Robot taxis: A Tesla robotaxi in Austin, Texas. Image Credits: Tim Goessman/Bloomberg / Getty Images 机器人出租车：得克萨斯州奥斯汀的一辆特斯拉机器人出租车。图片来源：Tim Goessman/Bloomberg / Getty Images
Musk first revealed the Cybercab in 2024 at a Hollywood movie lot. But the idea has been around far longer. Musk has spent more than a decade promising that Tesla would find a way to make its cars fully autonomous, paving the way for a network of robotaxis. He even went so far as to claim, in 2016, that every Tesla being made had the capability to become fully autonomous and that the cars only needed the right software update to make it happen. He was wrong. 马斯克于 2024 年在好莱坞的一个电影制片厂首次展示了 Cybercab。但这个想法由来已久。十多年来，马斯克一直承诺特斯拉将找到实现汽车完全自动驾驶的方法，为机器人出租车网络铺平道路。他甚至在 2016 年声称，当时生产的每一辆特斯拉都具备完全自动驾驶的能力，只需正确的软件更新即可实现。他错了。
Tesla has reworked the hardware in its cars multiple times since that declaration, and Musk recently admitted that millions of them will need some kind of hardware retrofit to become autonomous. Still, Tesla kept developing driving automation software. It has steadily released and refined its primary offering, Full Self-Driving (Supervised). But as capable as that software has become, it is still driver-assistance software. The responsibility and liability remain with the driver. 自那次声明以来，特斯拉多次对其汽车硬件进行了改造，马斯克最近也承认，数百万辆汽车需要进行某种硬件改装才能实现自动驾驶。尽管如此，特斯拉仍在继续开发自动驾驶软件。它不断发布并完善其核心产品——全自动驾驶（监督版）。但无论该软件变得多么强大，它仍然只是驾驶辅助软件。责任和法律义务依然由驾驶员承担。
The Cybercab is supposed to change all that. It emerged from an effort by Tesla to develop a next-generation EV platform that was cheaper to build. The plan was for the company to take what it learned from the Model 3 and Model Y — its two biggest mass-market successes — and develop a new platform that would cost half as much, allowing Tesla to make more affordable EVs. Cybercab 的出现旨在改变这一切。它源于特斯拉开发一种制造成本更低的新一代电动汽车平台的努力。该计划旨在利用从 Model 3 和 Model Y（其两款最成功的大众市场车型）中学到的经验，开发一个成本减半的新平台，从而使特斯拉能够制造出更实惠的电动汽车。
Years of reporting and Musk’s own biography have shown that he was so dead set on achieving full autonomy that he decided against building a manually drivable car on the platform. Instead, Musk focused entirely on using the new platform to power the two-seater robotaxi we now know as the Cybercab. In April 2024, months ahead of the Cybercab reveal, he approved massive layoffs at Tesla in service of going “balls to the wall for autonomy,” which he called a “blindingly obvious move.” “Everything else is like variations on a horse carriage,” he wrote at the time. 多年的报道和马斯克的个人传记表明，他实现完全自动驾驶的决心如此坚定，以至于他决定不在该平台上制造可手动驾驶的汽车。相反，马斯克将全部精力集中在利用该新平台来驱动我们现在所知的双座机器人出租车 Cybercab 上。2024 年 4 月，在 Cybercab 发布前几个月，他批准了特斯拉的大规模裁员，以“全力以赴投入自动驾驶”，他称此举为“显而易见的举措”。他当时写道：“其他一切都像是马车的变体。”
Slowly, then quickly? Tesla cybercab on display at the AutoSalon in january 2025 in Brussels, Belgium. Image Credits: Sjoerd van der Wal / Getty Images 先慢后快？2025 年 1 月在比利时布鲁塞尔车展上展出的特斯拉 Cybercab。图片来源：Sjoerd van der Wal / Getty Images
Tesla started testing the first version of its Robotaxi program last June in Austin using modified Model Y SUVs. For the first few months, the company had an employee in the front seat (sometimes behind the wheel, sometimes in the passenger seat) who could stop the car if something went wrong. Things have gone wrong along the way, though not catastrophically. Tesla has reported a few dozen incidents in Austin since it launched the Robotaxi pilot. Most were minor crashes with stationary objects, and a few involved teleoperators remotely moving the vehicles at low speeds. 特斯拉去年 6 月在奥斯汀开始测试其机器人出租车计划的第一个版本，使用的是改装后的 Model Y SUV。在最初的几个月里，公司在副驾驶座上安排了一名员工（有时在驾驶座，有时在乘客座），以便在出现问题时停车。在此过程中确实出现过问题，但并非灾难性的。自启动机器人出租车试点以来，特斯拉在奥斯汀报告了数十起事故。大多数是与静止物体的轻微碰撞，少数涉及远程操作员在低速移动车辆时发生的情况。
The company has expanded this Model Y-based system to a few other cities in Texas and Florida. But over the past year, the network has not lived up to the hype Tesla manufactured at launch in June 2025. In July, the company revealed that the number of paid miles the network was facilitating was actually moving backward. But that may not matter much to Tesla, which believes scaling its robotaxi network requires the Cybercab. 该公司已将这种基于 Model Y 的系统扩展到得克萨斯州和佛罗里达州的其他几个城市。但在过去的一年里，该网络并没有达到特斯拉在 2025 年 6 月发布时所制造的炒作效果。7 月，该公司透露，该网络促成的付费里程数实际上在倒退。但这对于特斯拉来说可能并不重要，因为它认为扩展其机器人出租车网络必须依靠 Cybercab。
Tesla designed the Cybercab around cost. It’s smaller, lighter, and has a lower-capacity battery pack than any other Tesla. Fewer raw materials — especially on the battery side — make it cheaper to build. The cheaper it is to build, the faster Tesla can potentially turn a profit once it’s deployed. 特斯拉围绕成本设计了 Cybercab。它比任何其他特斯拉车型都更小、更轻，电池组容量也更低。更少的原材料（特别是在电池方面）使其制造成本更低。制造成本越低，特斯拉在部署后实现盈利的速度就可能越快。