Tesla’s Robotaxi event excites faithful betting on the company’s future in robotics, while underwhelming those watching from afar
4 min
Elon Musk , dressed in a leather jacket in front of adoring fans, looked like an ageing rock star on stage playing one of his greatest hits.
Robot cars are coming.
Those fans at Thursday’s event swooned as they always have as he pushed out timelines for delivering robot cars and showed what those vehicles could look like. But outside the Hollywood-area venue, it wasn’t exactly clear that everyone believed his vision for the future is as near as he says.
Tesla stock fell almost 9% Friday amid investors frustrated with the continued lack of details for how the company is going to make the very complicated transition from maker of cars to maker of robots.
In essence, Thursday night’s much-hyped product reveal became something of a Rorschach test: Supporters, who point to everything Musk has accomplished with electric cars and other industries, heard a glorious future with driverless cars and humanoid robots. Critics—mindful of previous missed goals and maybe peeved by his contentious politics —saw more smoke and mirrors.
“Let’s not get nuanced here,” the chief executive told the crowd as they peppered Musk with questions, a reminder that even among the faithful, time is ticking for him to play some new notes. And to deliver a big hit.
What he did show was cool. A two-seat car with doors that swung upward to open, inspired, in part, by the sci-fi movie “Demolition Man.”
Though as Musk talked about the vehicle, it wasn’t clear he had settled on a formal name. On stage, he called it the “Cybercab,” while the company released details on its website calling it the “Robotaxi.”
Whatever the name, the straight lines of the small car resembled what might be the offspring of the Cybertruck , the pickup the company brought out last year after some delays, and the new Roadster that was first revealed in 2017 and has yet to come to market. Those delays are examples of “ Elon Standard Time ,” or his practice of setting a target only to miss it.
Robot cars are coming.
The Cybercab/Robotaxi reveal also included what Musk says will be Tesla’s autonomous van, an art deco-inspired vehicle that resembled a giant toaster with an interior meant to feel like a spaceship and enough room for 20 passengers.
Like the small car, the van lacked a steering wheel—the sort of doodads currently required under regulations, though exceptions can be granted. The car could begin production “probably” in 2026, Musk said. He didn’t even suggest when the van might come.
The nearest timeline was deploying fully self-driving cars, through the company’s current offerings, next year in Texas and California.
Musk has been predicting driverless cars being just around the corner for several years, including in 2016 when he said Tesla would demonstrate a car driving itself from Los Angeles to New York City in 2017. That didn’t happen.
In 2019, he said he expected his robot taxis would arrive in 2020 . That didn’t happen.
But Tesla has pushed the envelope with its driver-assist system that is essentially a glorified cruise control—adjusting speed, keeping within a lane and other manoeuvres—but can’t technically drive the car itself. Tesla says the person behind the wheel is responsible for everything, though some drivers grow overconfident in its true abilities and act like the car is autonomous.
Musk likes to talk about how Tesla vehicles are collecting valuable real-world data that is used to train its AI systems.
After building Tesla into the world’s leading electric-car company, Musk in recent years has tried to position its future on robotics, saying it is focused on solving self-driving technology. “That’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero,” Musk said in 2022.
Despite that rhetoric, Tesla is behind in deploying cars on roadways without drivers. Alphabet ’s Waymo has deployed fully autonomous vehicles in places such as San Francisco, where paying customers can take its vehicles around the city without anyone sitting behind the wheel.
On Thursday night, Tesla demonstrated 50 vehicles, including the new two-seater, driving autonomously on private property of the Warner Bros. studios where Musk held his party for investors and supporters.
Detractors were quick to pounce.
“After over 10 years of Full Self-Driving development, Tesla is limited to a 20-30 acre geofenced 5mph 1950s Disneyland ride on a preprogrammed, premapped and heavily rehearsed route with no traffic and no pedestrians,” Dan O’Dowd , a critic of Tesla and founder of a rival software company, said in a statement. “Tesla robotaxi is nothing more than the latest work of fiction to come out of the Warner Bros. Studio.”
But Thursday night wasn’t about impressing the O’Dowds of the world. And maybe not even those watching on the livestreams through Musk’s social-media platform X—which counted more than 9 million views by Friday evening.
The real target were the hundreds of attendees at the event who spent the evening riding around in the cars and posting fawning videos of their experiences on social media, in turn, helping the event go even more viral and generating even more attention for the idea that Tesla is paving the way for a robot future.
Robot cars are coming.
Not only did party attendees enjoy rides, but they were entertained by the latest versions of Tesla’s humanoid robots Optimus, which Musk has said could one day add $25 trillion to the company’s market value.
Former Tesla board member Steve Jurvetson posted a video of himself playing rock, paper, scissors with one of the robots. “Optimus just beat me in rock paper scissors!” he tweeted .
Others shared videos of robots pouring drinks and dancing.
“The markets won’t get what happened last night at @tesla ,” Robert Scoble, a blogger and former Microsoft tech evangelist, posted on X. “I couldn’t be more impressed. @elonmusk laid out a bunch for next decade. I have been to a lot of product launches and never have been to one like this.”
Some even compared the evening to when the late Steve Jobs unveiled Apple ’s first iPhone, marking the beginning of a new technology era. It was an idea that Musk was quick to endorse.
“Yes, this marks a fork in the road,” he tweeted afterward.
Robot cars are coming.
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Subsidised minivans, no income taxes: Countries have rolled out a range of benefits to encourage bigger families, with no luck
7 min
Imagine if having children came with more than $150,000 in cheap loans, a subsidised minivan and a lifetime exemption from income taxes.
Would people have more kids? The answer, it seems, is no.
These are among the benefits—along with cheap child care, extra vacation and free fertility treatments—that have been doled out to parents in different parts of Europe, a region at the forefront of the worldwide baby shortage. Europe’s overall population shrank during the pandemic and is on track to contract by about 40 million by 2050, according to United Nations statistics.
Birthrates have been falling across the developed world since the 1960s. But the decline hit Europe harder and faster than demographers expected—a foreshadowing of the sudden drop in the U.S. fertility rate in recent years.
Reversing the decline in birthrates has become a national priority among governments worldwide, including in China and Russia , where Vladimir Putin declared 2024 “the year of the family.” In the U.S., both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have pledged to rethink the U.S.’s family policies . Harris wants to offer a $6,000 baby bonus. Trump has floated free in vitro fertilisation and tax deductions for parents.
Europe and other demographically challenged economies in Asia such as South Korea and Singapore have been pushing back against the demographic tide with lavish parental benefits for a generation. Yet falling fertility has persisted among nearly all age groups, incomes and education levels. Those who have many children often say they would have them even without the benefits. Those who don’t say the benefits don’t make enough of a difference.
Two European countries devote more resources to families than almost any other nation: Hungary and Norway. Despite their programs, they have fertility rates of 1.5 and 1.4 children for every woman, respectively—far below the replacement rate of 2.1, the level needed to keep the population steady. The U.S. fertility rate is 1.6.
Demographers suggest the reluctance to have kids is a fundamental cultural shift rather than a purely financial one.
“I used to say to myself, I’m too young. I have to finish my bachelor’s degree. I have to find a partner. Then suddenly I woke up and I was 28 years old, married, with a car and a house and a flexible job and there were no more excuses,” said Norwegian Nancy Lystad Herz. “Even though there are now no practical barriers, I realised that I don’t want children.”
Both Hungary and Norway spend more than 3% of GDP on their different approaches to promoting families—more than the amount they spend on their militaries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Hungary says in recent years its spending on policies for families has exceeded 5% of GDP. The U.S. spends around 1% of GDP on family support through child tax credits and programs aimed at low-income Americans.
Hungary’s subsidised housing loan program has helped almost 250,000 families buy or upgrade their homes, the government says. Orsolya Kocsis, a 28-year-old working in human resources, knows having kids would help her and her husband buy a larger house in Budapest, but it isn’t enough to change her mind about not wanting children.
“If we were to say we’ll have two kids, we could basically buy a new house tomorrow,” she said. “But morally, I would not feel right having brought a life into this world to buy a house.”
Promoting baby-making, known as pro natalism, is a key plank of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ’s broader populist agenda . Hungary’s biennial Budapest Demographic Summit has become a meeting ground for prominent conservative politicians and thinkers. Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, Trump’s vice president pick, have lauded Orbán’s family policies.
Orbán portrays having children inside what he has called a “traditional” family model as a national duty, as well as an alternative to immigration for growing the population. The benefits for child-rearing in Hungary are mostly reserved for married, heterosexual, middle-class couples. Couples who divorce lose subsidised interest rates and in some cases have to pay back the support.
Hungary’s population, now less than 10 million, has been shrinking since the 1980s. The country is about the size of Indiana.
“Because there are so few of us, there’s always this fear that we are disappearing,” said Zsuzsanna Szelényi, program director at the CEU Democracy Institute and author of a book on Orbán.
Hungary’s fertility rate collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union and by 2010 was down to 1.25 children for every woman. Orbán, a father of five, and his Fidesz party swept back into power that year after being ousted in the early 2000s. He expanded the family support system over the next decade.
Hungary’s fertility rate rose to 1.6 children for every woman in 2021. Ivett Szalma, an associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest, said that like in many other countries, women in Hungary who had delayed having children after the global financial crisis were finally catching up.
Then progress stalled. Hungary’s fertility rate has fallen for the past two years. Around 51,500 babies have been born there this year through August, a 10% drop compared with the same period last year. Many Hungarian women cite underfunded public health and education systems and difficulties balancing work and family as part of their hesitation to have more children.
Anna Nagy, a 35-year-old former lawyer, had her son in January 2021. She received a loan of about $27,300 that she didn’t have to start paying back until he turned 3. Nagy had left her job before getting pregnant but still received government-funded maternity payments, equal to 70% of her former salary, for the first two years and a smaller amount for a third year.
She used to think she wanted two or three kids, but now only wants one. She is frustrated at the implication that demographic challenges are her responsibility to solve. Economists point to increased immigration and a higher retirement age as other offsets to the financial strains on government budgets from a declining population.
“It’s not our duty as Hungarian women to keep the nation alive,” she said.
Hungary is especially generous to families who have several children, or who give birth at younger ages. Last year, the government announced it would restrict the loan program used by Nagy to women under 30. Families who pledge to have three or more children can get more than $150,000 in subsidised loans. Other benefits include a lifetime exemption from personal taxes for mothers with four or more kids, and up to seven extra annual vacation days for both parents.
Under another program that’s now expired, nearly 30,000 families used a subsidy to buy a minivan, the government said.
Critics of Hungary’s family policies say the money is wasted on people who would have had large families anyway. The government has also been criticised for excluding groups such as the minority Roma population and poorer Hungarians. Bank accounts, credit histories and a steady employment history are required for many of the incentives.
Orbán’s press office didn’t respond to requests for comment. Tünde Fűrész, head of a government-backed demographic research institute, disagreed that the policies are exclusionary and said the loans were used more heavily in economically depressed areas.
Government programs weren’t a determining factor for Eszter Gerencsér, 37, who said she and her husband always wanted a big family. They have four children, ages 3 to 10.
They received about $62,800 in low-interest loans through government programs and $35,500 in grants. They used the money to buy and renovate a house outside of Budapest. After she had her fourth child, the government forgave $11,000 of the debt. Her family receives a monthly payment of about $40 a month for each child.
Most Hungarian women stay home with their children until they turn 2, after which maternity payments are reduced. Publicly run nurseries are free for large families like hers. Gerencsér worked on and off between her pregnancies and returned full-time to work, in a civil-service job, earlier this year.
She still thinks Hungarian society is stacked against mothers and said she struggled to find a job because employers worried she would have to take lots of time off.
The country’s international reputation as family-friendly is “what you call good marketing,” she said.
Norway has been incentivising births for decades with generous parental leave and subsidised child care. New parents in Norway can share nearly a year of fully paid leave, or around 14 months at 80% pay. More than three months are reserved for fathers to encourage more equal caregiving. Mothers are entitled to take at least an hour at work to breast-feed or pump.
The government’s goal has never been explicitly to encourage people to have more children, but instead to make it easier for women to balance careers and children, said Trude Lappegard, a professor who researches demography at the University of Oslo. Norway doesn’t restrict benefits for unmarried parents or same-sex couples.
Its fertility rate of 1.4 children per woman has steadily fallen from nearly 2 in 2009. Unlike Hungary, Norway’s population is still growing for now, due mostly to immigration.
“It is difficult to say why the population is having fewer children,” Kjersti Toppe, the Norwegian Minister of Children and Families, said in an email. She said the government has increased monthly payments for parents and has formed a committee to investigate the baby bust and ways to reverse it.
More women in Norway are childless or have only one kid. The percentage of 45-year-old women with three or more children fell to 27.5% last year from 33% in 2010. Women are also waiting longer to have children—the average age at which women had their first child reached 30.3 last year. The global surge in housing costs and a longer timeline for getting established in careers likely plays a role, researchers say. Older first-time mothers can face obstacles: Women 35 and older are at higher risk of infertility and pregnancy complications.
Gina Ekholt, 39, said the government’s policies have helped offset much of the costs of having a child and allowed her to maintain her career as a senior adviser at the nonprofit Save the Children Norway. She had her daughter at age 34 after a round of state-subsidised IVF that cost about $1,600. She wanted to have more children but can’t because of fertility issues.
She receives a monthly stipend of about $160 a month, almost fully offsetting a $190 monthly nursery fee.
“On the economy side, it hasn’t made a bump. What’s been difficult for me is trying to have another kid,” she said. “The notion that we should have more kids, and you’re very selfish if you have only had one…those are the things that took a toll on me.”
Her friend Ewa Sapieżyńska, a 44-year-old Polish-Norwegian writer and social scientist with one son, has helped her see the upside of the one-child lifestyle. “For me, the decision is not about money. It’s about my life,” she said.
