Tesla Cybercab has superior unit economics (low cost per mile, high platform fees) that will allow it to dominate the robo-taxi market and outcompete rivals like Uber and Waymo.

Today we have the folks at Arc Invest talking about Tesla Cybercap after their epic launch event. And what do you know? The image of the Roadster was clearly flipped upside down.

This is where I originally thought the cold gas thrusters would be in the original videos we saw, they looked like there was a drop down panel there. Hasn't been moved, and I'm really smart.

Well, so CyberCap, we have other content. Tasha is talking about Cyber Cab here, but the the launch event is, hey, this is a two seat, zero steering wheel, zero pedals vehicle that they are, you know, putting out into the world, and it's running around at um on a per mile basis, half the cost of an Uber. um which is, you know, we think it'll actually probably get even cheaper over time.

Um and the Cyber Cab is clearly Tesla's push into the robo taxi future. This is a vehicle that was designed specifically for robo taxiing around. Meaning you can make all kinds of neat engineering optimizations if you're going to try to reduce cost per mile as aggressively as possible for Robocat taxi.

Now cost per mile is different from price per mile. So there's this controversy that's out there of um why on earth would Tesla sell these cyber caps? Why would they let other people have them if they're going to be so lucrative to the business?

Why not own them themselves? And I want to clear this up for people. So the way this is going to work is Tesla's going to charge a platform fee just like Uber does. The platform fee will be some percentage cut of the gross revenue that people go.

Facts. My best guess by the way probably low-end will be 20%, high-end 30, maybe even as high as 35. Ballpark at maybe 25%. Comparable to what Uber takes today from drivers. This is a very big deal.

If you look at really rough numbers, $2 a mile. If Tesla's taking a quarter of that off the top, it's 50 cents per mile. If a customer buys a Cyber Cap, operates it commercially, does roughly the same number of miles per year as a full-time Uber or taxi, which are about 50,000, that would mean at those prices, which obviously will come down over time.

But just to illustrate the point, $25,000 pure profit straight to Tesla off the top by taking a cut, they could build a Cyber Cab for less than that, pay for its entire cost in a single year by selling it to a customer.

The economics are insane. whether they're owned by Tesla and operated or sold to commercial operators.

Tesla will want the people who buy Cyber Cabs to get a good return on capital and they'll own some themselves and they can control the return on capital that people people get by changing that platform fee.

But if they're competing with Uber and they're able to charge even a $1.50 a mile, we think the Cyber Cab could cost around 25 cents a mile to operate. So there's a $1.25 per mile that Tesla can keep some for itself and give others to cyber cab owners.

Uh and so um if you are operating the vehicle at 25 cents a mile and you get 5 cents a mile on top of that, that's you know a 20% return on every mile that it's operated. A platform uh asset owner would be super happy with that kind of return.

Meanwhile, that still lives a do it leaves a$120 a mile for Tesla to embed into its own profitability. So, I think they'll manipulate the mix over time. But that's the solution to the puzzle of like why is Tesla's selling these cyber cabs?

I think they want people to be able to operate these assets particularly um holding them for their own use uh during non-arch periods but then getting induced in during surge periods to provide them um to the system as a whole.

And I think these things are going to be um everywhere um and they're going to make sure that they appear everywhere. Tesla is going to treat those um asset owners as you know favored customers who can get an abnormally high return on their investment because there's so much lucrative economics in the business generally um and Tesla can be so profitable on the back end of facilitating cyber cap miles.

So that's kind of like my take on why they're selling them.

AI infrastructure as a service-like returns, but just other infrastructure, transportation infrastructure as a service returns. Um, I thought it was extremely interesting to hear all about the unboxed process here.

You know, over 6 miles per kilowatt hour of energy, so a hyperefficient vehicle. You know, back in the day, we we showed the progress and where we thought it was going to get. And I remember us having a conversation saying, "Is it is it really going to get that high?

That seems seems like uh maybe it's too much." And here here we are. Um no brake fluid. So total electric actuation of the brakes. another design choice to reduce uh complexity in manufacturing, also known as cost and time.

Now, I don't think most people really appreciate, but everything about the CyberCap has been not just slightly, but hyper optimized for autonomy. Not just extremely low cost to build, extremely fast to build, but extremely low ongoing operational cost per mile, including, we just heard, how far the vehicle will go on a fully charged pack.

To Brett's earlier point, they believe at scale Cyber Cab's operational cost is going to be somewhere around 20 cents per mile.

Um, I think the cost is going to surprise people, right? Obviously, there's going to be a ramp up that's going to be more painful than even Elon expects as is customary. Uh, and then the end result is going to be more mind-blowing than people can imagine. I think there's interest. Yeah, go ahead.

I think there's there's this, you know, just just imagine what you can do to cost optimize a vehicle per mile when you're designing to cyber cab and how uh when you're competing against a company like Whimo that is taking offtheshelf products and then super gluing sensors onto them kind of the difference in optimizations you can make.

So the cyber cab doesn't have to have like a consumer acceptable range. It has to have a range that is just sufficient to meet the intended operating conditions over the course of a day before getting back to charging.

Um, you can it doesn't have to be able to go, you know, 60 to 80 mph with any PEP at all. Um, because that's not like the operating conditions it's going to be typically doing.

So, you can change the power electronics to optimize for like how these things are actually going to operate. Um, and kind of because they're designing from scratch, they can design and manufacture this two seat vehicle in a hyperefficient high throughput way.

Net the if you look at the cost per mile economics of a of running a cyber a robo taxi network, the biggest biggest input to those economics is the actual cost of the vehicle. um because that also um affects your maintenance uh and operating costs.

Then it's also the efficiency of the vehicle on an electric basis um and your ability to charge it like those two crossed. And so Tesla has here the optimal vehicle. They already have much better charging infrastructure than any of the marginal competitors out there.

I think that they will be able to should be able to to price at a level that is on the order of a dollar a mile or less. Uh and that might be a price where Whimo literally cannot get gross profitable at that price point given.

So I think what I just heard there from Brett is Whimo is completely and utterly fine as well. There's nothing to see here. the cost of their sensors, their cost of manufacturer, everything else.

So, it could be that um kind of Tesla, you know, prices enough to keep Whimo limping along in the business for a while and then just turns the screws on them uh um as they accelerate and scale.

Obvious things are obvious. So, as I was saying earlier in this video, there's a price point, whether we're talking about Uber, human-driven, or Whimo or other competing quote unquote robo taxi services that Tesla could price per mile profitably while no other competitor would be able to match the same cost per mile and actually make money.

This is a very important point. Here's my prediction. In fact, it's not even a prediction. It's just extremely obvious. Putting aside the initial launch where Tesla might super aggressively just to get people using the service, forget that.

As they begin to scale city after city, not just dozens of cyber caps, but hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and ultimately millions, Tesla will try their best to match the cost per mile to use their robo taxi service with the available supply at any given time.

So, dynamically pricing to keep wait times in check. There's no point offering the service for 50 cents a mile if customers have to wait 42 minutes on average to get a Cyber Cab or a Model Y.

That's just dumb. So they can't price too aggressively until they have enough supply of robo taxis in any given city to ensure that wait times don't blow out because people will pay more to wait less time.

But this means that Tesla can price dynamically in real time in different locations and strategically saturate particular cities one after another with cyber cab production. Get a foothold in many different cities at the same time.

But they'll strategically go, you know what, it's time for us to absolutely saturate Austin, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Tampa, Nevada. Pick your city. Tesla's ability to massroduce in a single week thousands of vehicles, which is what the goal will be with Cyber Cap, means they can go, okay, what are the top 10 cities we need to saturate?

All right, how many do we need in 10,000 in this city, 15,000 in this city, 8,000 in this city, 4,000 in this city? Great. This is how we'll do them in this order. and they will dynamically adjust pricing per mile based on available supply to ensure weight times don't get ridiculous.

So imagine your Whimo or Uber or any company offering transport as a service in a particular city and Tesla begins flooding that city with cyberc cab after cyberc cab after cybercap and offering a service a fraction the cost of yours with comparable or better weight times.

Who in their right mind, by the way, the answer is nobody. Who in their right mind would choose to pay significantly more for a service that at best is equivalent, if not inferior?

Is anyone watching this at home thinking, you know what, if there was a cell service provider out there that would charge me literally double for exactly what I have now, I'd be happy to pay double for the exact same service.

If there was an electricity provider that was 50% more expensive, I'd totally use that provider for no reason other than I just like pay more. Gas provider, same thing. Water, same thing.

I cannot see a world in which Uber, Whimo, taxis sustainably compete with Tesla CyberCap over time. Now, it will take a while. Uber will limp along. Whimo will limp along. But 10 years from now, how do they have a cost competitive service per mile? I just don't see it.

And then I do want to just a meta point here, which is what was the event, right? It's like the cyber cab was already announced. They didn't launch they I guess they launched some into the road.

So, there's that. That's exciting. This was not a W.

That by the way was the event the Cyber Cab beginning commercial operation. Widely attended event. It was a it was a hyper exclusive crowd that attended. Um I think you know maybe the you could say it was a unboxing manufacturer release which is arguably one of the most important elements here.

Uh I think it's super exciting. I think of the adage never sell a dull a boring market and I think Tesla became boring and that was pretty clear right I think the last earnings call the last two I would say all of the Tesla influencers got bored and they were distracted by SpaceX AI and all of the exciting things happening and just as Cyber Cab is getting ready to you know transform transportation entirely.

People are saying okay you know who knows when this is going to happen another year another quarter like you know I'm I'm looking elsewhere and I think it is true that never ignore what seems boring there's tons of stuff going on I think it is going to be extremely exciting and happen faster it's happened way slower than everyone expected and now it will happen way faster than people expect

yeah I mean and I do think It's they are capability gated on releasing the next software release which we think is going to happen end of year. Um if you look I part of the reason to do a more um less flashy event is because um they're not yet ready to accept all the masses and to drive demand into the app um and and really provide this service at scale. If you look at um

I made a similar point at the time after the event. The reason it wasn't live streamed and Tesla didn't make a massive deal out of this is because they've literally launched Cyber Cabs in a single city in a single state in a single country.

The vast majority of people that subscribe to Tesla's YouTube channel that are fans or followers of the company cannot yet actually use a Cybercap. So making a big song and dance about the launch of CyberCap, not the right strategy.

This is very different from launching a new vehicle everyone on Earth can buy or everyone in a single country can buy or a continent. This was really an opportunity for Tesla's engineers to give the double birds to everybody who said that vision only was impossible.

For the engineers to pat each other on the back and for Tesla fanboys, fan girls and investors to celebrate the launch of a phenomenal, massively disruptive new product kind of app usage trends just on the strength of the cyber cab launch. you know, they've gone from never having done above, you know, uh 25k active users on the robo taxi app and now they're sitting at uh 90,000.

So they uh four and a half timed their active user base on the strength of a very low PR event. I I think partly it's because now you can select the cyber cab in the app and you get, you know, a price that I think it's 40% cheaper than riding in a Model Y and half as half the cost of riding riding in an Uber.

So, um, you know, we could begin like we're going to begin testing demand elasticity at these lower price points. Uh, and and you if you're in Austin, you can flag a cyber cab and soon you'll be able to do it everywhere.

I can't believe I can't wait for these things to be available in Los Angeles. Um, so that I can ride around in them rather than driving myself or having my Tesla drive myself, but still drive having something else drive me. um you know that I'm not responsible for finding parking for at the very least.

And it's like 500 of these on the road in a city will seem like they are everywhere just because of it's like this was true in San Francisco. There were not that many ways and yet you could always look out and you'll be like, "Oh, there's a Whimo."

One, they're distinct looking so you'll notice them. Two, the utilization is going to be, you know, five to 10x more than a car that gets parked and hidden for most of the day.

So, I think it will strike people pretty rapidly once they start rolling out.

Also worth pointing out, you don't need anywhere near as many full-time robo taxis as you would think in an absolutely enormous city because of the massively higher rates of utilization for a city of around a million people.

Today, there are roughly four, five, maybe 6,000 full-time equivalent robo taxis, taxis, Ubers, lifts, etc. in total. An important caveat, this is including a vehicle that say only operates 20% as many miles as a full-time taxi.

That's 1/5th of a full-time equivalent vehicle. Obviously, if you want to meet all existing demand for ride hail transport as a service, you need to factor in many of those part-time taxis.

Part-time Ubers appear only during peak times. So, the actual number of dedicated robo taxis you'd need would be higher, but even so, maybe on the high end, a nice round number of

People have no idea how quickly Tesla's going to be able to go from having a small foothold in a city legally, but at very small scale, operating cyber cabs, to saturating that city, not just taking a small portion of ride hail, but the majority.

My new 20-year Tesla and SpaceX valuation model is now also live on Patreon to supporters at the investor level and above.