Elon Musk presents Robovan: the biggest surprise of Tesla’s We, Robot event

Elon Musk unveiled a prototype of Tesla’s Robovan on Thursday evening during the We, Robot corporate event in Los Angeles. The Robovan will probably be an electrical, autonomous vehicle about the size of a bus, designed to move people in high-density areas. According to Musk, it’ll have the opportunity to move as much as 20 people at a time, in addition to transport goods.

“We’re going to do it and this is what it’s going to look like,” Musk said Thursday night as Robovan took center stage. That’s about as much as Musk was willing to say, though we’re not even sure it’s true.

Musk didn’t mention how much the Robovan will cost, how Tesla will produce it or when it’ll come out. It looks pretty cool though.

The Robovan has a retro-futuristic look – somewhere between The Jetsons bus and a Nineteen Fifties toaster. It has silver metallic sides with black detailing and strips of light running parallel to the ground along the sides, with doors that slide out from the center. There are seats and standing space inside, and the windows are tinted throughout. There isn’t any steering wheel since it is autonomous.

“One of the things we want to do – and we did with the Cybertruck – is change the look of the roads,” Musk said. “The future should look like the future,” he said, repeating an old phrase.

It looks just like other purpose-built robots, corresponding to those designed by Zoox and Cruise. Only the Tesla van is way larger. In China, WeRide built an identical one Robobus.

That said, the Robovan shown on Thursday is only a prototype. Despite what Musk claims, there isn’t a telling what the reality will probably be or when it’ll actually come out.

Tesla has kept the design of the vehicles it introduced on Thursday fairly near the box. The only real hint we got got here from Tesla’s Investor Day in 2023, when the automaker teased a pair of recent vehicles that seemed destined for mass production: one smaller vehicle that now appears to be a Cybercab, and a bigger one which we are able to now say that this might be Robovan.

The stated goal at the time was to supply 20 million vehicles per yr by 2030. This would mean Tesla would should increase production and sales by about 15 times from 2022.

During Thursday’s event, Musk didn’t outline any plans to construct recent manufacturing plants or renovate existing facilities to accommodate the Cybercab or Robovan. He also didn’t provide much details about the Robovan’s timeline, though he did predict that production of the Cybercab would begin in 2026 or 2027.