Oct 20, 2024
- The Tesla Robovan was revealed Thursday night as part of the "We, Robot" event that primarily focused on the Robotaxi's reveal.
- The Robovan is a fully autonomous transporter that can seat up to 20 people and be adapted for personal or commercial use.
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will build the Robovan and it will look like the concept, but no price or timetable for production was mentioned.
While the Tesla Robotaxi was the main attraction during Thursday night's big reveal event, the Elon Musk-led company took its vision of an autonomous future to new heights (literally) with the introduction of the Robovan concept.
Robovan or Robobus?
"We're going to make this, and it's going to look like that," Musk told a crowd of invite-only spectators. The Robovan might have the word "van" in its name, but the enormous toaster-shaped vehicle looks a lot more like a bus or a train car. Its art-deco design definitely draws a comparison with vintage locomotives, except the Robovan will let computers do the driving.
As with the Robotaxi, the Robovan doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals. In fact, its entire interior looks like a waiting room at a dentist's office, albeit one that offers cozy mood lighting. From the photos that Tesla shared, we can see a Robovan configured for transporting people (Musk said it can carry up to 20 but also be used for transporting goods). There are multiple rows of seats that face each other, with large wall-mounted displays located at both ends of the cabin. One side of the Robovan features a sliding door that's at least partially made of glass, and there are two vanes of glass panels that run along either side of the roof.
While we now have our first glimpse of the Tesla Robovan, other than what our eyes can see and some mostly vague comments from Musk, we don't know much else about it. Tesla's CEO said it can be adapted for personal or commercial use, but there was no mention of how much it will cost.
Notably, there's no timetable for when the Robovan will start production, although we'd expect 2027 at the earliest, as the smaller Robotaxi isn't slated to enter production until sometime in 2026. That's also according to Musk, who is notoriously optimistic about product launches, and he even admitted as much during Thursday night's event, saying, "I tend to be a little optimistic with time frames." Of course, Tesla also still needs to get regulatory approval for an unsupervised version of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, which will dictate the future of the Robotaxi, the Robovan, and the company's other plans for fully autonomous vehicles.
