Elon Musk unveils the Robovan: the biggest surprise from Tesla’s We, Robot event

Elon Musk unveiled a prototype of Tesla’s Robovan on Thursday night during the company’s We, Robot event in Los Angeles. The Robovan will be an electric, autonomous vehicle roughly the size of a bus, designed for transporting people around high density areas. It will carry up to 20 people at a time and also transport goods, according to Musk.

“We’re going to make this, and it’s going to look like that,” said Musk on Thursday night as the Robovan rolled towards center stage. That’s about as much as Musk was willing to say, and we’re not even sure that much is true.

Musk didn’t mention how much the Robovan would cost, how Tesla would produce it, or when it will come out. However, it does look pretty cool.

The Robovan has a retro-futuristic look – somewhere between a bus from The Jetsons and a toaster from the 1950s. It features silver metallic sides with black details, and strips of light running parallel to the ground along its sides, with doors that slide out from the middle. Inside, there are seats and room to stand, with tinted windows throughout. There is no steering wheel, since it’s autonomous.

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

It looks similar to other purpose-built robotaxis, like those designed by Zoox and Cruise. Only Tesla’s van is much bigger. In China, WeRide has built a similar Robobus.

That said, the Robovan showed on Thursday is only a prototype. Despite what Musk says, there’s no telling what the real thing will look like or when it will actually come out.

Tesla had kept the design of the vehicles it introduced on Thursday pretty close to the chest. The only real hint we had was from Tesla’s 2023 Investor Day, when the automaker teased a couple of new vehicles that appeared to be designed for volume production: One smaller vehicle that appears now to be the Cybercab, and a larger one that we can now say is likely the Robovan. 

The stated goal at the time was to produce 20 million vehicles per year by 2030. That would mean that Tesla needs to increase production and sales by about 15 times from 2022. 

During Thursday’s event, Musk did not outline any plans for building new production facilities or retooling existing facilities to accommodate either the Cybercab or the Robovan. He also didn’t provide much in the way of timelines for the Robovan, though he predicted the Cybercab would start production in 2026 or 2027.