Elon Musk’s new invention is utterly stupid. As usual.

So, let’s start from the beginning: what would you like your Taxi cab to be?
– a boxy, shaped vehicle that is easy to get in and get out, accessible also to elderly and people on wheelchairs, that can take you and your friends or family from A to B, like, for example, a would famous London Taxi?

– or a two-seater sporty-looking coupe with gullwing-style doors that even under 1.90 m tall Elon Musk has to duck to get into and where you seat almost at vehicle’s floor? I can’t see my elderly dad who is 2m tall and has knee problems, being able to use it.

We probably could end this here and there, as this is as stupid as it can be but there is more. So let’s continue watching Tesla’s presentation (the short 7 minute version of course, no human is capable of surviving that much cringe to be able to watch the whole 2 hours of it). Because, yes, Elon so cringy… But I heard his mom asked not to be mean to him and his mental issues, so I am putting this aside. But really, Cyber-cab? What are you, pal? 12?

Ok, but let’s get back to the presentation. He starts it by showing the people 20 more cyber-cabs, saying there is nobody in them. So we are looking at a traffic jam of vehicles that are not carrying even a single person. Make a note of that, we’ll come back to it.

He says the cost of it will be so low, that it will be like individualized mass transit. We know, Elon, from your stupid car tunnel in Las Vegas, which combines the worst aspects of the subway and travelling by car, while adding additional issues related to safety or accessibility, that you don’t really understand mass transit. So let me tell you that thing: the thing with mass transit is that it can carry great masses of people at the same time, thus saving a lot of space and being space-efficient, which is crucial in the cities. Two-seater coupe’s of the size of an average Transit van are none of that.

Elon then goes to tell us, how cheap it will be, and how we’re going to use it all the time because it will be cheaper than going by the bus. This is accompanied by scenes showing various people riding his robotaxi. Mothers with children in ones, lone men in the others… Are those members of the same family, Elon, that just happened to need two of your robotaxis because you were too stupid to imagine the situation where the family of three or more might want to go somewhere together? In one of those scenes we see a woman with her son and a dog. They need to keep their dog on their lap, because there is not even enough space for a medium size dog in it. Of course, being Tesla, you have this large idiotic tablet, that obstructs the view forward too. Because who would want to watch where they going, if they can wank to footage of a SpaceX rocket going up. But Elon, we are not like you. We are regular people, who like to interact with the world and to have a choice to watch the views during our journey!

Then he promises you’ll be able to buy one in 2026 (LOL, how’s that Tesla Semi mass rollout going, Elon? Or new sporty Tesla that was supposed to hit the market 4 years ago? :P). It will have inductive charging, and then we see a footage of a robot hoovering the interior, so it is clearly meant as an investment into a driveless taxi cabs. You won’t need those underpaid migrant workers to drive your Uber cars 16 hours a day, you just buy a Robotaxi, and money just starts rolling.

And now lets get back to what I drew your attention to that queue of empty robo-cabs in the beginning. You know what’s the problem with that tech-bro idea of self-driving cars being future of the city transportation? That they are cars. And cars take space.

There is an argument for self-driving cars that your own car just makes one trip to work in the morning, and one trip back in the afternoon and the rest of this time it gets parked somewhere. This is true, and this is why car is not the most efficient mean of transport.

But do you know what the problem with self-driving cars is? Well, if all of your workmates need to be in their office at 9am, or your family and 280 other passengers of the plane need to be at the airport 2 hours before its departure, every single, or at best, if Elon’s robotaxi is really the future, every couple of them will need to get a robotaxi at about the same time. So we still need plenty of vehicles. And yes, it’s true, after they drive you to work, they will go to pick up another passenger. But to do so, they will have to drive to pick him up. And off peak, unless we are happy with them just going around the block aimlessly, we’d need to still park them somewhere.

So the bottom line here is: We need at least as many vehicles to cover all the existing car journeys. Those vehicles will not only make all the journeys we would make. They would also make journeys between dropping one passenger off and picking up another one. If you have City Skylines game, try to click on a taxi cab sometimes, and follow it. See how much driving it does between picking one passenger and dropping another. Or maybe you ever played Quarantine, or pretended to be a Taxi Drive in Grand Theft Auto… Remember how much time you were spending driving around looking for passengers to pick up?

More journeys mean more congestion. More congestion means journeys take longer. Journeys taking longer means we need more vehicles… Are you following me here? And remember, we are talking about replacing typical cars, that usually can carry 5 persons, with Tesla’s stupid cyber-cabs that are about the same size, but can only carry two…

Of course, even someone as stupid as Elon understands that sometimes you need to travel in groups bigger than two persons. And so he introduces a bastard of an interaction between 1950’s toaster and Mandalorian’s helmet: a Robovan.