Elon Musk: you’ll be able to buy a low-cost Tesla, but it won’t have a steering wheel

Tesla’s long awaited mass-market car isn’t coming — or at least not in the form of a regular car.

“I think having a regular $25,000 model is pointless,” CEO Elon Musk said during Tesla’s earnings call yesterday. “It would be silly, like it will be completely at odds with what we believe.”

Instead he said the autonomous $25,000 robotaxi — without a steering wheel or pedals — would be available for ride-hailing in California and Texas next year and in “volume production” in 2026. Consumers would be able to buy the robotaxi for personal use as well. Musk also said the company is bringing down the cost of existing Tesla vehicles — which currently start around $40,000 and go over $100,000 — and they will be able to drive themselves without human intervention next year.

“Nonautonomous gasoline vehicles in the future will be like riding a horse and using a flip phone,” he said. “It’s not that there are no horses. Yeah, there are some horses, but they’re unusual. They’re niche.”

With those changes, Musk said to expect 20% to 30% vehicle growth next year — an estimate that sent Tesla stock up 12% in premarket trading.

Obviously, there are a lot of giant asterisks here, like getting regulatory approval since his plans run up against US law. “I’d be shocked if we don’t get approved next year,” Musk said regarding permission for unsupervised, fully self-driving vehicles in California and Texas.

Several times during the earnings call, Musk and other Tesla executives mentioned the need for federal approval of autonomous vehicles, which makes his Donald Trump political gambit make more sense. (Of course, the presidential candidate has also vowed to eliminate government subsidies that benefit Musk’s electric-vehicle industry.)

There’s also Musk’s penchant for grossly underestimating timelines for new products. (Musk has been promising that autonomous vehicles were just around the corner for about a decade and they’re still not here.)

Oh, and we don’t actually know if these vehicles can drive themselves in the real world without killing people.

If Tesla and consumers can get past all that, they’re in for some fun. Musk said that Tesla will incorporate products from his other businesses, X and Grok, into Tesla vehicles.

“Once you get to full autonomy, you actually want fully a system that can do anything,” Musk said. “Like if you want to browse the internet, if you want to ask AI questions, if you want to watch a movie, if you want to play a video game, if you wanted to do some productivity thing, you can do anything you want in an autonomous vehicle, because you don’t need to drive. So that’s why the Cybercab’s got a nice big screen and a great sound system.”

So, if you want to read political tweets by Elon Musk and get spammed by bots on X while riding in your autonomously driven Tesla, you might be able to do so... sometime in the future.