Elon Musk unveils the Tesla Cybercab self-driving robot taxi | Tesla

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unveiled the company's robotaxi, Cybercab, promising it will cost less than $30,000 and said he will introduce autonomous driving to its Models 3 and Y by next year in California and Texas .

At the highly anticipated We, Robot event at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, the billionaire arrived in the cybercab wearing his signature black leather jacket, accompanied by a man in a spacesuit. Human-like robots mingled with the crowd, dancing and serving drinks to the people gathered for the party.

Ahead of the announcement, analysts were skeptical that Tesla would deliver on its promise, as fully self-driving vehicles had been around for nine years and robotaxis for five years.

Musk said there were 20 other cybercabs at the event in addition to the one he arrived in, and 50 fully autonomous vehicles that attendees could try out on the 20 acres that Tesla had secured for the event.

The Cybercab will have no steering wheel or pedals, Musk said, and will feature inductive charging instead of a plug.

He added that Tesla had “supersized” the computer in the vehicles in what he described as an Amazon Web Services style of computing – where it could be distributed across the cars' network.

Musk said the cost of Tesla's Cybercab was expected to be under $30,000 (£22,980, A$44,500).

He said the Cybercab would go into production “in 2026,” then paused and added: “before 2027.”

“I tend to be a little optimistic about the time frame,” he said.

The future Musk envisions with autonomous vehicles is one where parking lots can be replaced with parks and people can fall asleep or watch a movie in a “comfortable little lounge” while being transported to their destination

He said autonomous cars could be used as Uber-like taxis when not being used by the owner, and people could build fleets of vehicles to compete with ride-sharing companies, which he described as “shepherds with a herd of cars.” .

“It will be a glorious future.”

Before that, Tesla's Model 3 and Model Y vehicles will transition from supervised self-driving to unsupervised self-driving, starting next year in California and Texas and, depending on regulatory approval, elsewhere in the U.S. and the rest of the world. He says the S and X models will also feature autonomous driving, but hasn't specified a time frame.

“With autonomy you get your time back. It will save many lives and prevent injuries,” he said.

He said the cars are safer than human driving because Tesla has collected driving data from millions of vehicles.

“With this amount of training data, it's obviously going to be much better than a human can be, because you can't live a million lives,” he said. “It doesn’t get tired and it doesn’t text. It will be 10, 20, 30 times safer than a human.”

He also announced an autonomous transporter called Robovan that can carry up to 20 people and goods, but did not disclose a price or when it would go into production.

The billionaire said the company has “made great progress” with Optimus, the humanoid robot that Tesla developed. Musk led the robots into the event hall and told attendees that they would “walk among you” and serve drinks.

“Please be nice to the Optimus robots,” he said.

At the end of the event, a group of the robots were positioned on a neon-lit stage and danced to Daft Punk's Robot Rock. He predicted that the Optimus robot would cost up to $30,000 “at scale.”

Tesla's advances in autonomous driving come as the automaker faces a class-action lawsuit in the US from Tesla owners who were promised fully autonomous driving but have not yet implemented it.

In February last year, Tesla was pressured by US safety regulators to recall fully self-driving vehicles because the system allowed speeding and other traffic violations. Tesla fixed the problem with a software update.

In April this year, regulators also announced an investigation into fully autonomous driving and Autopilot systems, examining whether the company was doing enough to ensure human drivers were paying attention after 20 accidents involving Autopilot were reported following the earlier recall.