She Will Be Back Before September

Salvatore carried ice up four flights on Union Street for eleven years, and he knew every window on the block by the card in it, the square one you turned so that the number facing the street told him how many pounds to bring up. In the summer of 1932 he reached Mrs. Kaminski’s landing and there was no card in her window. She had a General Electric in the kitchen, humming, with a little metal tray of cubes inside it. He told her what his union had been telling everybody that year, that the electric boxes leaked gas and killed people in their sleep, that his ice was cleaner, that she would be back before September. She said she was sorry and gave him a dollar anyway. Going down the stairs he was not thinking about her. He was counting windows.

The internet is full of opinions about the Cybercab announcements, so let me start with what is actually there, because a lot of the commentary is arguing with something that does not exist. Tesla has been running an autonomous fleet for a while, and as of this month you can hail a Cybercab in Austin like any other car. It seats two and has no steering wheel, no pedals and no gearbox. There are around forty five of them registered in Texas right now, which is nothing, and next year that number gets multiplied rather than added to. Everyone seems to expect this to become the norm for personal transportation, and I think they are right about that.

The two seats are what people complain about most, and it is the complaint that holds up worst against the numbers. Driver reported passenger counts in the New York taxi records put single rider trips somewhere between seventy eight and eighty six percent of the total, depending on whose cut of the data you are reading, with two rider trips the next largest group by a long way and three and four rare enough to be a rounding error. Average occupancy across ride hailing lands around 1.3 people. Two seats therefore cover almost the entire distribution, and the ones they do not cover are a solvable problem, because nothing stops Tesla from putting a larger vehicle on the same network for the nights you are four people going to dinner. What a two seater does buy you is that the rest of the time the city is not moving three empty seats around for every person actually going somewhere.

What are we going to do with the three million people we brought in to do low value work, once their tasks are automated?

That is the union argument, and the answer is that we will do what we did with the icemen and with the men who lit the street lamps every evening: they will find other work. Technology is the great equalizer and automation is how you get to a fairer future, not the obstacle to it. When electricity arrived, the size of the advance was not remotely comparable to the harm done to the lamplighters who walked the city every dusk with a pole. Electricity did not just produce better light, it produced a distribution system that let people work at any hour instead of arranging their lives around sunrise. The refrigerator did the same thing to Salvatore, and it did it by making the luxury he sold cost a fraction of what he charged for it and arrive at the exact second it was wanted, which is to say you walk over and open the freezer. Yes, something was lost on that landing, the conversation, the name you knew, the dollar he did not have to be given, but as I always say, convenience replaces nostalgia. The same thing is going to happen to taxi drivers. They will stop offering the service, not because anybody banned them, but because their price cannot compete with a vehicle that works twenty four hours a day and never needs to rest.

The idea that taxi drivers will lose their jobs is the part I find hardest to take seriously, because nothing in any of this stops a taxi driver from buying a Cybercab. He can buy one, or three, and let them work while he does something else. The money arrives without the shift attached to it, which is roughly the opposite of what his union is describing when it warns him about automation. It also gives him back the hours, and the hours are the real price of that job. A driver puts in a schedule nobody would accept in any other trade in order to clear a modest wage, and he does it while paying for the privilege of being allowed to do it at all. With the car working for him he gets to eat dinner with his family, raise his own children, read something, pick up whatever he put down when he started driving. I have not yet heard anyone from the union explain why that counts as a loss.

The other thing worth checking is the story that a taxi license belongs to a poor man. In Madrid a license sells for somewhere between €80,000 and €210,000 depending on which day of the week it lets you rest, and the license on its own is averaging around €180,000. Barcelona runs €120,000 to €140,000. Nobody in Spain wakes up one morning and decides to become a taxi driver. You inherit that number or you borrow it, and the number exists because the count of licenses is fixed by law and cannot go up, so the permission became the asset and the driving became the thing you do to service the debt on the asset. When a driver retires he does not hand the license back to the city that issued it. He sells it, usually for more than he paid, and more and more often he sells it to somebody who already owns several. In Barcelona about fifteen percent of the 10,518 licenses are now in the hands of multi license holders and fleet companies, 377 individuals holding 834 between them and 281 companies holding another 771, and that share moves in one direction every year, because the cap that keeps the price high is also what makes buying an existing license the only way in. The city caps the number, the cap sets the price, the price is what the association exists to defend, and the association is what keeps the city from ever touching the number. That is the arrangement we are being asked to protect from a car with nobody sitting in the front of it, and I am not going to pretend I feel bad about it.

There is a detail inside that arrangement that deserves more attention than it gets, because it is the same business model everybody is currently calling dystopian when Tesla describes it. A license holder does not drive twenty four hours a day, so for the hours he is not working, the license works without him. The legal route is to employ a salaried driver. The other route is to rent the thing out to another driver or a small fleet, which municipal ordinances prohibit in writing, and the reason the prohibition needed to be written down is that it happens. Either way, the man at the wheel at four in the morning is usually not the man who owns the permission to be there. He is paying for access to a piece of paper the city refuses to print more of, and a cut of his night goes to whoever holds it. That is passive income drawn off an artificial scarcity with a person installed in the seat to produce it, and it has been running in every Spanish city for decades. So when I say a taxi driver could buy a Cybercab and let it earn while he sleeps, the model will not be unfamiliar to him. His guild has been running it since long before anyone wrote the software, with a human being where the software goes.

The fare gap is already there. Tesla’s Austin tariff is three dollars to start plus a dollar forty a mile, with no tip. On the comparison I ran, a ride that came to $6.42 in a Cybercab, about $2.95 a mile all in, was $11.95 in an UberX before tip, about $5.50 a mile, which is less than half. Ride hailing prices move around with demand and you can find trips where the numbers come out the other way, so I am not claiming that ratio holds on every route on every afternoon. The tariff is the thing worth looking at, because a tariff with no driver inside it has a floor that a tariff with a driver inside it can never reach, and Tesla is nowhere near that floor yet. Line the per mile numbers up and the shape of it is obvious.¹

	Cost per mile
NYC yellow taxi, metered rate	$3.50
Waymo, estimated rider price	$3.16
US ride hailing, Uber and Lyft	$2.80
Personal car, all in cost of ownership	$0.77
China ride hailing, human driven	$0.50
Tesla robotaxi at scale, ARK estimate	$0.25
Cybercab operating cost, Musk target	$0.20

Treat the bottom two rows the way you would treat any number produced by a bullish research shop and a man announcing his own product, which is to say assume they slip and assume they slip by a lot. The row I would actually point at is China, where human driven ride hailing costs about $0.50 a mile with labor as cheap as labor gets in a large market. Double Musk’s target, miss his deadline by three years, and a driver still cannot reach it, because what separates $2.80 from $0.50 is a wage, and what separates $0.50 from $0.25 is the rest of that same wage.

I like taking taxis because the driver talks to you, gives you advice.

The argument here is that the driver is not only moving you, he is also a source of local knowledge, the man you ask where do you eat well around here? That value is gone, because the Cybercabs run Grok, SpaceX’s AI. Grok will tell you where to eat without the driver’s bias, and it will also talk to you about anything else, which a taxi driver is generally not equipped to do. The bias part is not a small detail either. These are not university professors we are consulting, and on top of that they are driving, so every question we ask costs them some fraction of their attention on the road. Start a heated conversation and it gets worse. My own experience with taxi drivers has always been bad, because to me they are a guild of middlemen, people who walled themselves into a monopoly that only they control, deciding what a ride is worth, how a city should be driven, and which topics are open for discussion. Most of them are exhausting and a lot of them only know how to talk about politics. Disagree with one about anything and watch how fast you are treated to genuine arrogance. They believe they know everything about how the world works. There is a good side to this, which is that most taxi drivers now come from genuinely underdeveloped countries, India, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, you know the ones, and those people really do not talk about anything, thank God. They do not want to get involved, and they have no interest in your opinion, your culture or your values.

I am not here to argue about cultures, though, but about the form of public transportation that is starting to impose itself and will sweep away what we have now. Price is only part of it. The other part is a model Tesla intends to put in place, where you can own a Cybercab without being a taxi driver, and the car is not only your private taxi, it also works for you during the hours you are not using it. I had genuinely not considered this until recently and I think it has more upside than downside. The downside I already covered: the drivers lose the monopoly. They stop being the only ones who get to make a margin on a ride, set the price, and decide which neighborhoods they will and will not take you to. Soon, even if governments drag their feet under pressure from that guild, it will be free people deciding what to do with their own property, and that seems exactly right to me.

There are a lot of reasons an autonomous taxi beats depending on an extortion racket, and freedom of movement is only the first. The bigger one is that there will be fewer private cars. A Cybercab costs thirty thousand dollars and, by the arithmetic people online have been running, it can bring in something like eighteen hundred dollars a month if you are not hogging it around the clock. That changes the incentive to own a car at all, once you count the parking at home and the parking near the office. The number that decides this is what your own car already costs you per mile with everything counted, and AAA put that at $0.77 in 2025, about $11,577 a year over fifteen thousand miles. A robotaxi ride priced anywhere under that makes the car in your garage an expensive hobby, and the targets being quoted are a third of it. I do not think most people will run the calculation deliberately. They will just notice one year that they have not driven in a while, and then the insurance renewal will arrive and they will look at it differently than they did the year before. Group buying sharpens it further, since nothing stops four people from owning one car between them, and even a single owner finds it worth doing, because he can rent out the entire stretch of the day he is not sitting in it.

Sure, but people are pigs. They will trash my autonomous taxi, I will be cleaning it every day, and everybody will just use their own and never share it even for extra money. There will be as many cybertaxis as there are private cars.

That is a fair objection, and the answer is that these cars have self management and will have more of it. When you are not using it and the battery runs down, it takes itself to a charger, which you never have to think about, and part of that cost is covered by the time you are not spending maintaining a car you are making money on. It also goes to a Tesla station where it cleans itself, so you are not scrubbing the back seat every night. I would expect riders to end up with ratings, and the ones who behave like animals to get thrown off the platform. This already happens in China and everywhere else that rents anything to anybody. A bad guest can do his thing once, twice at the outside, and then Airbnb removes him and he goes looking for another way around the system, which eventually stops existing. In China, where they built the whole credit score model, people behave better because they know that if they do not, the score falls, and then they cannot rent a place, cannot go to the movies, cannot take the train. I do not like that system and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Applied to a single platform, as a way of keeping the peace, it seems acceptable to me: misbehave here and you lose this platform, and you go use another one. What I object to is the version that belongs to the state rather than to the company, the one that follows you out of the platform and into a train station.

Whatever you think about the surveillance question, the interesting part of this is what it opens up for ordinary people. Right now, if you want a car, the first thing you need is a blessing from a civil servant. That blessing turns into paperwork and requirements which were set up with good intentions and produce mostly inconvenience. Before you can have a car you need a license, and before you can have a license you need to be old enough, pass a written exam and then pass a road test, and after all of that you still have to be physically capable of driving without hurting anybody every single time you get in. Autonomous driving deletes that whole stack. Nobody has to be sober, awake and clear headed anymore in order to avoid killing a pedestrian, and it goes further than that, because you do not need to be able to see or hear, and you do not need to be an adult. The car drives better than you and better than anyone you know, and the gap widens every year while the human half of the comparison stays exactly where it has always been.

The other half of this is what happens to the time. A car trip currently costs you the trip. Driving it takes your full attention for a job nobody pays you to do, and riding in a taxi takes some of it too, because you spend the ride half watching the road and half managing the man who is driving. In a Cybercab those twenty minutes come back to you. You can work through them, play something, watch a film or sleep, and you can get in at two in the morning completely wrecked and arrive home without having put anybody in danger, including yourself. That last one on its own would justify most of the project.

The accident numbers are the part of this I care about most. In Spain around seventeen hundred people die on the roads every year. The DGT headline number for 2025 was 1,119, but that counts only interurban roads and only deaths inside the first twenty four hours, so the real figure is higher. It is an enormous number and the only acceptable target for it is zero. To get anywhere near zero you have to remove human error from the equation. People make mistakes and so do machines, everything is possible, but not everything is equally probable. A Tesla, or any other car running this class of AI, sees and analyzes the whole environment in real time in a way no person can. Tesla’s own safety report puts FSD at 5.3 million miles between major accidents in North America against a national average of roughly one crash every 660,000 miles, which works out to something close to a ninety percent reduction. That is Tesla measuring Tesla, on a supervised system, and I would like somebody independent to run the same numbers before I lean on them too hard. In an environment where most people are still driving themselves, the human factor stays in the equation regardless. When most of the cars on the road are running FSD or something like it, this drops to a handful of cases a year. Think about how many lives that is.

Lives are one side of it and the environment is the other, and for all the noise that gets made about the environment this is the most pro environment thing anybody has put on the table in years. The cars are electric, and beyond that they actually get used, because an owner can be at work while his car is moving other people around, which means fewer vehicles serving more passengers. It takes a lot of combustion engines off the street doing errands, including the man who drives a diesel pickup to the grocery store to buy snacks. Imagine the silence of never again hearing an exhaust at full volume because the driver decided that accelerating hard on a twenty mile per hour street was the most exciting thing available to him that day.

This will run into plenty of barriers, and the skeptics and the people who love gas cars and speed and noise are the least of them. That nostalgia will lose to convenience the way it lost when we stopped shifting our own gears. The serious resistance will come from politicians, the ones who will no longer have a way to extract money through arrangements with the collectives that, in exchange for favors, get handed a monopoly on nearly everything. The countries that refuse to adopt this and refuse to liberalize it will simply stay where they are, like the places where clean drinking water is a thing rich people have and everyone else drinks from the dump, or the ones still moving around on horseback because the state will not accept that the technology arrived.

Footnotes

1. NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission standard city rate; ARK Big Ideas 2026 and ARK newsletter 496; AAA Your Driving Costs 2025, at $11,577 over fifteen thousand miles; Obi ride sampling data reported by TechCrunch in January 2026; Musk at the We, Robot event in October 2024. The Waymo figure is an estimate rather than a published price, built by applying Obi’s 12.7 percent Waymo over Uber premium to the ride hailing average. Chart by Geneva Investor. ↩