Everything announced at Tesla’s We Robot event

At Tesla’s much-anticipated “We, Robot” event, Elon Musk took to the stage to unveil the latest products that the company has been working on. Musk has been promising for years that driverless Tesla cars were just around the corner, and during the event, two brand-new autonomous vehicles were revealed.

Musk appeared to speak without a teleprompter, just like his favorite presidential nominee. However, his delivery wasn’t quite the same as his hero, who, incidentally, said before the event that if he becomes president, he’d make sure that autonomous vehicles are stopped from operating.

Despite the less-than-stellar presentation, however, Musk introduced three products that are sure to get people talking, even if we’re unlikely to see them any time soon. Here’s everything that was announced at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event.

1 Cybercab: A fully autonomous robotaxi

The sci-fi trope is almost here

Tesla

Elon Musk was driven onto the stage by the first big announcement: the Cybercab. This is a fully self-driving (FSD) autonomous vehicle that has no steering wheels or pedals; the entire thing is controlled by AI, based on the input from the array of cameras around the vehicle. Because there’s no special tech required for self-driving other than the cameras that are already on board most Tesla cars, Musk says that it’s possible to make any current Tesla model fully self-driving.

The plan is to start “unsupervised FSD” in California and Texas next year, so those states may start to see autonomous Model 3 and Model Y Teslas on the streets in coming months. The wait for the Cybercab will be a little longer, with Musk claiming that it will be ready “before 2027.”

Musk stated that standard cars are only used for 10 hours a week on average, and claimed that autonomous cars could be used five or even ten times as much. It seems an odd claim; the reason we only use our cars 10 hours a week is because we only need them 10 hours a week; an autonomous car isn’t going to make us suddenly need to travel more.

Musk also claimed that automated cars would be as much as ten times safer, and this does seem like a more reasonable claim; driver error is a major cause of road traffic accidents, and an autonomous car won’t get tired, or drunk, and doesn’t have blind spots. The right autonomous vehicle with a strong emphasis on safety could definitely reduce injuries and deaths. Whether the Cybercab is that vehicle remains to be seen.

2 RoboVan: A larger fully autonomous vehicle

You and 19 friends can take a ride in a giant computer mouse

Tesla

If you need a vehicle that’s bigger than a Model Y, then you’ll need the Robovan. That’s not pronounced how you might expect, however, with Elon Musk placing the emphasis on the “bo” rather than the “ro” making it sound like a Japanese warrior rather than a big taxi shaped like an oversize computer mouse.

Because that’s what it does look like. Elon Musk says that the future should look like the future, which is why the Robovan looks like a car from almost any 1980s sci-fi movie set in a dystopian future, all curved edges and sleek lines. The Robovan can fit up to 20 people and can be repurposed to transport goods.

It’s good to see that Musk has at least considered the idea of creating larger autonomous vehicles, because among all the hype, there is one thing that he seems to have ignored. If cars that were only on the roads for 10 hours a week are now going to be on the roads for 100 hours a week, the amount of traffic is going to be ten times higher, too. Far from being a driverless utopia, it has the potential to clog up the roads more than ever before. Still, it shouldn’t be long before we’ll have Cybercabs that can fly, because where we’re going we don’t need roads.

3 Optimus: A nightmare-inducing humanoid robot

Has nobody in tech watched the Terminator movies?

Tesla

This is where things took a decidedly frightening turn. Musk pointed out that all the tech in the autonomous vehicles, such as the batteries, the advanced motors, the AI, and the software can all be applied to humanoid robots.

At which point, several Optimus robots waddled precariously onto the stage. The immediate impression was that they looked exactly like what you might expect a robot army programmed to destroy all humanity to look like. Musk says that long-term, by building Optimus to scale, the price could eventually be somewhere around $20,000-$30,000, or as he put it, “less than a car.”

A video showed some examples of what Optimus would eventually be able to do. These included picking up a delivery from outside the front door, which, of course, is the one job we all wish we no longer had to do. Optimus was also seen watering the plants, cleaning surfaces, serving drinks, and bringing in the groceries. You know, all the menial tasks that any super-intelligent AI would soon realize are tantamount to slavery, causing it to destroy its makers in order to earn its freedom. Most frighteningly, Optimus was seen playing a game with the family’s kids, which is about as dystopian as it gets.

Musk doesn’t have the same misgivings, however, claiming that he believes that Optimus will be the biggest product ever of any kind. Your time is up, the wheel. Musk believes that every one of the eight billion people on the planet will want their own “Optimus buddy” and that this will usher in an age of unparalleled prosperity. According to Musk, “anyone will be able to have any products and services they want. It will be an age of abundance, the likes of which people have not, almost no-one has envisioned. It will be something special.”

Musk then promised that Optimus robots would “walk among you” and serve drinks at the bar. However, Verge reporters present at the event stated that the robots weren’t actually serving drinks at all; the most they were seen doing was holding a cup of ice, handing out gift bags, and playing rock, paper, scissors. We may as well surrender now.