The Tesla Cybercab May Be The Most Efficient Car Ever And It’s Not Even Close

By Gary Gastelu |

Mar 18, 2025

The Tesla Cybercab was designed to be a money machine.

The purportedly self-driving vehicle is slated to enter pilot production this summer and be deployed in a ride-hailing service run by Tesla in Austin, Texas, and possibly other cities. The two-seat vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals and was designed specifically with this purpose in mind.

Tesla eventually plans to sell it to private owners who would be able to add their cars to the service when they don’t need them, but many regulatory hurdles need to be surmounted before then.

In the meantime, a ride-hail vehicle isn’t any good if it can’t turn a profit and the Cybercab was designed with low operational costs in mind.

Its teardrop shape and disc-style wheel covers should give it the lowest aerodynamic drag of any Tesla, if not any vehicle, but it is also being engineered to be as light as possible. The team behind it recently gave engineering consultant and Tesla advocate Sandy Munro an up-close look at the vehicle on his YouTube channel and revealed a key detail.

Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, Lars Moravy, said that it will have an unusually small battery pack with less than 50 kWh of capacity that will provide a real-world range of nearly 300 miles per charge to keep it in service for long shifts. That could put its efficiency at 6 miles/kWh, which would make it the most efficient production vehicle ever built.

The current record belongs to the Lucid Air Pure, which achieved a 5 miles/kWh rating with an 84 kWh battery pack — that’s the equivalent of 146 mpg — while a Tesla Model 3 Long Range Rear-Wheel Drive delivers around 4.8 miles/kWh with a 75 kWh battery pack.

The Cybercab is still in development and hasn’t been officially rated, but it’s clear that its smaller size and sleeker shape will make it more efficient than the Model 3. Tesla hasn’t said how much it will weigh, which has a greater impact on efficiency in city driving, but it has been designed around the small battery and and fewer, but larger parts than is typical in an effort to reduce weight and production costs.

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An exact date for the Cybercab’s launch hasn’t been announced and Tesla often refers to it as the Robotaxi, so its name doesn’t yet appear to be confirmed. The company has also said that a new conventional entry-level Tesla is slated to debut this year along with the production version of the long-awaited second-generation Roadster sports car, which was previewed by a prototype in 2017.