🚨 NEWS: Tesla's sporty, two-seater robotaxi design puzzles experts | @Reuters
"When you think of a cab, you think of something that's going to carry more than two people," said Jonathan Elfalan. "Making this a two-seat-only car is very perplexing."
The market for two-door robotaxis would be very limited, said Sandeep Rao, a senior researcher at Leverage Shares, an investment management company with assets of about $1 billion, including in @Tesla.
Two-door vehicles account for just 2% of car sales in the U.S., excluding SUVs and pickups, according to data from analytics firm J.D. Power.
Musk said he wanted to make robotaxis cheaper than mass transit to operate and predicted an operating cost of 20 cents per mile over time for the Cybercab.
"Two-seaters have been proposed for decades as commuter vehicles. They just haven't taken off," said Sam Fiorani, vice president at research firm AutoForecast Solutions. Tesla will eventually need to build larger robotaxis, he said.
Blake Anderson, senior investment analyst at Carson Group, a $TSLA investor, said that if the Cybercab is supposed to be a lower-cost, mass-market model to widen Tesla's appeal, the two-seat design doesn't make sense.
"It's probably a way that they can introduce something quick to market," he said.
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