Can Tesla's Cybercab Share the Road with America's Myth of the Highway?

Scientific American

4 hours ago

In the American psyche, the automobile—that great democratizer of distance—has always been about more than transportation. It's freedom incarnate: the ability to leave and become someone new three states over. It's James Dean smoking a cigarette, leaning against a fender—masculinity codified in chrome and horsepower, sexuality expressed through gear ratios and exhaust notes. It's Thelma and Louise escaping not just their dreary lives but all that's wrong with their culture. We've had the Corvette, the Mustang, the Charger, the Eldorado, the Camaro, the Thunderbird—and soon we will have the Cybercab.
Elon Musk revealed the Cybercab prototype last October, with production targeted for 2026, and today a convoy of 10 to 20 Model Y robotaxis has begun paving the way for its launch, testing the safety of Tesla's autonomous driving tech on a geofenced loop in Austin, Texas. But the Cybercab stands out in the emerging genealogy of robotaxis. Whereas the motto of Amazon subsidiary Zoox's robotaxi—which resembles a cross between an art deco toaster and a subway carriage—is 'It's not a car,' the Cybercab, for all its streamlined science-fiction minimalism, remains squarely in car territory: a sleek two-seater with butterfly doors—the unmistakable hallmarks of a glamorous ride. Yet there's no wheel to grip, no gas pedal to stomp to the floor. The shape of the car says you can still escape your life, but now AI does the driving. The promise might seem seductive: all the mobility; none of the responsibility.
More than a century after the first Model T shipped for $825 in 1908 (nearly $29,000 today), we've forgotten how quickly and profoundly car ownership changed American culture. In 1900 fewer than 1 percent of American households owned cars. By 1913 Henry Ford's moving-belt assembly line cut build time to 93 minutes, and cheap Texas oil kept the tank full, turning personal mobility from luxury to the default setting. A 1927 survey found that 55.7 percent of American families owned at least one car.
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Not until 1926, however, did the American myth of the highway truly boot up, when Route 66—John Steinbeck named it the 'Mother Road' in The Grapes of Wrath —linked Chicago and Santa Monica, Calif. In the book Hip to the Trip, historian Peter Dedek called the route 'a pillar of mid-twentieth-century automobile culture,' a corridor where vacationers, beatniks, cowboys and Okies fleeing the dust bowl contributed to myths of freedom and transformation. Photographer Robert Frank revealed in his 1958 book The Americans how windshield glass turned travelers into both spectator and exhibit. The cars that Frank famously depicted were as much social containers as machines. Robin Reisenfeld, who curated the Toledo Museum of Art's exhibition Life Is a Highway: Art and American Car Culture, argued in an interview with Antiques and the Arts Weekly that 'the automobile has defined our society' and been used as 'a means of self-expression and status and identity.'
After World War II, the G.I. Bill financed suburban mortgages, so millions fled dense cities. And in 1956 the Federal-Aid Highway Act funded 41,000 miles of interstate—an asphalt backbone justified as civil defense infrastructure but experienced as a coast-to-coast permission slip for self-reinvention. The tail fins and chrome of the late 1950s signaled cold war optimism, while Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road and Chuck Berry's 1958 song 'Johnny B. Goode' hard-coded the romance of endless motion into the culture's firmware. Yet the myth of the open road has always been about who's in the driver's seat. The driver is king: one hand on the wheel, eyes on the horizon, free to turn down that dusty side road on a whim. Control over one's vehicle equated to control over one's destiny. Cars changed the sound of our music, with rock guitars emulating the roaring of engines, and they changed how we courted, providing not just a means of transportation but also a destination, allowing couples to get away from 'porch swings, parlor sofas, hovering mothers, and pesky siblings,' as historian David L. Lewis explained in his Michigan Quarterly Review article 'Sex and the Automobile: From Rumble Seats to Rockin' Vans.' A number of films, such as Drive-In (1976), Grease (1978) and American Drive-In (1985), depicted cars as popular places for trysts.
The highway lore, however, was never without critics, and the choice of the word 'king' (followed by 'of the road,' for example) was not accidental. Men were predominantly at the wheel, and even as highways offered freedom, they carved concrete canyons through neighborhoods, separating communities. Public transportation didn't keep pace to help those without cars cross ever larger distances between home and work or to accommodate those with disabilities or older people. Studies have since revealed the scope of corporate efforts to dismantle public transit systems and thus encourage car ownership. In 1998 architecture critic Jane Holtz Kay wrote in the book Asphalt Nation that 'mobility has vanished completely for the third of the nation that cannot legally drive—those 80 million Americans who do not operate automobiles because they are too old, too young, or too poor.' A 2012 Brookings report found that in the 100 largest U.S. metro areas, the typical job could be reached by transit within 90 minutes by only 27 percent of workers.
In many ways, debates around robotaxis have flipped the narrative. Critics say they reduce personal agency while writing us into an information network against our will (though simply carrying a smartphone does this well enough), whereas defenders argue that autonomous vehicles could offer freedom to the very groups who benefitted least under the car kings of yore. Those with disabilities and older people might find work and community more easily, or they might simply experience more: stare out at that far highway horizon and go wherever. A 2017 report estimated that autonomous vehicles could allow two million individuals with disabilities to enter the workforce, and it highlighted a potential annual savings of $19 billion in health care expenditures as a result of fewer missed medical appointments. Robotaxis could even offer freedom from the grueling commute, the exhausting hours spent jockeying in traffic, and allow naps or Netflix bingeing, time to answer e-mails or—for a couple or a parent and child—time to talk and connect. A 2023 study in Frontiers in Future Transportation and another from 2020 in Sensors recorded lower stress levels in autonomous vehicle passengers. One might argue that ride-sharing already provides similar freedoms to those offered by robotaxis, but drivers for hire can be tired, cranky or in a rush, and there's a social dynamic and a rating system, which can limit other freedoms—even one as simple as the desire to be quiet with one's thoughts.
The Cybercab may look like a miniature sportscar dipped in sci-fi, but the engine's roar has been replaced with silence, and the inside is spacious. There will no doubt be glitches and accidents heaped with media coverage. Yet the car will likely obey speed limits, never get drowsy or drunk and never rubberneck or give in to road rage. With robotaxis, more teenagers may arrive home safely and more grandparents may set out on the adventure of a lifetime. As for design, there will always be disagreement; the very concept of aesthetics invites debate, and our sensitivity to fashions are often deeply entwined with the politics of change and the people in power.
The greatest challenge facing autonomous vehicles, however, will likely be public opinion. A recent poll of 8,000 Americans conducted by the market research initiative Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report found that 71 percent of the respondents were unwilling to ride in robotaxis and that 43 percent thought they should be illegal. Yet recent research shows different numbers after people have ridden in autonomous vehicles. A 2021 report on a pilot of an autonomous shuttle service in Utah found that 95 percent of surveyed riders had more positive views toward the technology and that 98 percent said they felt safe. And as adoption rises, prices are anticipated to fall. Whereas Goldman Sachs Research estimated that the driving costs of robotaxis were $3.13 per mile in 2024, it expected that number to drop below $1 by 2030 and to reach 58 cents by 2040. A 2022 McKinsey & Company analysis expected a more than 50 percent drop in robotaxis' costs per mile between 2025 and 2030. Though robotaxis are currently more expensive than traditional ride-hailing services in the U.S., last year a Chinese state media outlet reported that a robotaxi available in Wuhan, China, could be up to 87 percent cheaper than a standard hailed ride.
As for the myth of the highway, if you're craving the freedom to outrun a thunderstorm or race through an amber light, take an impromptu detour down a country lane or make an unplanned stop at a 'last chance' diner, conventional cars will remain part of American culture as a hobby, just as people still ride horses for pleasure. But we may see new narratives arise. The road trip movie of the future may feature two friends in a Cybercab arguing over which streaming service to watch until they realize the true meaning of their journey. And maybe the next Kerouac will write a novel on their laptop as an autonomous car carries them across the continent. With its wide windshield, the Cybercab appears suited to the highway, and it may end up being as much a means of transportation as a destination. In brief, the car itself may become the drive-in theater.