OPINION · Opinion
Showtime at Giga Texas: X Takeover Weekend Is the Cybercab's Biggest Audition Yet
Tesla fans are arriving in Austin for Saturday's X Takeover, and many are hailing Cybercabs to get around. That is exactly the crowd the car needs to impress, and the early signs are good.
Harper Quinn, Opinion, Live desk
Published · 3 min read
The Cybercab is about to face its toughest audience: the people who love Tesla most.
X Takeover, a fan festival run by the nonprofit Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley, comes to Giga Texas on Saturday, with factory tours on Thursday and Friday and events running through Sunday, according to the event's website. Its organizers say the festival draws enthusiasts from every continent. Tesla is providing the venue, and the event is independently organized.
Many of those visitors will meet the Cybercab the only way the public can right now, by hailing one in Austin. They have already started. On Wednesday evening, Josh West, a Tesla creator who posts as JoshWest247, photographed gold Cybercabs lined up outside Terry Black's Barbecue on Barton Springs Road. "Insane amount for Cybercabs rolling up to Terry Blacks right now!" he wrote. Robotaxi Radar, an account that tracks Tesla's driverless rollout, put it another way: "Tell me the X takeover is happening this weekend without telling me."
Tyler Jon Warnecke, who is in town for the event, priced a late-morning trip on Wednesday from West Lake Hills to the same barbecue spot. Tesla's app offered a Cybercab in 7 minutes for $12.49. UberX was quicker, at 4 minutes, but cost $15.94. "I'll take the Robotaxi Cybercab or Model Y over Uber any day," he wrote. Later that day he posted video of his first Cybercab ride, and Radar said the pickup landed accurately.
That is the kind of review that matters. Fans who fly in for X Takeover are not casual riders. They film everything, from the wait screen to the spot where the car pulls over, and they post it for an audience that knows the product inside out. A weekend of them riding between hotels, restaurants and the factory will put the service under a brighter light than any week since launch.
Tesla looks ready for it. Radar wrote this week that Tesla is "actively working the pickup experience," pointing to a recent video by the creator David Moss that, in Radar's reading, shows Tesla simulating pickups at different locations to refine the service. There are also more cars on the street. Austin's daily tally of Cybercab sightings, as logged by Radar, reached 557 on Tuesday, up 50 percent from the Tuesday before.
A weekend like this will not be flawless. A popular restaurant at dinnertime can stretch any fleet, and waits for every ride service climb in a rush. The answer is not to hope the fans stay home. It is to let them ride, film and post, and to treat every clip as free testing.
The timing helps, too. Two days after the main X Takeover event, a Cybercab from Tesla's U.S. fleet goes on display at the Paris Motor Show, which runs Oct. 12 to 18, for its first appearance in Europe. That makes one week and two very different crowds: the most devoted fans at home and the most curious ones abroad.
If the waits stay short and the cars pull up where riders expect them, the visitors heading home next week will carry the best advertising Tesla could ask for: their own videos.
