For Tesla’s latest high-profile event, Elon Musk wanted the Hollywood treatment. On Thursday evening, the CEO unveiled a prototype of the automaker’s “robotaxis” at the “We, Robot” event on the Warner Bros. Discovery film studio lot in Burbank, California.

The vehicle is intended to be fully autonomous and not require a human driver, like other self-driving taxis currently in use in select markets, such as Google’s Waymo fleets and General Motors’ Cruise fleets. Musk initially announced that the demo of the Tesla version would take place on August 8, but then delayed the presentation by two months, tweeting in July that the unveiling was due to “an important design change to the front” of the car and for this reason “The extra time allows us to show a few other things.” In late September, he tweeted that the robotaxi would be “one for the history books.”

As is typical for Musk, the unveiling came about an hour later than planned. Before taking the stage, Musk demonstrated the Robotaxi, or Cybercab,’s autonomous driving capabilities by climbing into the sleek silver vehicle with butterfly doors and taking it for a ride around the site.

Musk said the Cybercab is expected to cost less than $30,000 and enter production before 2027, but admitted he tends to be “a little bit optimistic about the time frame.” He also said unattended, fully autonomous vehicles, the Model 3 and Model Y, would hit the roads in California and Texas next year.

Tesla also launched the Robovan, essentially a sleek bus that Musk said would seat up to 20 people. “Can you imagine walking down the streets and seeing something coming toward you?” he told the crowd gathered in Burbank. “That would be sick.”

For Tesla’s latest unveiling, Musk introduced Optimus, a “humanoid friend” that he said would cost $28,000 to $30,000. Although he didn’t give a date for when the robot would be available, the CEO capped off his speech by showing a group of Optimus dancing to Haddaway’s “What Is Love” and having the robots serve drinks to attendees later that evening.

While the event was full of Musk’s ambitious predictions and fancy revelations, the video presentation began with a lengthy disclaimer that said “forward-looking statements” are “not guarantees.”

Dan O’Dowd, billionaire co-founder of Green Hills Software and founder of the Dawn Project, which works to “ban unsafe software from safety-critical systems” and has sounded the alarm about Tesla’s driver assistance features, was unimpressed.

Musk has touted autonomous driving technology as key to Tesla’s future, saying in 2022 that the company would be “basically worth zero” if it couldn’t make self-driving cars. But the automaker has struggled to realize its vision of fully autonomous vehicles, consistently exceeding its overly optimistic (or simply unfounded) predictions about when Tesla would hit certain benchmarks. In 2016, he claimed that a Tesla could drive across the US without human assistance by the end of 2017 – eight years later, that still hasn’t happened. Tesla also faked a video demonstration of its self-driving technology in 2016, according to an engineer who later testified in a lawsuit against the company. Tesla has removed the video from its website.

The concept of a Tesla “robotaxi” first surfaced in a 2019 presentation in which Musk announced that Teslas equipped with the company’s “Full Self-Driving” software (or FSD) would soon be called driverless taxis could function, with owners earning passive income by sending them out into the world to pick up fares. “Next year we will definitely have over a million robotaxis on the road,” he speculated. That didn’t happen either. And since then, Tesla’s claims and marketing surrounding its driver assistance systems have been investigated by both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Justice Department. Meanwhile, the company is facing a series of lawsuits alleging that a Tesla with faulty “self-driving features” caused injuries or deaths to third parties. (During a test drive to observe how the technology works, Rolling Stone found that FSD made common and dangerous mistakes while maneuvering on city streets and highways.) Tesla has defended itself against the lawsuits, claiming that it is not liable for accidents involving autonomous driving features because the responsibility lies with the driver.

It’s unclear whether Musk or Tesla leadership still believe that private Teslas with FSD can eventually be upgraded to autonomous taxis, but the introduction of a purpose-built “robotaxis” seems to indicate a departure from this original one Remove idea. However, if the goal is to compete with brands like Waymo, Tesla faces an uphill battle: Waymo vehicles travel 17,311 miles before they are shut down – moments when the technology fails or a human operator intervenes and manual control must take over. By comparison, Tesla owners who publicly compile their FSD driving data find that the latest versions of the software only manage 65 city miles between “critical disengagements,” incidents where they must take over to avoid an illegal maneuver or collision to prevent. Waymo and other driverless taxis currently in use are equipped with an expensive array of LiDAR (light detection and ranging) and radar sensors, while Tesla has long taken a “video-only” approach to autonomous driving systems.

“Tesla is years behind Waymo,” says O’Dowd Rolling Stone. “As usual, Elon Musk is trying to take part in the Tour de France on a tricycle.”

Whether Tesla shareholders are convinced by Musk’s latest song and dance will certainly be reflected in the development of the share price on Friday. Ahead of the Robotaxi event, investors were divided over the possible outcome. Tesla shares fell more than eight percent in July as the demo was pushed back to October, suggesting the vehicle’s prospects could take Tesla to the moon – or see it crash to Earth.