Taxis

When Tesla taught the Cybercabthere was a detail that was obvious even before talking about autonomy, sensors or commercial deployment: I only had two seats. It was not a minor decision. For decades we have associated the taxi with a car capable of carrying four passengers, with its driver in front and a back seat designed for almost everything. That’s why that model without a steering wheel or pedals seemed, at the very least, a rarity. Now, seeing what we have seen later, that image begins to have another reading. The interesting thing is not only that we are talking about driverless cars, but about vehicles that can be thought of differently from the first moment. The traditional taxi took advantage of a well-known architecture: four or five seats, a driving position and a body prepared for very varied uses. On the other hand, a robotaxi designed for a fleet can ask a more precise and specific question: what do most journeys require? The answer appears when we look at how these services are used. Some time ago, Lucid’s Marc Winterhoff and Uber’s Andrew Macdonald, they pointed out that more than 90% of the journeys Uber offers only one or two passengers. This proportion helps to understand why two-seater robotaxis are beginning to appear in more projects. It is not advisable to turn this information into a universal rule, because each city, service and use case has its nuances. In that context, Tesla’s proposal fits better. The Cybercab is not planned as a conventional car to which autonomous driving is simply added, but as a vehicle designed to operate, if Tesla manages to deploy it as promised, within a transportation network without a human driver. Hence it dispenses with a steering wheel and pedals, and reduces the cabin to two occupants. The firm led by Elon Musk presents it as a specific piece for safe point-to-point travel. Tesla is not the only one who has reached a similar conclusion. Lucid showed in March 2026 Lunara two-seater robotaxi concept without steering wheel or pedals, although it should be stressed that we are talking about a conceptual proposal and not a product ready to hit the streets. Verne, the Croatian company linked to Mate Rimac, also previously presented a two-seater electric autonomous vehicle. Lucid Lunar The logic behind these designs is not only spatial, it is also economic. A smaller vehicle may require fewer materials, move less weight and consume less energy per trip, something especially relevant when we talk about fleets that should circulate many hours a day. Lucid, for example, presents Lunar as a vehicle designed to be as efficient and cheap as possible for fleet operators. The company projects an efficiency of 8.9–9.7 km per kWh in typical use, although these are figures from a conceptual proposal and not from an already deployed fleet. Furthermore, the change is not limited to the size of each vehicle. It also affects the way we imagine fleets. A study by Boesch, Ciari and Axhausenlinked to ETH Zurich, modeled a specific scenario in Zurich and concluded that, if waiting times of up to 10 minutes were accepted and adoption was sufficiently wide, a fleet of shared autonomous vehicles could very significantly reduce the total number of cars needed, even up to 90% in certain conditions. It is not a universal recipe, but it is an important clue: the robotaxi not only rethinks the seat, but also the scale of the system. So we could say that the four-seater taxi will continue to make sense for many uses, and the fleets of the future will probably need to combine different vehicles. The novelty is that the robotaxi allows each need to be better separated. For individual or two-person trips, a smaller model may be sufficient, more efficient and easier to justify within an on-demand network. What a few years ago seemed like a strange decision begins to fit with another way of looking at mobility: not always designing for the maximum possible, but for what happens most of the time. Images | JavyGo | Maxim In Xataka | Xiaomi CEO has a message for the world: the “cheap electric car” may never arrive