The chip Tesla said would launch the Cybercab — AI5 — will not reach volume until mid-2027. [1] The vehicle is scheduled for production in 2026. The gap is approximately one year. The post Elon Musk wrote on November 15, 2025 was the disclosure; Electrek and notateslaapp confirmed the downstream consequence — the dedicated robotaxi, designed without a steering wheel or pedals, will ship on the current-generation AI4 hardware. [1] [2]

The April 15 tape-out announcement put AI5 nearly two years behind its original promise. [2] The paper's Tuesday brief on the Musk-Altman verdict named the post-trial-order question; it is now a hardware-capability question as well, since Tesla committed to bring FSD Unsupervised to AI4 vehicles. [2] Whether the production Cybercab is upgradeable to AI5 has not been disclosed. [2]

No formal product-launch update has revisited the AI5-to-AI4 swap since November. Musk has called AI5 "existential to Tesla" and roughly H100-class as a single chip. [2] The Cybercab will arrive without it, and without anyone repeating the swap on a stage.

The asymmetry matters for the FSD Unsupervised promise. Tesla has committed to delivering it on AI4; Musk has separately said AI5 was the chip that unlocked the next phase. Both cannot be true without specifying which capabilities are AI4-bounded. The April 15 tape-out and the AI6 schedule, now Samsung-2nm-bound and slipping to Q4 2027, lengthen the gap. [2] The Cybercab's silent hardware demotion is the production-line story behind the showcase.

-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing