On Thursday evening, around 7 pm PDT, Tesla is slated to unveil the newest vehicle in its lineup: one that will be able to drive itself. A purpose-built Tesla robot taxi—a “Cybercab,” in the electric automaker’s parlance—is meant to establish the company as less a manufacturer of cars than a maker of pathbreaking robotics technology. “The way to think of Tesla is almost entirely in terms of solving autonomy and being able to turn on that autonomy for a gigantic fleet,” CEO Elon Musk told Tesla investors in April.

As Musk takes the stage tomorrow at the Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. movie studio in Burbank, California, and attempts to usher that substantial (and difficult!) vision into reality, canny observers should keep watch for information about Tesla’s service that extends beyond the vehicle itself. The robot devil will likely be in the robot details. Ride-hailing services are logistically complex, governed by liability laws and state-by-state regulations. Sometimes, robot taxis are attacked by vandals. To run a robotaxi fleet, Tesla will have to work out all of those pieces.

The Tesla robotaxi has been a long time coming. Musk made his first promise about a self-driving, Uber-like service back in 2019, when he said that Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020. At the time, the idea was that the automaker would be able to effectively “flip a switch” to transform on-the-road Teslas into autonomous robots able to do their drivers’ bidding—including pick up fares!—during down times. This past April, Musk announced the official Cybercab reveal would take place in August, then he delayed it after saying the vehicle needed design tweaks.

Now, Tesla has made a purpose-built autonomous electric vehicle, owned and operated by the company itself, more central to its future robotaxi fleet. Musk has likened the business model to a mix of Airbnb and Uber, but maintains, as he said in April, that “there will be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself and operates in the fleet.”

Tesla has shown renderings depicting what a self-driving robotaxi app might look like. And earlier this year, Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy intimated that the automaker had at least a sense of the challenge ahead, when he acknowledged to investors that Cybercabs will need to be charged, cleaned, and maintained in between ferrying passengers about day and night. Who will do that, and where? And who will pay for it?

A self-driving ride-hail service would put Tesla in direct competition with other tech developers with years’ worth of head starts. Alphabet subsidiary Waymo says it’s providing 100,000 paid trips per week in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It has plans to launch in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, next year. Amazon’s Zoox is testing its purpose-built, toaster-shaped robotaxi in Las Vegas, and has said it will launch an autonomous taxi service later this year.

There may be a “last mover” advantage, though; Perhaps Tesla can learn from what other self-driving developers have done poorly, and well. Waymo, which does not make its own vehicles but installs self-driving tech on other automakers’ EVs, has zeroed in on a business model that could leave the Google sister company responsible for just tech development. Last month, Waymo announced a partnership with Uber, which should see self-driving vehicles running on the ride-hail company’s platform in Atlanta and Austin by the end of next year. Waymo would retain control of the self-driving technology and some rider support functions, the companies said, but Uber will provide “fleet management services”—vehicle cleaning, repair, and other depot operations. In this arrangement, a single entity would not be responsible for the workings of an entire robot ride-hailing fleet.

There may also be a lesson to learn about playing nice with regulators. Another competitor, General Motors’ Cruise, suffered serious setbacks after regulators accused the self-driving vehicle developer of obscuring details of a gruesome October 2023 collision that critically injured a pedestrian, an incident that led to more than a $1 million in federal fines, lost operating permits in the state of California, serious shakeups in the firm’s executive ranks, and a multi-million dollar settlement for the crash victim. Cruise has been back testing its autonomous tech in Arizona and Texas since earlier this spring. But the fallout from the collision demonstrates the perils of angering regulators while deploying new technology on public roads.

Tesla does not seem to have gotten in touch with crucial California autonomous vehicle regulators about a robotaxi service, despite basing its engineering headquarters in Palo Alto. A spokesperson for California Public Utilities Commission, which licenses ride-hail operations in the state, said the agency hasn’t had contact with the company about autonomous permits.

Tesla does have a permit to test autonomous vehicles in the state of California through the Department of Motor Vehicles, but last year the company didn’t report any autonomous driving miles to the state. Waymo, Zoox, and even Cruise and Apple (which shut down its self-driving car project earlier this year) each reported thousands of miles driven.