The Tesla Cybercab is a cool-looking prototype that needed to be much more than that

Tesla CEO Elon Musk could have taken the stage at last night’s “We, Robot” event and put a lot of fears to rest. He could have released comprehensive safety data for the company’s Full Self-Driving feature that showed real progress for the driver-assist feature, contradicting all the crowdsourced data that’s out there making FSD look truly awful. He could have announced that the Cybercab, a sleek little two-seater with butterfly-wing doors, would be a geofenced, Level 4, fleet-owned vehicle, operating in a few select markets with impressive-looking margins. He could have provided an ounce of detail about the Cybercab’s technology stack, including its sensors, vision system, and onboard processing power. And he could have shocked the industry and surprised many of his doubters by embracing lidar, the laser sensor that serves as a crucial redundant system for every other driverless vehicle on Earth. But he did none of those things. Instead, he put on what arguably looked…