Elon Musk revealed a prototype of Tesla's Robovan on Thursday night at the company's We, Robot event in Los Angeles. Musk said the Robovan will be an electric, self-driving vehicle around the size of a bus that will transport people throughout high-density areas. The vehicle will be designed for transporting both people and cargo, carrying up to 20 people at a time, according to Musk.

We're going to build this, and it's going to look like that," Musk said Thursday night as the Robovan rolled toward center stage. That's about all we can get him to say, and we're not even sure that much is real.

Musk didn't say what the Robovan would cost, how Tesla would produce it or when it will come out. But it does look pretty cool.

The Robovan looks to me like a retrofuturistic bus – that is, it's somewhere between a bus from The Jetsons and a toaster from the 1950s. It has silver metallic sides with black details, plus light strips running paralled to the ground on either side, double-sliding doors that come out of the middle, seats and space to stand inside, along with tinted windows everywhere. No steering wheel because it's autonomous.

"One of the things we want to do-and we've done this with the Cybertruck-is we want to change the look of the roads," said Musk. "The future should look like the future," he said, repeating an old line.

It looks a bit like other purpose-built robotaxis, such as those designed by Zoox and Cruise. Only Tesla's van is much larger. In China, WeRide has built a similar Robobus.

That said, the Robovan shown on Thursday is only a prototype. Whatever Musk and others claim, there is no telling what the final version will be or when it will see the light of day.

Tesla had kept the designs of the vehicles it unveiled Thursday pretty under wraps. The only real clue we had was from Tesla's 2023 Investor Day, where the automaker teased a few new vehicles that seemed designed for volume production: One smaller vehicle that seems now to be the Cybercab, and a larger one that we can now say is likely to be the Robovan.

At that time, the objective was to achieve 20 million vehicles per year in 2030. That means Tesla must boost its production and sales at least 15 times, if we are looking for requirements from 2022.

During the presentation on Thursday, he didn't go into any detail over the building of new production facilities or alterations to existing ones to make either the Cybercab or the Robovan. Neither did he extend much generosity in terms of timeline for the Robovan, although he said that Cybercab would be ready to launch in 2026 or 2027.