Elon Musk and Tesla want to call their autonomous robotaxi service Cybercabs, a name that would seem to fit snugly with the company’s line of “Cyber” products. But an obscure French beverage wholesaler, run by someone who appears to be a devoted Musk fan, could ruin those plans.
UniBev, based in Ajaccio, France, beat Tesla to filing for the trademark for Cybercab. Last week, Musk’s company struck back, filing a 167-page complaint with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that called UniBev “a bad faith trademark squatter, who started as a Tesla fan.” UniBev has until April 19 to respond to the complaint.
Should the issue go to trial, a decision could be delayed until 2027. That would put Tesla in a bind, since it expects to begin production on the vehicles in April, with sales planned to launch before the end of the year. Tesla has also submitted trademark filings for “Cybercar” and “Cybervehicle,” which could allow it to bypass regulatory requirements in some cities tied to the word “cab.” There are no indications, however, that it plans to step back from the Cybercab name.
Tesla did not reply to Fast Company‘s request for comment.
Ironically, Tesla shoulders much of the blame for the dispute. It publicly announced the Cybercab name on April 23, 2024, during an earnings call. At the time, though, no one at the company had filed for a trademark. That gave UniBev co-owner, and Tesla shareholder, Jean-Louis Lentali an opening to file a trademark application in France on April 29. (Tesla did not apply for the trademark until October.)
Under international trademark law, Lentali’s application was given priority. At the moment, UniBev holds rights to the Cybercab trademark in the United States and internationally.
Tesla, in its complaint, cited UniBev’s long history of registering patents and trademarks referencing the automaker and speculating about products tied to it. Those include French rights to the names Cyber Diner, Cybervan, and XCab, as well as U.S. rights to Teslaquila and Teslaquila Hard Seltzer.
Tesla, it is worth noting, holds trademarks for CyberBeast (for vehicles), CyberBeer (for beverages), CyberHammer (for “exercise equipment”), CyberVessel (for drinkware), and CyberWhistle (for toys). It has released products tied to all of those trademarks.
The company did not go so far as to call UniBev and Lentali trolls, but it clearly suggested as much.
“The United States trademark system exists to protect legitimate commercial actors and consumers, rather than to reward those who seek to exploit the registration process for improper purposes,” the complaint reads. “Allowing the Bad Faith Application to register would undermine this purpose.”
UniBev, it added, filed the application without any intention of launching a vehicle in the United States. To date, the company has not made any vehicles or demonstrated the capacity to do so. (Founded in 2022, UniBev has worked exclusively on the B2B side of the beverage industry.)
Musk has repeatedly pointed to the Cybercab as a major part of Tesla’s future. (He has also emphasized the Optimus humanoid robots.) As with many of his announcements, however, he was in retrospect overly optimistic about the go-to-market timeline. Many of Musk’s products, both cars and rockets, have been delayed multiple times, often by years. The Cybertruck, initially promised for 2019, did not reach buyers’ garages until late 2023.
In 2019, Musk said the Cybercab (then described as self-driving robotaxis) would launch in 2022. That timeline slipped to 2023. He finally revealed the design in 2024 and later promised an arrival date of 2026, with a price “under $30,000” and rider costs of about 20 cents per mile. The vehicles, he said, would turn parking lots into parks.
In January, however, he acknowledged that production rates for both the Cybercab and Optimus “will be agonizingly slow.” Year to date, Tesla’s stock is down more than 9%.