Headline of the Day

Tesla Loses Trademark to "Cybercab" Due to Its Own Staggering Incompetence

—Futurism, letting their schadenfreude freak fly.

In a blunder that sums up Tesla’s struggling efforts in the self-driving space, Electrek reports that the Elon Musk-owned automaker has badly screwed up trying to get a trademark for its upcoming “Cybercab.”

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According to a US Patent and Trademark Office suspension notice obtained by Electrek, the trademark “Cybercab” has been formally suspended as of November 14, 2025, for two main reasons: a “likelihood of confusion,” the USPTO’s examining attorney wrote, and because another company called Unibev, a French beverage outfit, beat Tesla to the punch.

This wasn’t down to bad luck. Per the reporting, Musk unveiled the Cybercab at the “We, Robot” event on October 10, 2024, but neglected to file an application until November — an astonishing oversight for a company so large and ambitious. Unibev, meanwhile, saw the opening and filed a “Cybercab” application before the end of the month. Tesla had weeks to secure its trademark, even after making the questionable decision of not filing for it before unveiling the new product at a highly covered event.

Unibev is using a tactic called trademark squatting, and it apparently has a vendetta with Tesla, having three trademarks for “TESLAQUILA” in the US, the same name Tesla tried to use for its own line of tequila, Electrek noted.

As we alluded to earlier, this isn’t the only branding blow Tesla has suffered for its self-driving cab efforts. Last summer, the USPTO turned down Tesla’s application for trademarking the term “Robotaxi” for being too generic. Or in the examiner’s words, “merely descriptive,” since the term robotaxi is “used to describe similar goods and services by other companies.” It may as well have tried to trademark its cars as Cars. 

So, not only id they fuck this up, they fucked this up at least twice before. 

If you think that they can screw the pooch like this on business 101 and still make self-driving work, you are smoking some bad LSD.