Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi rollout: the biggest news and announcements

Getting out of a taxi shouldn’t be a shameful experience. Yet I find myself feeling particularly embarrassed while exiting a Tesla Cybercab as it partially blocks a narrow road outside a popular Austin swimming hole. As a cadre of annoyed, sweaty Texan parking spot hunters pile up around it, the gold-painted two-seater just sits there obliviously, lights flashing. I try not to make eye contact, but I can feel the stares of frustrated pool-goers around me, whose earnest attempt at a peaceful outdoor reprieve from the heat had just been interrupted by yet another not-quite-finished glimpse into the future.

Tesla’s long-awaited, two-seater Cybercab is officially offering paid rides in Austin, Texas, and the experience, so far, somehow feels equal parts nerve-wracking and reassuringly boring — often at the same time. The Verge spent the better part of an hour in the gilded hype-mobile last weekend, gallivanting around a roughly 288-square-mile geofenced area of the Texas capital.

The Tesla Cybercab is notable for what it lacks, namely a steering wheel and pedal. By design, there is no way for this vehicle to be manually controlled — or so we thought. Less than a week after the Cybercab was officially launched in Austin, Texas, some riders have discovered the Cybercab’s secret manual controls that appears to be intended only for Tesla employees.

In at least two videos posted on X, Cybercab riders are encountering a virtual joystick that appears intended to control the vehicle’s movements. A square-shaped screen appears in the lower left corner of the central display, with a toggle in the middle for manual driving. It says “forward” at the top and “reverse” on the bottom. There are also buttons to “stop” the vehicle, sound the horn, and manually open the doors. To the right are views of the live camera displays, though in one rider’s video the image appears to be frozen on a Tesla Supercharger from a previous location.

Elon Musk’s gilded robot car barely made it on public roads before federal regulators launched an investigation into the vehicle’s lack of traditional features — many of which are required by law.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it was opening an audit query (AQ) into the Tesla Cybercab “to examine the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the Cybercab and related issues.” At issue is the absence of certain design features such as sideview mirrors, pedals, and steering wheel — all of which are required under the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, or FMVSS.

At a private, closed-door event in Austin, Texas today, Tesla officially launched its gilded car of the future: the Cybercab. It’s a huge milestone for Elon Musk, who has been hyping the imminent arrival of driverless cars for years and has bet the future of his company on AI, autonomous vehicles, and humanoid robots.

It was an unusually muted event, with no livestream, no journalists, and a very short invite list comprised mostly of pro-Tesla content creators. Elon Musk wasn’t even there, which was especially strange given the years he’s spent hyping Tesla as a leader in AI and robotics. The Tesla influencers who were planning live shows with the event stream were left streaming the webpage that tracks the number of Tesla robotaxis in Texas instead.

Believe it or not, the Tesla Cybercab is coming.

Nearly two years after Elon Musk first unveiled the gold-tinted, gull-wing-door sporting, steering-wheel-free, two-seaters as the future of Tesla’s autonomy efforts, the company is finally putting them into operation as part of its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. Public rides are here, and as Musk fans will assert, the era of Tesla’s robotaxi dominance will begin.

As Tesla gears up for the official launch of its steering wheel and pedal-less Cybercabs, Waymo is issuing a stark warning about Elon Musk’s approach to autonomous driving.

Srikanth Thirumalai, Waymo’s VP of Onboard Software, doesn’t specifically call out Musk or Tesla in a blog post, published Wednesday, entitled “10 AI Lessons from Driving 200+ Million Fully Autonomous Miles.” But his intention is clear: Tesla’s system is insufficient for the task of fully autonomous driving.

The Tesla Cybercab, that golden two-seater central to Elon Musk’s robo-supremacist ambitions, is finally nearing its public launch. Whether or not the no-steering wheel and no-pedal vehicle is actually ready for public roads, let alone customers, remains very much in doubt.

According to The Information, Tesla is planning a public launch of the Cybercab in Austin, Texas, as soon as this month. The driverless vehicle has been popping up around the country, although often with a steering wheel and pedals, as employees are continuing to gather data. Tesla employees have been testing the fully driverless version on private roads around the company’s campus since July. And it recently completed a training with first responders in Austin, teaching them how to move the vehicles in the event of an emergency, Brad Cesak, a spokesperson for the city of Austin, confirmed.

In an earnings call yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk did his best to paint a positive portrait of the company’s robotaxi program. New cities are being added, more miles are being driven, and more people are experiencing Tesla’s unsupervised vehicles.

But Musk’s typical bullishness seemed to be absent from the call, as the occasional trillionaire sought to temper expectations about the program’s future.

Against all odds, the Tesla Cybercab is in production. And while Elon Musk’s company may not have a very coherent plan for the tiny, autonomous two-seater, it’s still taking the necessary steps to certify the EV’s legitimacy. As such, Tesla recently filed paperwork with the Environmental Protection Agency that reveal many of the Cybercab’s specs, including its weight, battery size, and preliminary range estimates.

What these documents reveal is the lightest, most range efficient vehicle Tesla has ever produced — and quite possibly one of the most efficient EVs ever produced.

Tesla is finally doing unsupervised robotaxi trips in Austin, Texas, according to a video posted on X. Elon Musk reposted the video, congratulating Tesla’s AI team for the milestone.

For months, Tesla’s robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco have included safety monitors with access to a kill switch in case of emergency — a fallback that Waymo currently doesn’t need for its commercial robotaxi service. The safety monitor sits in the passenger seat in Austin and in the driver seat in San Francisco. Neither service is fully open to the public yet, relying instead on customer waitlists.

Last year, Tesla defied its critics by boldly launching a robotaxi service that, by the end of the year, required no human supervision and was available to over 50 percent of the US population.

At least that’s what Tesla CEO Elon Musk told us would happen by the end of 2025. The reality, of course, was much different.

Last week, Tesla revealed a new section of its website dedicated to reporting safety statistics for its advanced driver assist systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD).

The new hub appears to be an attempt to move beyond the company’s traditional quarterly safety reports, which have been criticized for failing to account for basic facts about traffic statistics, and toward something more verifiable and reliable. And given that Tesla’s future relies on people trusting its self-driving technology, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted the company would be able to remove the safety monitors from its robotaxis “by the end of the year.” He also said Tesla would launch a robotaxi service in 8-10 new markets also before the end of 2025.

“We are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year,” Musk said in an earnings call with investors. “So within a few months, we expect to have no safety drivers at all, at least in parts of Austin. We’re obviously being very cautious about the deployment.”

For a company that’s staking its future on AI and robotics, Tesla sure is having a tough time explaining its technology to government regulators. The company’s efforts to launch a robotaxi service in San Francisco, which isn’t actually a robotaxi since it features safety drivers in the front seat, is alarming state officials in charge of overseeing autonomous vehicle testing, according to a new report from Reuters.

Emails between Tesla and state officials illustrate the growing sense that the company is trying to have its cake and eat it too. Despite Elon Musk’s public statements that Tesla was getting “regulatory permission” to launch a robotaxi service in the Bay Area, the company had yet to apply for any of the needed permits to do so. Instead, the service that Tesla eventually did launch was in vehicles with safety drivers behind the wheel to invite-only customers.