Tesla Cybercab

Tesla said today it will sell Cybercab to consumers by the end of this year, raising questions of what end users would do with a vehicle with no steering wheel and no self-driving software.

Tesla’s Senior Manager of Cybercab General Assembly at Gigafactory Texas, Jody Kerns, is leaving the company to become Rivian’s Director of General Assembly for the R2 in Normal, Illinois.

He’s the second Cybercab launch leader to leave Tesla this year. The head of Cybercab new product introduction walked out in April, before the vehicle ever carried a paying passenger.

A Tesla Cybercab was involved in a crash in Philadelphia this week, and it came out of it missing the entire outer panel of its driver-side door.

We don’t know who was at fault or whether Tesla’s software was driving. But Tesla has no permit to run automated vehicles in Pennsylvania, and that narrows down what this car was doing on Broad Street.

A Nasdaq-listed company worth about $2.4 million says it wants to buy 500 Tesla Robotaxis. KIDZ AI, formerly an online coding school for kids, announced today that it sent Tesla a “procurement inquiry” for the vehicles and plans an “Autonomous Fleet Operations Strategy.”

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, the playbook should. Tesla’s Robotaxi is turning into what bitcoin treasuries were for failing micro-caps in 2025: a buzzword you bolt onto a dying business to get the stock moving.

Tesla is putting its Cybercab on public display in China this week, but the company wants to be clear about one thing it isn’t: a vehicle it plans to sell there.

Tesla China said the showcase “does not involve” selling the Cybercab in the Chinese market or launching a driverless ride-hailing service — even as China’s own robotaxi operators run paid rides at scale.

NHTSA has ordered Tesla to prove that its Cybercab is even legal to sell. The agency issued a formal Special Order on September 10 demanding that the company show, under oath, how a vehicle with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no mirrors complies with federal safety standards written for human drivers.

Tesla has until September 30 to respond. Failing to answer fully and truthfully carries penalties of up to $139 million.

A Tesla Cybercab rider in Austin says a 10-minute trip turned into a 70-minute ordeal after the driverless taxi took a long detour across the city.

The reason is a limitation Tesla still hasn’t solved. Its robotaxis can’t drive on highways, so a quick hop that a human would take up the freeway becomes a winding surface-street tour.

A pre-production Tesla Cybercab was spotted parked on a street in Berkeley, California, and it gives us the clearest look yet at how Tesla puts a steering wheel into a car it designed to have none.

The photos, shared with Electrek by reader Adam Machacek, show a Cybertruck steering wheel mounted on an exposed steering column that has been bolted into the two-seat robotaxi.

A Tesla Cybercab rider found something in the robotaxi: a manual driving mode. When he got in, the touchscreen was showing a virtual joystick to drive the car by hand.

Tesla built the Cybercab with no steering wheel and no pedals. But it apparently still has a way to drive it manually, and you do it by dragging a finger across a screen.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been running a sidebar survey about whether our Electrek readers believed the new Cybercab would be a transformative new technology, or – not. After nearly 2,700 responses, here’s what you told us.

On today’s pressing episode of Quick Charge, we challenge the notion that all press is good press by filling the void of information surrounding this week’s Tesla Cybercab launch with a whole lot of bad news for the Full Self Driving brand.

Alongside Tesla’s low-key Cybercab event this week, the company showed off its new rare earth-free Cybercab motor, which reportedly increases power density and efficiency significantly.

It’s some kind of an achievement, but to understand how much of an achievement it is, we must first understand what all of this actually means. Strap in.

Tesla’s Cybercab is already under federal investigation. NHTSA opened an audit into how Tesla certified the vehicle the same day the company started putting passengers in it in Austin.

The probe targets the exact thing that makes the Cybercab unusual: it has no steering wheel, no pedals, and no mirrors, and Tesla certified it as road-legal anyway.

Tesla has started distributing a “Robotaxi interest form,” collecting interest from fleet buyers who would want to build a Robotaxi network or provide related infrastructure services.

It’s the first step in allowing non-Tesla entities to make money off of Tesla’s FSD driver-assist software… but the owners who were promised they could make passive income with their cars are still out of luck.

Tesla has a packed September ahead of it, with two confirmed and one rumored product launches. For a company that has gone so long without new products, it would be a big month… if all three of those products hadn’t been launched years ago already.

Tesla holds its Cybercab launch event in Austin on September 3, and it’s being sold as a milestone. Here’s my prediction: it’s going to look a lot like the last time Tesla launched this car, back in October 2024.

Expect a big robotaxi fleet number as the headline, a steering wheel and safety monitor finally coming out, and almost nothing that touches the one thing actually holding the program back.

Tesla confirmed it will hold a Cybercab event in Austin on September 3, promoting it with a poster that reads “Exclusive Access: Cybercab.” It’s an invite-only affair for the top scorers in its Robotaxi rider sweepstakes, and Tesla says it will livestream the launch for everyone else.

The framing suggests something big is coming. What’s actually coming is a two-seat car with no steering wheel added to the same driverless service Tesla has been running in Austin for over a year — a fleet that our tracking still puts at roughly two dozen unsupervised vehicles.

Tesla laid out an updated timeline for Full Self-Driving, its Cybercab, and the Optimus robot in a recent meeting with JPMorgan at its Fremont factory. The bank walked away with claims that FSD v15 is a “step-change,” that today’s HW4 computer can handle unsupervised driving, and that Optimus could go on sale to outside buyers as soon as the second half of 2027.

Most of it repeats promises Tesla has made, and missed, before.

Tesla’s robotaxi account posted photos today of what it’s calling the first Cybercab with a Starlink antenna built into the vehicle.

The pictures show a gold Cybercab parked at Gigafactory Texas, with a low-profile satellite antenna integrated into the roof. It’s the physical version of an integration Tesla teased with a diagram last month.

Tesla is building a purpose-built, wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle, a company policy advisor told lawmakers in Washington, DC, on Monday.

But Tesla gave no timeline, no vehicle, and no details, and it’s not clear the “active product” is anything more than the Robovan it unveiled nearly two years ago.

Tesla is ramping up production of the Cybercab at Giga Texas, with more than 100 of the steering-wheel-less two-seaters already spotted in the factory’s outbound lots.

The problem is that Tesla can’t sell it to you, and it can’t yet drive itself without a human watching — which raises the obvious question of why Tesla is building the car at all right now.