Tesla puts driverless Cybercab, with no steering wheel, on Austin streets

Tesla began operating its purpose-built Cybercab robotaxi on public streets in Austin, Texas, this week, putting a vehicle with no steering wheel, no pedals and no way for a human occupant to intervene into everyday traffic for the first time. The company deployed the two-seat vehicles around the city on Wednesday night ahead of an invite-only launch event Thursday, opening a new phase in its long-delayed bid to build a driverless taxi business.

The vehicles, built at Tesla's Giga Texas plant, rely entirely on cameras and an onboard AI system to navigate; there is no manual backup if the software fails. Chief executive Elon Musk posted "a storm of Cybercabs" on social media as the fleet fanned out through the city overnight, and Tesla invited sweepstakes winners and existing robotaxi riders age 21 and older to take some of the first rides.

The numbers

According to Texas's automated-vehicle operator registry, Tesla Robotaxi LLC has authorized 45 Cybercabs for driverless operation in the state, part of a broader fleet of roughly 420 vehicles the company has registered there for autonomous use. Tesla says close to 200 vehicles nationwide now carry its "unsupervised" designation, meaning they run within defined zones without a human safety monitor aboard. The ride-hailing service now reaches six Texas and Florida cities — Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa — and Tesla told shareholders in its second-quarter letter that the robotaxi program had expanded to seven U.S. markets and logged roughly 380,000 "unsupervised" miles with what it called an impeccable safety record.

Tesla has previously estimated it can build a Cybercab for around $18,000, a fraction of the six-figure sums competitors have spent retrofitting or purpose-building robotaxis, and executives have argued that cost gap is central to the company's long-term bet on the category. Musk has cautioned that meaningful revenue from Cybercab is unlikely before 2027, after production ramps past what he has called an "agonizingly slow" early phase. Tesla shares, which have traded down roughly a fifth so far this year, rose on the day of the launch.

How Tesla got here

Tesla began offering rides in a geofenced part of Austin in June 2025 using modified Model Y vehicles that still had steering wheels and pedals, with company employees riding as safety monitors before that supervision was gradually withdrawn. The Cybercab, first shown as a concept in October 2024, is the company's first vehicle engineered from the start without manual controls, a design choice Musk has described as essential to eventually building the vehicle at high volume and low cost.

The rollout is also happening under a new state regulatory regime. Under Senate Bill 2807, passed by the Texas Legislature in 2025 and now codified in the state's transportation code, commercial operators of automated vehicles must obtain state authorization before putting driverless cars on public roads. Companies apply through the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles' automated-vehicle program, certifying that their vehicles can reach a "minimal risk condition" if the system fails, carry event-recording equipment, meet insurance requirements and are properly registered. Operators must also file a plan with the Texas Department of Public Safety explaining how police, firefighters and paramedics should interact with the vehicles at a crash scene or traffic stop. Enforcement of the framework became mandatory this past May, after the department finished writing final rules in February.

Tesla's automated driving systems also remain under federal scrutiny. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has open investigations covering both its Full Self-Driving software, following reports of red-light running and other traffic violations across nearly 2.9 million vehicles, and its Austin robotaxi service, after a series of crash reports were filed under the agency's standing order requiring manufacturers to disclose collisions involving automated systems within days of learning about them.

Who is affected, and what the competition is saying

The launch directly affects riders in the six cities where the service now operates, along with Tesla investors who have been asked to weigh a strategy built increasingly around autonomy and the humanoid robot Optimus rather than near-term car sales, which fell over the prior two years. It also sharpens a public rivalry with Alphabet's Waymo, which already runs fully driverless paid rides — without safety drivers, though its vehicles retain steering wheels — in considerably more cities and with a larger fleet than Tesla's.

Waymo has been openly skeptical of Tesla's approach. In a company blog post published roughly a week before the Cybercab launch, drawing on more than 200 million fully autonomous miles, a Waymo vice president argued that gradually expanding a driver-assistance system into full autonomy is not a substitute for building a driverless system from the ground up.

"You can run billions of miles in simulation or with human supervision, but an AV system only truly matures when it is solely responsible for the driving task. Full autonomy exposes the system to the true gravity of its decisions and reveals novel situations that humans or simulations might unconsciously smooth over," Waymo wrote in its retrospective on 200 million autonomous miles.

The post did not name Tesla, but its timing a week before the Cybercab's public debut was widely read as a direct response. Consumer-safety advocates have separately pressed Tesla for years to be more transparent about how its supervised and unsupervised systems perform, criticism the company has partly answered by publishing more detailed crash data over the past year.

What happens next

Tesla has not said when it will expand Cybercab beyond Texas and Florida or how quickly the 45-vehicle authorization will grow, though the company has signaled plans to add cities as production at Giga Texas increases. Musk has said publicly that early output will stay slow before accelerating, and analysts covering the stock have generally cautioned that his timelines for autonomy have proven optimistic in the past. In the meantime, investors are watching for evidence that the low production cost Tesla has cited can translate into a fleet large enough to compete with Waymo's head start, while regulators in Texas and at the federal level continue to collect crash and performance data from a service still short of a year old.

Whether the no-controls Cybercab expands smoothly will likely depend on both variables at once: how the vehicles perform without any of the fallback options — a steering wheel, a brake pedal, a human safety monitor — that Tesla's own robotaxi fleet has relied on until now, and how state and federal regulators respond as more of them reach public roads.