Chips & Hardware
Tesla to start selling Cybercabs before year's end
Tesla says it will begin selling its driverless Cybercab to customers by the end of the year, even as federal regulators investigate whether the vehicle meets safety standards.
Tesla said Wednesday that it intends to begin selling its Cybercab to outside buyers before the year is out, even as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the US auto-safety regulator, examines whether the vehicle meets federal standards. The gold-colored, two-seat vehicle has no steering wheel or other conventional controls.
The plan marks a shift for CEO Elon Musk, who for years described a future built on privately owned Teslas turning into self-driving taxis through a software update rather than a purpose-built vehicle. That version of the vision still hasn’t arrived: Tesla owners currently pay for Full Self-Driving (Supervised), which automates much of the driving but still requires a human ready to intervene — a rule plenty of viral videos show drivers pushing to its limit. Musk said Wednesday that an unsupervised version of FSD won’t reach customers until sometime in next year’s second quarter, one more slip for owners who paid for the software years ago.
On the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Tesla vice president of engineering Lars Moravy said every Cybercab built so far is going straight into Tesla’s own robotaxi fleet. As that fleet expands, he said, third-party sales will begin on a small scale and grow as Tesla learns more about delivering, owning and managing autonomous vehicles. Tesla floated the idea of outside sales last month around a Cybercab event in Austin, even posting a signup form for prospective buyers, though it had not committed to specifics until now.
Should both schedules hold, buyers of the third-party Cybercab fleet could be running a robotaxi service before existing Tesla owners get the same hands-off driving in their own cars. Musk framed the Cybercab accordingly: “the vast majority of the Cybercab stuff will be essentially Tesla-owned and transported as a service,” while models like the 3, the Y and the Roadster remain vehicles meant for personal ownership.
That rollout still hinges on the NHTSA probe, opened last month just hours after Cybercabs began operating on Austin’s public roads. Federal vehicle-safety rules require manual controls such as brake pedals and mirrors, and automakers normally self-certify that compliance themselves, as Tesla did for the Cybercab. Current rules don’t address vehicles with no manual controls at all, though the Department of Transportation has recently proposed dropping that requirement for vehicles built to drive themselves. Until the investigation concludes, it remains unclear whether Tesla — or any manufacturer — can legally put the Cybercab on the road.
Why it matters
Tesla is now selling a purpose-built robotaxi to outsiders before many of its own owners get the unsupervised self-driving they already paid for — and the plan’s fate still depends on a federal safety review that could decide whether the driverless Cybercab can legally operate at all.