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.
Matthew Skrzypczak posted a video on X on September 7 showing his Cybercab in an unusual state.
“When I got in the vehicle, the display was in a different configuration with a virtual joystick for manual driving,” he wrote, adding that he had “a feeling I wasn’t supposed to see this” and then tried to drive the car with it anyway.
The clip shows the Cybercab’s single touchscreen split in two. The left side is a driving interface built around an on-screen joystick, with a prompt to “Close cabin doors” and buttons for opening the doors and calling support. The right side shows a live surround-camera view of the car parked in what looks like a parking lot – though the side cameras appear to be frozen on a frame from a previous location at a Supercharger.
What it shows is the workaround Tesla built for a car with no physical controls. A Cybercab still has to be moved by a person sometimes, whether that’s repositioning it in a depot or nudging it out of a tight spot, and with no wheel and no pedals, an on-screen joystick is how you do it. Tesla has never shown this mode publicly.
A robotaxi with “almost” no controls
Tesla launched the Cybercab in Austin on September 3, and that same day NHTSA opened an audit into how it certified a vehicle with no steering wheel, pedals, or mirrors. The agency wants to know whether Tesla was right to decide that certain federal safety standards simply don’t apply to a driverless car. That probe covers roughly 1,000 vehicles.
The pitch has always been that the Cybercab doesn’t need manual controls because it drives itself. Yet here’s manual control, buried in a menu.
And Tesla has already left the door open to more. Back in October, chair Robin Denholm said the car could get real controls if it had to: “If we have to have a steering wheel, it can have a steering wheel and pedals.”
We have seen many Cybercab prototypes equipped with a steering wheel and pedals during the test phase.
Electrek’s Take
A touchscreen joystick is fine for creeping a car across a parking lot at walking speed, but those controls honestly look awful to use. It’s not a serious answer to the question regulators are actually asking, which is what happens when a driverless car needs a human and there’s no real way for one to take over.
Tesla removed the wheel and pedals to make a point, that full autonomy is here and manual controls are obsolete. And yet, it has yet to scale its robotaxi service, which has been in operation for more than year with Model Ys, which use the same autonomous hardware and software as the Cybercab, which is ultimately just a different form factor.
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