Tesla Cybercab

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.

Tesla’s Cybercab EPA certification documents reveal the robotaxi’s full technical specs for the first time — including a 3,113-lb curb weight, a 219 HP motor, and a 48 kWh battery pack. The filing confirms several claims Tesla made about the vehicle while revealing some surprises.

The Certificate Summary Information (CSI) for EPA test group TTSLV00.0L1A, filed on May 21 and certified on May 26, provides the most detailed look yet at the engineering behind the most efficient EV ever produced.

Tesla’s Cybercab has been certified at 165 Wh/mi, making it the most efficient electric vehicle ever produced — by a wide margin. The next most efficient EV on the market, the Lucid Air Pure, consumes 28% more energy per mile.

Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy confirmed the figure, which represents a certified rating — not a marketing claim or internal target. It’s an impressive achievement, but it comes with a massive asterisk: Tesla accomplished this by building a tiny two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel, no pedals, and a sub-50 kWh battery pack.

CEO Elon Musk confirmed during Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call that Cybercab production has officially begun at Giga Texas.

VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy confirmed that the Cybercab will not be subject to NHTSA’s 2,500-vehicle annual production cap for autonomous vehicles.

Victor Nechita, who served as Tesla’s vehicle program manager for the Cybercab, has announced he is leaving the company. The departure comes just days after the first Cybercab production unit rolled off the assembly line at Giga Texas, adding to an accelerating exodus of senior program managers at the automaker.

A new sighting of Tesla Cybercab prototypes in Austin, Texas, is fueling the ongoing debate about the vehicle’s design. While the prototypes were spotted with steering wheels, which is standard for testing, it raises questions about whether Tesla can actually stick to its plan to launch the vehicle without them given the state of its self-driving effort.

Tesla’s chairwoman said that the automaker might redesign the Cybercab, specifically add a steering wheel and pedals.

Early last month, Tesla unveiled the Cybercab, a 2 door vehicle with no steering wheel and pedals, fully reliant on the future of autonomy. Since then, they’ve put the vehicle on display at a couple Tesla showrooms, most recently at the Meatpacking District location in New York City. I went to go take a look, and I have a few thoughts.