Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi rollout: the biggest news and announcements

At a private, closed-door event in Austin, Texas today, Tesla officially launched its gilded car of the future: the Cybercab. It’s a huge milestone for Elon Musk, who has been hyping the imminent arrival of driverless cars for years and has bet the future of his company on AI, autonomous vehicles, and humanoid robots.

It was an unusually muted event, with no livestream, no journalists, and a very short invite list comprised mostly of pro-Tesla content creators. Tesla influencers planning live shows with the event stream were left streaming the webpage that tracks the number of Tesla robotaxis in Texas instead.

Believe it or not, the Tesla Cybercab is coming.

Nearly two years after Elon Musk first unveiled the gold-tinted, gull-wing-door sporting, steering-wheel-free, two-seaters as the future of Tesla’s autonomy efforts, the company is finally putting them into operation as part of its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. Public rides are here, and as Musk fans will assert, the era of Tesla’s robotaxi dominance will begin.

As Tesla gears up for the official launch of its steering wheel and pedal-less Cybercabs, Waymo is issuing a stark warning about Elon Musk’s approach to autonomous driving.

Srikanth Thirumalai, Waymo’s VP of Onboard Software, doesn’t specifically call out Musk or Tesla in a blog post, published Wednesday, entitled “10 AI Lessons from Driving 200+ Million Fully Autonomous Miles.” But his intention is clear: Tesla’s system is insufficient for the task of fully autonomous driving.

The Tesla Cybercab, that golden two-seater central to Elon Musk’s robo-supremacist ambitions, is finally nearing its public launch. Whether or not the no-steering wheel and no-pedal vehicle is actually ready for public roads, let alone customers, remains very much in doubt.

According to The Information, Tesla is planning a public launch of the Cybercab in Austin, Texas, as soon as this month. The driverless vehicle has been popping up around the country, although often with a steering wheel and pedals, as employees are continuing to gather data. Tesla employees have been testing the fully driverless version on private roads around the company’s campus since July. And it recently completed a training with first responders in Austin, teaching them how to move the vehicles in the event of an emergency, Brad Cesak, a spokesperson for the city of Austin, confirmed.

In an earnings call yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk did his best to paint a positive portrait of the company’s robotaxi program. New cities are being added, more miles are being driven, and more people are experiencing Tesla’s unsupervised vehicles.

But Musk’s typical bullishness seemed to be absent from the call, as the occasional trillionaire sought to temper expectations about the program’s future.

Against all odds, the Tesla Cybercab is in production. And while Elon Musk’s company may not have a very coherent plan for the tiny, autonomous two-seater, it’s still taking the necessary steps to certify the EV’s legitimacy. As such, Tesla recently filed paperwork with the Environmental Protection Agency that reveal many of the Cybercab’s specs, including its weight, battery size, and preliminary range estimates.

What these documents reveal is the lightest, most range efficient vehicle Tesla has ever produced — and quite possibly one of the most efficient EVs ever produced.

Tesla is finally doing unsupervised robotaxi trips in Austin, Texas, according to a video posted on X. Elon Musk reposted the video, congratulating Tesla’s AI team for the milestone.

For months, Tesla’s robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco have included safety monitors with access to a kill switch in case of emergency — a fallback that Waymo currently doesn’t need for its commercial robotaxi service. The safety monitor sits in the passenger seat in Austin and in the driver seat in San Francisco. Neither service is fully open to the public yet, relying instead on customer waitlists.

Last year, Tesla defied its critics by boldly launching a robotaxi service that, by the end of the year, required no human supervision and was available to over 50 percent of the US population.

At least that’s what Tesla CEO Elon Musk told us would happen by the end of 2025. The reality, of course, was much different.

Last week, Tesla revealed a new section of its website dedicated to reporting safety statistics for its advanced driver assist systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD).

The new hub appears to be an attempt to move beyond the company’s traditional quarterly safety reports, which have been criticized for failing to account for basic facts about traffic statistics, and toward something more verifiable and reliable. And given that Tesla’s future relies on people trusting its self-driving technology, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted the company would be able to remove the safety monitors from its robotaxis “by the end of the year.” He also said Tesla would launch a robotaxi service in 8-10 new markets also before the end of 2025.

“We are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year,” Musk said in an earnings call with investors. “So within a few months, we expect to have no safety drivers at all, at least in parts of Austin. We’re obviously being very cautious about the deployment.”

For a company that’s staking its future on AI and robotics, Tesla sure is having a tough time explaining its technology to government regulators. The company’s efforts to launch a robotaxi service in San Francisco, which isn’t actually a robotaxi since it features safety drivers in the front seat, is alarming state officials in charge of overseeing autonomous vehicle testing, according to a new report from Reuters.

Emails between Tesla and state officials illustrate the growing sense that the company is trying to have its cake and eat it too. Despite Elon Musk’s public statements that Tesla was getting “regulatory permission” to launch a robotaxi service in the Bay Area, the company had yet to apply for any of the needed permits to do so. Instead, the service that Tesla eventually did launch was in vehicles with safety drivers behind the wheel to invite-only customers.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is eyeing San Francisco for his next robotaxi city — to which I say, good luck to you, sir.

Musk acknowledged that the company is still waiting on “regulatory approval,” which hints at the uphill climb company Tesla will face in pushing this process forward. (Get it? Uphill? San Francisco?)

Over the years, Tesla has built part of its reputation on hosting big, bold events to generate authentic hype for upcoming releases. The robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas, last week wasn’t one of them.

Coverage of the rollout was dominated by a close-knit cohort of Tesla influencers and Elon Musk superfans, many of whom are openly supportive of the CEO’s vision. Journalists and tech bloggers who might have been more critical of the technology were not only excluded but also actively ridiculed and mocked by Tesla fans and some of their followers for attempting to ask basic questions about the service. In Austin and online, Tesla fans were taking a cue from Musk, who has spent years fomenting a culture of resentment toward critical media.

This might be a bigger deal than the robotaxis.

Tesla said it completed its first fully autonomous vehicle delivery from factory to customer. A video posted on X shows the vehicle — a Tesla Model Y — leaving the company’s Austin Gigafactory, driving on the highway, passing through suburban sprawl and residential neighborhoods, before arriving at a customer’s apartment building.

Tesla’s robotaxi rollout has been rockier than the fanboys and influencers who got early access to the company’s driverless vehicles would like you to believe. And thanks to these diligent Redditors, we now have a list of all the mistakes the company’s “unsupervised” vehicles have made in the first couple days.

Some are relatively minor, like failing to recognize a reversing UPS truck while trying to pull into a parking space or driving over a curb. Others are more worrisome, like briefly driving on the wrong side of the road or dropping passengers off in the middle of a busy intersection.

This week, Tesla launched its long-promised robotaxi service in Austin, and almost immediately its vehicles were caught fucking up.

In a YouTube video, a Tesla robotaxi briefly drives on the wrong side of the road. Another video shared by Ed Niedermeyer, the author of a book about Tesla’s origins, shows a robotaxi braking hard in the middle of the road in response to stationary police vehicles that were not in its immediate driving path. And a third captures a robotaxi dropping off its passengers in the middle of a busy intersection.

After years of grand promises about how robotaxis would change the way we buy and use our cars, Tesla finally launched its taxi service. In one small portion of one city. With only a few cars and a few riders. Plus safety monitors in the passenger seat. Caution is a good thing in this industry, but what does all this say about where Tesla’s self-driving efforts really stand?

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Andy Hawkins tells us all about the early days of Tesla robotaxis. He talks us through the somewhat stealthy launch, how Tesla’s robotaxi plans could grow from here, and why nobody — not even Waymo, which appears to be way ahead — has this race won.