Tesla takes car without steering wheel on public roads for the first time

Tesla is taking its driverless Cybercab without pedals or a steering wheel for a ride on public streets for the first time.

The two-seater has been spotted doing rounds in downtown Austin, where Tesla first started its Robotaxi ride-share platform dedicated to driverless vehicles. The service launched with the new Model Y running on a custom FSD 14 (Unsupervised) software branch as that is what Tesla could first get a permit for, and it wanted to map the areas and test the ride-share payment app with a more familiar vehicle.

According to Elon Musk, however, Tesla has plans to add owner vehicles, most likely 2026 Model Y units again, as well as the Cybercab, to its Robotaxi platform in 2026. The owners of older HW3 vehicles unfortunately won't be able to add their vehicles to the fleet, as their FSD computer and camera kit can't run unsupervised FSD. The best they can hope for is a feature-limited FSD 14 Lite of sorts, but the Cybercab won't have this problem as it is running on Tesla's latest AI4 hardware.

Tesla has been testing the self-driving Cybercab on its factory premises for a while now, and also outfitted regular Model 3 vehicles with a custom Cybercab FSD kit to gauge its performance beyond factory grounds.

It is now confident enough in the Cybercab's autonomous driving abilities to take it out on public streets for the first time. It is not clear if the self-driving, self-cleaning, self-charging Cybercab had a supervisor inside, but considering that this is its first public outing, there must have been a Tesla engineer sitting in the driver's seat.

Driver is not the exact word here, as there are no pedals or a steering wheel, so it would be interesting to follow how the Cybercab fares on public streets with a lot of traffic and without the option to take over in case of an emergency. Granted, the Cybercab has been spotted driven manually with a sort of gaming controller, but that was just for positioning it inside expo halls and nothing of the sort can be attempted while making rides for the Robotaxi platform.

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