The Cybercab Is Real. The Hard Part Starts Now

I see Waymos driving around LA all the time. Sliding through traffic, stopping for pedestrians, doing their thing with nobody behind the wheel. I have never actually ridden in one. That is about to be harder to put off, because Tesla just did the version of this that finally feels like a line has been crossed.

On September 3, Tesla held its Cybercab launch event in downtown Austin and started giving rides in the two-seat Cybercab, a car built with no steering wheel and no pedals. Not a regular car with the software swapped in. A vehicle designed from zero around the idea that no human ever drives it. Texas state records show 45 Cybercabs registered among 420 Tesla autonomous vehicles in the state, and Reuters reports the rides are live right now in limited areas of Austin. Tesla's VP of AI Ashok Elluswamy frames the whole approach as solving autonomy with AI and cameras instead of heavy lidar sensor setups, and Tesla already runs driverless Model Ys in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, with the Cybercab meant to become the main vehicle of that network over time.

To me, this is a genuinely exciting milestone. Cheap and efficient transportation for everyone is a pretty good thing to want. I also have a more selfish reaction: I would personally like to own a fleet of these things. And that part is not just my imagination. Musk has been saying publicly since 2016 that Tesla owners will be able to add their cars to a robotaxi fleet and earn money with them, and he repeated it at the 2024 shareholder meeting: you tap a button, your car joins the fleet, Tesla takes a cut, and most of the income goes to the owner. This week Tesla put a form on its website asking people to sign up to buy and run Cybercab fleets. That form currently reads as aimed at businesses more than individuals, and nobody knows yet what the real terms for a normal person would look like. But the idea of plugging into that is exciting to me, and Tesla itself keeps saying it is where this is going.

The worry, and I think it is the big one, is regulation. Getting a car with no steering wheel fully up and running across the country is not going to be a technology problem at this point. It is going to be a permission problem, decided state by state, agency by agency, and it will get slow and political. NHTSA has already said it is evaluating the effort, which is fair, but fair and fast are not the same thing. Politicians will have opinions, some of them good ones, and this will be the biggest hurdle between the Austin demo and the thing showing up where I live.

And yeah, I will admit the first ride is going to feel unnerving. Handing your life over to a camera and a model with no wheel to grab if you panic is not nothing. But here is the thing. Watching Waymos handle real LA traffic every day, from the sidewalk, they look pretty safe to me. The machines do not seem to need me in the loop.

So I am excited, a little nervous, and already saving up opinions for the day I get my first ride. If you never rode in one of these things ten years ago, this week is worth noticing. The future has been parked next to us for a while. Now it has no steering wheel.