Five days after Tesla put its production Cybercab into public Robotaxi service, early riders in Austin are split between awe and annoyance.
The Cybercab, revealed on 4 September, drops the steering wheel, pedals and mirrors entirely and relies on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software. Several riders called the experience flawless, with one posting that Uber, Waymo and Lyft should rest in peace because Tesla is about to take over.
Others hit real-world friction. In one widely shared clip, the car froze at a stop sign before a right turn, waiting so long that an impatient human driver skirted past it before the Cybercab finally committed.
Software quirks appeared too. Some riders saw a manual-control joystick on the screen, a hint that staff can still drive the car remotely, with one noting it should never have been visible to passengers.
Comfort drew complaints as well. In Austin’s 35.6 deg C late-summer heat, the air conditioning would not drop below 18.9 deg C, a limit that will matter more when the service reaches Las Vegas and Phoenix, where temperatures regularly pass 43 deg C.
The fleet is small but real. Texas records show 420 Tesla autonomous vehicles registered as of last Friday, 45 of them Cybercabs.
A regulatory cloud has formed. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a review of about 1,000 Cybercabs, focusing on how Tesla justifies that a wheel-less, pedal-less, mirror-less vehicle meets federal motor-vehicle safety standards written for human-driven cars.
For Tesla, Robotaxi is the next core growth bet, and the Cybercab is the lever for a recurring service-revenue stream. Whether a car with no wheel and no pedal can earn that role at scale is still unproven.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original CheDongXi report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://chedongxi.com/p/375766.html.
Translated and adapted from CheDongXi (https://chedongxi.com/p/375766.html).