Five days after Tesla opened its production Cybercab to the public in its Robotaxi fleet, the verdict from riders is split. The vehicle, unveiled on 4 September, has no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors and relies entirely on Full Self-Driving. Some riders say they felt like VIPs; others say it ran flawlessly. Many more posted videos of small but telling failures.
The most common complaint is hesitation. In one clip the Cybercab stalls at a stop sign before a right turn, frozen long enough for an impatient human driver to swing around it and merge first. It only completed the turn after a large gap opened in traffic. Several riders also spotted a virtual manual-driving joystick appear on the centre screen, with controls for speed, steering, a horn and a Stop button. One tried tapping the controls. Nothing happened. Because the car has no wheel or pedals, that on-screen stub is presumably for staff to take over, but riders called it something they should not be seeing.
Comfort details drew fire too. In Austin, where the fleet runs, temperatures hit about 96 Fahrenheit (35.6 Celsius), yet riders found the air conditioning would not go below 66 Fahrenheit (18.9 Celsius). If Cybercab reaches Las Vegas or Phoenix, where heat routinely passes 110 Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius), that limit will matter more.
More from the original report
The launch itself was unusually secretive: no livestream, no stage appearance by Elon Musk, no price and no personal-order channel. State figures show Tesla had 420 autonomous vehicles registered in Texas as of last Friday, 45 of them Cybercabs. Riders have also spotted units outside Austin, suggesting wider rollout is near.
The bigger cloud is regulatory. On launch day the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a review of roughly 1,000 Cybercabs, focused on how Tesla justifies meeting federal safety standards with no wheel, brake pedal, accelerator or mirrors. Those rules were written for cars driven by people, and NHTSA will probe whether Tesla’s case for exempting them holds.
For Tesla, Robotaxi is the next growth pillar, and Cybercab is the lever. Five days in, there has been no headline “crash”, but plenty of small glitches. As more US cities see the car, the test of a vehicle with no human controls has only just begun.
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.
Translated and adapted from CheDongXi (https://chedongxi.com/p/375766.html).