Tesla is beginning public robotaxi operations with its Cybercab in Austin, Texas, nearly two years after the vehicle was first unveiled. The two-seat, camera-only car has no steering wheel or pedals, and it represents Elon Musk鈥檚 long-standing bet that a simplified sensor approach can beat rivals. The launch puts that bet to a direct test, as the company now faces legal responsibility for any crash involving the vehicle.
Tesla鈥檚 Full Self-Driving system, used in modified form in the Cybercab, remains a supervised Level 2 feature for regular owners. In the robotaxi, remote operators will monitor the cars and can theoretically intervene if something goes wrong. The system has been linked to thousands of crashes and dozens of fatalities, according to the source, and Tesla can no longer blame a human driver when a Cybercab fails.
Musk has argued for years that lidar, a light-based sensor used by nearly all other autonomous vehicle developers, is unnecessary because humans drive with their eyes. Tesla briefly used radar but removed it in 2022 over the objections of its own engineers, who warned that cameras alone could be blinded by rain or sunlight. The company鈥檚 camera-only neural network must approximate depth and distance from flat two-dimensional images, leaving it vulnerable to glare and adverse weather.
Waymo, which combines lidar, cameras, and radar, currently operates a fleet of thousands of fully driverless vehicles across many U.S. cities. Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov recently said that while cameras are good enough to approximate human driving, weak sensing limits the safety ceiling for truly autonomous systems. Lidar has not slowed Waymo鈥檚 rollout, and its engineers believe the sensor helps accelerate progress.
Tesla argues that omitting lidar and traditional controls like steering wheels and mirrors makes the Cybercab cheaper to produce and easier to deploy at scale. At an event in 2024, Musk promised the vehicle could be purchased for less than that price point, though the source does not confirm a final figure. Selling the car to individuals, however, would require an exemption from federal safety rules that mandate steering wheels and pedals, a hurdle that previously delayed Amazon-owned Zoox.
Regulatory approval is not guaranteed. Tesla still needs a permit from the California DMV for driverless public operation, and it has yet to demonstrate the required level of safety. The U.S. has no federal policy governing driverless vehicle deployments, and legislation that could ease the way has stalled in Congress for years. That leaves Tesla to seek permission on a state-by-state and city-by-city basis, an expensive and slow process.
The Cybercab also relies on remote teleoperation as its primary failsafe when the autonomous system cannot handle a situation, since there is no human onboard to take over. Tesla has equipped its Cybercabs with Starlink connections to support that remote oversight. The Austin launch is the company鈥檚 most extensive unsupervised deployment so far, but the path to broader operation remains uncertain.
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