Tesla said on Tuesday it had begun engineering tests of its first production Cybercab on public roads in Austin.
The company announced the milestone in a post on X accompanied by a short video filmed from inside the two-seat vehicle, which has no steering wheel and no pedals.
Musk reposted the clip to his own account, writing that the Cybercab was driving around Austin “with no steering wheel or pedals.”
The footage showed the Cybercab navigating Austin traffic with an empty dashboard where a driver’s controls would sit, the central touchscreen displaying a mapped route.
A caption on the video noted that a safety monitor was present in the engineering vehicle during the test.
Production of the model began at Gigafactory Texas earlier this year, and the move to public-road engineering tests places those purpose-built units on the same streets where Tesla already runs a robotaxi service using modified Model Y vehicles.
A 20-Month Path
Musk unveiled the Cybercab concept on October 10, 2024, at an event on a Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, California, where prototypes without steering wheels or pedals gave short rides to attendees.
The first production unit rolled off the line at Giga Texas on February 17, 2026, roughly six weeks ahead of the timeline the company had reaffirmed weeks earlier.
Volume production followed in April, and Tesla shifted its Giga Texas line to steering-wheel-free builds as the ramp progressed.
Joe Tegtmeyer, a drone operator who regularly photographs the site, reported on Monday that the outbound lot had thinned to roughly 50 to 60 units as cars were hauled off-site, while vehicles bearing “Cybercab” logos were being driven fully autonomously on a dedicated test track.
Tegtmeyer added that a large number of older wrapped engineering Cybercabs had appeared on a temporary lot and might be headed for scrapping, a sign the company is moving past its earliest pre-production builds.
Musk has warned that the early ramp would be slow, telling investors on the first-quarter earnings call that initial output of the Cybercab and the Tesla Semi would be “very slow” before climbing later in the year.
He framed the manufacturing process as closer to consumer electronics than traditional automaking, repeating a target of one unit every ten seconds at full capacity.
The company aims to build the vehicle at an eventual rate near 2 million units a year across multiple factories.
Engineering vehicles fitted with temporary steering wheels and pedals have circulated on Austin and California roads since late 2025, but the units shown driving on Tuesday reflect the production design, which omits manual controls entirely.
That design was confirmed days earlier when the company published its Cybercab First Responder Interaction Plan over the weekend, a document that classifies the vehicle as an SAE Level 4 system capable of performing the entire driving task without human input within its defined operating area.
The same guide details a safety package that includes at least ten airbags, an active hood that raises during certain pedestrian impacts, and exterior microphones and speakers on the B-pillars that let emergency crews speak with remote Tesla Robotaxi Support staff.
A Cybercab fitted with a steering wheel and pedals, the guide states, is an engineering or test vehicle rather than the intended product.
Specifications Surface Through Regulators
For a vehicle Tesla has discussed sparingly, much of what is known about the Cybercab has emerged through regulatory filings rather than company disclosures.
An Environmental Protection Agency certificate, revealed in filings published in June, showed a roughly 48-kilowatt-hour battery, a single front-mounted motor rated at 163 kilowatts, or 219 horsepower, and a curb weight of 3,113 pounds.
The filing listed an unadjusted combined range of 418 miles, well above the roughly 300 miles of real-world range the company has previously cited, and recorded an introduction-into-commerce date of May 29.
Front-wheel drive marked a departure for a company whose other models use rear- or all-wheel-drive layouts, a choice that prioritizes cost and efficiency over performance.
Tesla vice president Lars Moravy has described the vehicle’s certified 165 watt-hours per mile as the most efficient figure of any production EV.
The certification clears the Cybercab for sale from an emissions standpoint, but does not grant approval for autonomous operation in any jurisdiction, which remains the program’s central hurdle.
Texas Lists the Cybercab
The Cybercab gained a formal marker of its impending deployment this week when the Texas Department of Public Safety added it to the state’s Connected Autonomous Vehicles First Responder Interaction Plans page.
The listing, under the entry “Tesla Cybercab Robotaxi,” places the purpose-built vehicle alongside operators including Nuro, Waymo, Zoox, May Mobility, Aurora and Avride, each of which files a plan instructing police and emergency crews on how to handle their vehicles.
The state filing gives the First Responder plan an official footing beyond the document Tesla published itself, and signals that the regulatory groundwork for driverless operation in Texas is advancing alongside the road tests.
The Network the Cybercab Is Meant to Scale
The robotaxi service the Cybercab is built to expand began in Austin in June 2025 with safety monitors, then started integrating unsupervised vehicles early this year.
Tesla launched unsupervised rides in Dallas and Houston in April, and stretched the driverless operating zone to the entire Austin metro area in early June.
Coverage has at times outrun the deployed fleet, with independent trackers estimating only around 20 vehicles running across the expanded Austin zone even as the company touted the wider map.
A first expansion beyond Austin opened with just one vehicle in each new city before the count grew, underscoring how early the rollout remains.
The service still runs entirely on Model Y vehicles, and Tesla has said the Cybercab will replace them as the largest-volume vehicle in the fleet over time.
The company has guided to robotaxi operations in roughly a dozen US states by the end of 2026, having named Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa and Las Vegas among markets slated for the first half.
Regulatory Path
Tesla has carved a regulatory route that differs from rivals operating purpose-built autonomous vehicles.
Moravy has said the Cybercab is not subject to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s 2,500-vehicle annual exemption cap because the company self-certified the model against existing federal safety standards.
Texas updated its law on May 28 to let companies self-certify autonomous systems as SAE Level 4 or higher for commercial driverless transport, and NHTSA moved in late June to propose dropping the federal requirement for manual brake pedals in fully autonomous vehicles.
Each change eases the path for a vehicle with no manual controls, though a federal investigation into Tesla‘s camera-only approach in low-visibility conditions remains open.
The Cybercab is priced to undercut the rest of the lineup, with Musk having pledged a vehicle available to consumers below $30,000 before 2027.
