Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi rollout: the biggest news and announcements – The Verge

Elon Musk’s heterodox robotaxi philosophy gets put to the test

2026-09-02T12:47:09-04:00

Believe it or not, the Tesla Cybercab is coming.

Nearly two years after Elon Musk first unveiled the gold-tinted, gull-wing-door sporting, steering-wheel-free, two-seaters as the future of Tesla's autonomy efforts, the company is finally putting them into operation as part of its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. Public rides are here, and as Musk fans will assert, the era of Tesla's robotaxi dominance will begin.

Or will it? Musk has bet his company - and his trillion-dollar pay package - on a stripped down, barebones autonomous driving system that eschews multiple sensors used by all of his rivals in favor of a camera-only approach. T …

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In a swipe at Tesla, Waymo says ‘cameras… aren’t enough’

2026-08-28T06:02:18-04:00

As Tesla gears up for the official launch of its steering wheel and pedal-less Cybercabs, Waymo is issuing a stark warning about Elon Musk's approach to autonomous driving.

Srikanth Thirumalai, Waymo's VP of Onboard Software, doesn't specifically call out Musk or Tesla in a blog post, published Wednesday, entitled "10 AI Lessons from Driving 200+ Million Fully Autonomous Miles." But his intention is clear: Tesla's system is insufficient for the task of fully autonomous driving.

"Cameras are incredible, but they aren't enough," Thirumalai writes. "For years, there's been a debate over whether cameras alone could solve full autonomy. Now, af …

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Tesla is finally launching the Cybercab — let’s hope it’s ready

2026-08-19T04:58:05-04:00

Tesla Cybercabs are lined up on a lot at Tesla Giga Texas in Austin, Wednesday, April 8, 2026. | Image: Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

The Tesla Cybercab, that golden two-seater central to Elon Musk's robo-supremacist ambitions, is finally nearing its public launch. Whether or not the no-steering wheel and no-pedal vehicle is actually ready for public roads, let alone customers, remains very much in doubt.

According to The Information, Tesla is planning a public launch of the Cybercab in Austin, Texas, as soon as this month. The driverless vehicle has been popping up around the country, although often with a steering wheel and pedals, as employees are continuing to gather data. Tesla employees have been testing the fully driverless version on private roads around the compa …

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Tesla’s robotaxi promises are clashing with reality

2026-07-24T04:42:15-04:00

In an earnings call yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk did his best to paint a positive portrait of the company's robotaxi program. New cities are being added, more miles are being driven, and more people are experiencing Tesla's unsupervised vehicles.

But Musk's typical bullishness seemed to be absent from the call, as the occasional trillionaire sought to temper expectations about the program's future.

"We're going as fast as humanly possible in scaling Robotaxi," Musk said, "while trying to ensure that we do not harm anyone at all and ideally do not even run over a pet."

Musk's insistence that Tesla's robotaxi service was growing is clas …

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The Cybercab is the lightest, most efficient Tesla ever made

2026-06-16T11:02:39-04:00

Against all odds, the Tesla Cybercab is in production. And while Elon Musk's company may not have a very coherent plan for the tiny, autonomous two-seater, it's still taking the necessary steps to certify the EV's legitimacy. As such, Tesla recently filed paperwork with the Environmental Protection Agency that reveal many of the Cybercab's specs, including its weight, battery size, and preliminary range estimates.

What these documents reveal is the lightest, most range efficient vehicle Tesla has ever produced - and quite possibly one of the most efficient EVs ever produced.

The EPA filings confirm the Cybercab runs on a single front-mou …

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Tesla is finally doing unsupervised robotaxi rides

2026-01-22T16:23:19-05:00

Tesla is finally doing unsupervised robotaxi trips in Austin, Texas, according to a video posted on X. Elon Musk reposted the video, congratulating Tesla's AI team for the milestone.

For months, Tesla's robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco have included safety monitors with access to a kill switch in case of emergency - a fallback that Waymo currently doesn't need for its commercial robotaxi service. The safety monitor sits in the passenger seat in Austin and in the driver seat in San Francisco. Neither service is fully open to the public yet, relying instead on customer waitlists.

Musk has said that the human monitors are only there bec …

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Is it even worth mentioning that Elon Musk blew past his own FSD deadlines again?

2026-01-09T11:13:43-05:00

Last year, Tesla defied its critics by boldly launching a robotaxi service that, by the end of the year, required no human supervision and was available to over 50 percent of the US population.

At least that's what Tesla CEO Elon Musk told us would happen by the end of 2025. The reality, of course, was much different.

Tesla's "robotaxi" service, as it stands today in Austin and San Francisco, is still not available to anyone who wants to use it. It is still supervised by an employee who sits in either the driver or front passenger seat with access to a "kill switch" if anything goes wrong. (There have been some unsupervised tests, but it …

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Tesla is getting better about reporting FSD crash data — but the numbers are still misleading

2025-11-20T14:51:20-05:00

Last week, Tesla revealed a new section of its website dedicated to reporting safety statistics for its advanced driver assist systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD).

The new hub appears to be an attempt to move beyond the company's traditional quarterly safety reports, which have been criticized for failing to account for basic facts about traffic statistics, and toward something more verifiable and reliable. And given that Tesla's future relies on people trusting its self-driving technology, the stakes couldn't be higher.

But safety experts say the updated report is too little, too late.

"Yeah on the surface it looks like FSD …

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Musk wants to get rid of Tesla’s robotaxi babysitters ‘by the end of the year’

2025-10-22T18:59:25-04:00

Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted the company would be able to remove the safety monitors from its robotaxis "by the end of the year." He also said Tesla would launch a robotaxi service in 8-10 new markets also before the end of 2025.

"We are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year," Musk said in an earnings call with investors. "So within a few months, we expect to have no safety drivers at all, at least in parts of Austin. We're obviously being very cautious about the deployment."

Tesla's robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco include safety monitors with access to a kill switch - a fallb …

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Tesla’s robotaxi push is confusing the hell out of regulators

2025-09-24T04:46:21-04:00

For a company that's staking its future on AI and robotics, Tesla sure is having a tough time explaining its technology to government regulators. The company's efforts to launch a robotaxi service in San Francisco, which isn't actually a robotaxi since it features safety drivers in the front seat, is alarming state officials in charge of overseeing autonomous vehicle testing, according to a new report from Reuters.

Emails between Tesla and state officials illustrate the growing sense that the company is trying to have its cake and eat it too. Despite Elon Musk's public statements that Tesla was getting "regulatory permission" to launch a r …

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