Overview
- Tesla signaled on Monday that Cybercabs will begin carrying employees at its Giga Texas site after a company video showed a wheel‑less unit in use and was briefly edited and reposted.
- The vehicle shown has butterfly doors and no steering wheel or pedals and lets riders control audio, video, climate, and destination from a smartphone app inside the two‑seat cabin.
- No federal or state regulator has approved unsupervised commercial robotaxi service without manual controls and Tesla’s in‑house rides do not equal public clearance.
- NHTSA’s administrator has said the agency will consider removing steering‑wheel requirements, while Tesla has filed EPA certification details and been testing engineering units that sometimes include manual controls.
- Tesla frames the employee trials as a step toward a late‑2026 to early‑2027 public launch but the company must complete software validation, public testing, and obtain regulatory sign‑off before scaling service.