On Thursday, Elon Musk deployed a fleet of self-driving Cybercabs in Austin, Texas. These vehicles operate without traditional controls like steering wheels or brake pedals. Musk’s initiative aims to encourage Americans to embrace this new form of transportation, despite concerns about riding in vehicles with no manual control.
The rollout of the gold-colored Teslas, which give passengers no way to take control in an emergency, comes as the company prepares to launch the service in other cities. Musk followed with a post showing a giant Cybercab floating above the Austin skyline and later wrote, “A Storm of Cybercabs. An invitation-only launch event was expected to be held later Thursday. Tesla trails self-driving taxi leader Waymo in the number of cabs deployed and trips completed. To catch up, it must demonstrate that its camera-only system can safely navigate streets and avoid pedestrians. By contrast, Waymo and another rival, Amazon’s Zoox, supplement cameras with radar and a laser-based technology called lidar.
Tesla shares have suffered amid a slump in vehicle sales, but they rose more than 5% Thursday on hopes that the futuristic-looking taxis will catch on quickly. Waymo has more than 4,000 such vehicles in 14 cities.
“No steering wheel, no pedals,” Tesla teased on X before the launch. Tesla has more than 200 “unsupervised” robotaxis in those cities, meaning they operate without safety drivers aboard, according to the monitoring site RobotaxiTracker.
Tesla stock was battered last year after Musk took over President Donald Trump’s government cost-cutting campaign, dubbed DOGE, and embraced extreme-right political candidates, sparking protests at Tesla showrooms and boycotts by car buyers in several countries.
Tesla has not received approval for drivers to use even its partial self-driving software in most European Union countries. In the U.S., where the software has been downloaded and used, regulators have opened several investigations into its safety.
