Tesla's Cybercab Deadline and the Steering Wheel Question

Tesla confirmed Cybercab production will start in April 2026, with Elon Musk promising a vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals. But prototypes spotted testing in Austin show human drivers with their hands on steering wheels. With Full Self-Driving still requiring supervision and federal regulations capping steering-wheel-less vehicles at 2,500 units per year, Tesla faces a choice: launch a vehicle it cannot deploy at scale, or add the controls Musk promised to eliminate.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Tesla just confirmed the Cyber Cab production will begin in
April of 2026, and Elon Musk says the vehicle will have no
steering wheel and no pedals. Manufacturing will look more
like a high volume consumer electronics line like Apple and
iPhone than a car factory. And the goal is to produce 1
unit every 10 seconds. But right now, the Cyber Cab
prototypes spotted testing on public roads in Austin over the

(00:22):
past few weeks all have steeringwheels.
Human drivers are sitting behindthe wheel with our hands on it.
This is normal for engineering validation and you need manual
controls for safety during this testing phase.
Now the question is what happensafter the testing ends?
Test bedding its future on a vehicle?
It cannot legally deploy a scaleunless regulators approve
steering wheel less cars, and Tesla has not demonstrated the

(00:45):
unsupervised autonomous driving capability that would justify
that approval. So is the cyber cab going to
launch as promised or is Tesla building a backup plan?
We're going to walk through the production timeline, the
regulatory constraints, the state of Tesla's Full Self
Driving software, and what theseprototype sightings actually
tell us about where the Cyber Cab program is headed.

(01:06):
But first, let me take care of one quick thing now.
Elon Musk dropped the April 2026timeline at Tesla's shareholder
meeting in November 2025. He described a manufacturing
process unlike any car production line Tesla has built
before. The Cyber Cab will use Tesla's
unboxed process, which assemblesthe vehicle in large modules and
brings them together Near the end of the line.
Giant aluminum front and rear and giga casters replace many

(01:30):
smaller stamp parts and the initial target is a 10 second
cycle time with a longer term goal of five seconds per
vehicle. And at those speeds, Tesla
projects production capacity of at least 2 million cyber cabs
per year once the line matures. That would make it the highest
volume single model in Tesla's history.
And the starting price is expected to be around $30,000,

(01:52):
which would also make it the cheapest Tesla.
Now the vehicle is A2 seater with butterfly doors, no rear
windows, no mirror, no steering wheel, no pedals and a 20.5 inch
center display. The passengers sit back and let
the car drive itself. And that's the vision.
But reality right now looks a little bit different.
In the last week of 2025, multiple cyber cab prototypes

(02:13):
were spotted driving in downtownAustin.
The two prototypes were traveling in tandem on South
Lamar. Another cyber cab approach and
intersection on Congress Ave. And every sighting of the cyber
cab, you can see a steering wheel through the side window.
A human driver has their hands on it.
The prototypes are marked with engineering decals that read
Cyber cab Tesla Engineering Prototype V-001 Now this is

(02:36):
standard for development vehicles.
Regulations require manual controls when testing autonomous
vehicles on public roads. A safety driver must be able to
take over if the system fails. And seeing steering wheels in
prototypes is totally expected. What matters is whether the
production vehicle will still have them.
And. I've been digging through our
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(02:59):
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(03:20):
I'm extremely for you and blessed to have you in this
community. So thank you.
Now, let's get back into it. Let's talk about Tesla's
chairwoman, Robin Denno. They admitted in late October
2025 the Cyber Cab might get a steering wheel if needed.
It was a rare break from Musk's rhetoric.
At the WE Robot unveiling in October 2024, Musk was explicit,
he said. No mirrors, no pedals, no

(03:42):
steering wheel. But Denholm's comment
acknowledged the regulatory and technical hurdles.
Federal rules kept the number ofvehicles without traditional
controls at 2500 units per manufacturer per year.
That limit exists because regulators have not certified
that any company can safely operate steering wheel less
vehicles at scale. Now Tesla would need an
exemption to sell millions of cyber cams without manual

(04:04):
controls. The exemption depends on
demonstrating that the autonomous system is reliable
enough that manual controls are necessary, and Tesla has not
demonstrated that yet. The current version of full self
driving in consumer vehicles is called supervised FSD.
It requires constant driver attention.
Drivers must keep their hands onthe wheel and be ready to
intervene, and it is not a technicality or regulatory

(04:25):
formality. Tesla uses this language because
the system is not reliable enough to operate without
supervision. It makes mistakes.
Sometimes those mistakes are dangerous.
The system struggles with construction zones, unusual Rd.
markings, and edge cases the human drivers can handle
intuitively. In the Model Y Robotaxi is
operating in Austin since June of 2025 have logged over 250,000

(04:47):
miles in the city across 1,000,000 miles in the Bay Area
with a safety driver present. Now the service has reported 4
incidents to NHTSA. That works out to roughly one
crash every 312,000 miles. Now that that's not bad for an
early stage autonomous service, but is not good enough to remove
the person in the car, the humanbackup.
Now the standard for unsupervised operation is not

(05:08):
just being better than average human drivers.
Standard is being reliable enough that removing the
steering wheel does not create an unacceptable risk.
Now Tesla is preparing to expandits robo taxi service beyond
Austin too. Musk announced that Miami,
Dallas, Phoenix and Las Vegas are next.
These cities have different traffic patterns, weather
conditions, and road infrastructure than Austin.

(05:29):
Each expansion test the limits of a system trained primarily in
one environment in Austin. And if the Model Y robotaxi
still need safety drivers in Austin after six months of
operation, it's unclear how the Cyber Cab will operate without
any driver at all in cities where the system has even less
experience now. Tesla delayed its next
generation AI5 chip to mid 2027.That means the Cyber Cab will

(05:51):
launch on the current AI 4 hardware.
And if AI4 has not achieved unsupervised autonomy in the
millions of Model Threes, and Model Y is already on the road,
it's hard to argue it will magically do so in the cyber
camp by April of 2026. Whusk acknowledged during the
shareholder meeting that regulatory approval and
production rate will need to match that.
He said the rate at which Tesla receives regulatory approval

(06:12):
will roughly match the rate of cyber camp production.
He described it as maybe a little tight, and that's an
understatement. Tesla is betting that by the
time the production line is run,regulators will have approved
the vehicle for operating without manual controls.
History suggests that that is very optimistic, and Elon Musk
has been promising full autonomyfor years, and it has always
been a year away when he says things about it.

(06:34):
Now, crash testing of Cyber Cab prototypes is already underway
in Giga. Texas drove footage from late
December showing multiple units in a storage lot after frontal
inside impact tests. Giga castings for the Cyber Cab
are piling up at the factory. Tesla is clearly moving toward
production. The company is also hiring for
the program and building out Cortex 2, the AI supercluster
that will train future versions of FSD and Optimist.

(06:57):
The infrastructure is coming together and the software is the
question mark mark. Tesla cannot deliver
unsupervised autonomy. Cyber cab becomes A2 seat car
with no trunk, no rear window and awkward proportions for
consumer use. It was designed for robotaxi
operations, not personal ownership, and the steering
wheel and pedals would turn it into something it was never
meant to be. Now.
Elon Musk thanked Waymo during the shareholder meeting for

(07:19):
paving the regulatory path. Waymo has been operating fully
driverless vehicles in Phoenix and San Francisco since 2020.
The difference is the MO uses Lidar high definition maps in a
geofenced operating domain. Tesla relies on cameras alone
and claims the system will work anywhere regulators have allowed
Waymo to operate because its approach is conservative and
transparent. Tesla's approach is ambitious
and opaque, and the company doesnot publish detailed safety

(07:42):
data, does not restrict operations to mapped areas.
It promises A generalized solution that works everywhere.
Now if that's true, that's very compelling.
And the problem is that Tesla has not proven that this is
true. And the most likely outcome is
that Tesla launches a cyber cab with a steering wheel and
pedals, sells the vehicle possibly is a cheaper Tesla that
can be a what taxi wants. The software is ready.
This is essentially what Tesla has done with every other

(08:03):
vehicle it sells. The Model 3 and Model Y were
sold with the promise that they would one day drive themselves
and that you could use them as cyber cabs and rent them out to
people for the day. And you can literally go to work
and while you're at work for 8 hours.
He has said in the past that youcould let your car make money
for you while you're working because it's just sitting in a
parking lot. You send it out so it could be

(08:24):
its own cyber cab. Now owners hit for full self
driving capability years ago andare still waiting for the actual
full self driving capability that's full.
And the cyber cab would follow the same pattern.
Buy the hardware now and then get the autonomy later if that's
the route that they go. Maybe.
And the main concern is that thecyber cab is poorly designed for
consumers. It is a 2C vehicle with limited
storage. It has no mirrors and no rear

(08:45):
visibility. It was built for passengers, not
for drivers. And adding a steering wheel does
not change the fundamental limitations of the design.
Tesla may end up with a vehicle that works as neither a consumer
car nor a robo taxi if that's the path they choose.
I don't think they're going to do that.
What I think I think is going tohappen is they're going to push
back the timeline a little bit for the very, very slow roll out
of a cyber cab with a steering wheel.

(09:07):
And then they'll take the they'll have the capability of
taking the steering wheel off inthe future.
Now production is set for April 2026.
Musk says the cyber cab will be unlike any other car.
He might be right, just not in the way that he intends.
The vehicle represents Tesla's biggest that yet on autonomy.
If it works, Tesla becomes the dominant market player in a
trillion dollar transportation industry.

(09:28):
If it does that Tesla has built a factory to produce millions of
two seat cars and vehicles, thennobody can legally use without
human controls. Steering wheels and those
awesome prototypes are more thanengineering artifacts at this
point. There are a glimpse into a
compromise that tests may be forced to make due to
regulations. Hey, thank you so much for
listening today. I really do appreciate your

(09:49):
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