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 past few weeks all have steering wheels.
Human drivers are sitting behind the 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 happens after the testing ends? Test bedding its future on a vehicle? It cannot legally deploy a scale unless regulators approve steering wheel less cars, and Tesla has not demonstrated the 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 these prototype sightings actually tell us about where the Cyber Cab program is headed. But first, let me take care of one quick thing now.
Elon Musk dropped the April 2026 timeline 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 assembles the vehicle in large modules and brings them together Near the end of the line.
Giant aluminum front and rear and giga casters replace many 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, 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 were spotted driving in downtown Austin.
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 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 analytics of the show recently and noticed that around 37% of you are following this channel. And I appreciate you. For you, I am forever grateful. And the other 63% haven't hit
the follower subscribe button. And I've been an independent journalist covering Elon Musk, SpaceX, Tesla, all of his companies and surrounding technology for the last six years. And I'll continue for the next 10. And all I ask from you is one second of your time to hit the follower subscribe button on the platform you're watching or listening on right now. 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 steering wheel. But Denholm's comment acknowledged the regulatory and technical hurdles.
Federal rules kept the number of vehicles 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 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 on the wheel and be ready to intervene, and it is not a technicality or regulatory 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 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 human backup.
Now the standard for unsupervised operation is not 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 expand its 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.
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 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 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 autonomy for years, and it has always been a year away when he says things about it. 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. 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 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 does not publish detailed safety 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 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 you could 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 its own cyber cab. Now owners hit for full self driving capability years ago and are 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 the cyber cab is poorly designed for consumers. It is a 2C vehicle with limited storage. It has no mirrors and no rear 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 to happen 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. And then they'll take the they'll have the capability of taking the steering wheel off in the 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. If it does that Tesla has built a factory to produce millions of two seat cars and vehicles, then nobody can legally use without
human controls. Steering wheels and those awesome prototypes are more than engineering 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 support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast plat thing on right now, I greatly appreciate it.
It helps out the show tremendously and you'll knit and each episode is about 10 minute to get you caught up quickly. Please, if you support the show, evenmore.com/stage Zero and please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you tomorrow.