Tesla will begin producing the Cybercab, an autonomous electric vehicle without pedals or a steering wheel, this April at its plant in Austin, Texas, Chief Executive Elon Musk said during the company’s shareholder meeting on Thursday.
His comments about Cybercab came moments after shareholders overwhelmingly approved a compensation package for Musk that could be worth up to $1 trillion in company stock — the largest in corporate history.
“We have the first car that’s purpose-built for unsupervised, full self-driving, so it’s a robotaxi called the Cybercab — it doesn’t even have pedals or a steering wheel,” Musk said, adding that there won’t be any side mirrors either. “It’s highly optimized for the lowest cost per mile in a stand-alone operation and the production is done right here in this factory and we’ll start production in April of next year.”
Tesla has yet to prove its cars are capable of driving themselves at scale without a safety screen, despite years of promises.
Musk’s comments appear to be at odds with Tesla president Robyn Denholm, who recently he told Bloomberg the Cybercab will include a steering wheel and pedals as a backup plan. Tesla once planned to make a wheel-and-pedal version of the Cybercab, but Musk killed the idea and opted instead to make very stripped-down versions of its cheaper cars.
Musk continued with how the Cybercab will be produced, claiming the manufacturing line would have a 10-second cycle time — a huge speedup from the one-minute cycle time to assemble a Model Y. Musk said that could mean producing 2 to 3 million Cybercabs in a year.
“So these will be everywhere in the future,” he said.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
Tesla first revealed the Cybercab in October 2024 during its dazzling “We, Robot” event at Warner Bros. Studios. Discovery in California, with the promise of eventually selling the vehicles for personal use.
Since then, Tesla has launched a very bare-bones robotaxi service, but not with the proposed Cybercab. The service, which launched in June in parts of Austin, uses Model Y SUVs equipped with what Musk described as a new, “unsupervised” version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software. A Tesla employee sits in the passenger seat on these driverless rides.
Putting a Cybercab — or any vehicle — on the road without standard equipment like a steering wheel would require approval from federal regulators. Earlier this year, Amazon-backed Zoox managed to get an exemption, and even then it was only to show off its custom robotics on public roads. Zoox is still seeking an exemption that would allow it to operate a commercial robotaxi service.
The regulatory process for these exemptions is long and sticky. General Motors tried and failed to get approval for its custom-built Cruise Origin vehicle, for example. Waymo, the dominant robotaxi service provider in the US, has stuck with modified Jaguar I-Pace vehicles that still have traditional controls. Waymo is also developing a vehicle with Zeekr.
Musk didn’t seem fazed by the possibility that regulators could scuttle his plans, and thanked Waymo for “paving the way.”
“I believe we will be able to deploy all the Cybercabs we produce,” he said in response to a question from shareholders at the annual meeting. “Once it becomes, extremely normal in cities, it will become … regulators will have less and less reason to say no.”
