Elon Musk launched dozens of self-driving Tesla Cybercabs without steering wheels or brake pedals onto the streets of Austin on Thursday, wagering that Americans will overcome their discomfort with rides offering no manual controls.
The gold-colored vehicles, designed so passengers cannot intervene in an emergency, mark a further step for Tesla as the company prepares to expand the service to additional cities. Tesla shares rose more than 5 percent on the day amid hopes the new taxis will gain traction.
“No steering wheel, no pedals,” Tesla posted on X ahead of the launch. Musk later shared an image of a giant Cybercab hovering over the Austin skyline and wrote, “A Storm of Cybercabs.”
An invitation-only event was scheduled for later Thursday. Austin has operated a Tesla robotaxi service since June 2025, initially with safety drivers and later with unsupervised vehicles that still retained steering wheels and pedals. The company now operates more than 200 unsupervised robotaxis across cities in Texas and Florida, according to monitoring site RobotaxiTracker. Rival Waymo fields more than 4,000 such vehicles in 14 cities.
Tesla relies solely on cameras for its autonomous system, unlike Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox, which combine cameras with radar and lidar. Public acceptance remains a hurdle: a February Pew Research Center survey found seven in 10 U.S. adults were “not too” or “not at all” comfortable riding in a driverless car.
Musk eventually aims to enable full self-driving software on hundreds of thousands of existing Teslas so owners can rent them out as taxis. Regulators in the United States and Europe, however, continue to scrutinize the technology’s safety record.
