Tesla says Cybercab employee trips at its Texas factory will begin soon. The announcement came with a gold Cybercab clip, butterfly doors up and without a steering wheel or pedals, on the road itself, Mashable reports.
Pay attention to the time. Tesla has said the rides “will begin soon,” not that they have, and several outlets have already reported otherwise.
That’s the whole announcement. No word on the route, fleet size, or whether the rides will be on public roads or entirely on Tesla’s own property.
What are we actually looking at?
Take the frame and a car drives itself around the parking lot. Autonomous vehicles have been doing it on private land for over a decade.
Giga Texas is a huge site with real internal roads, so an actual campus shuttle would mean something. There will be no loop on the outgoing lot.
Tesla did not say which one it was. Breaking the announcement, Electrek concluded that it can’t say either.
What is definitely not is what people expect. Cybercab has yet to join Tesla’s fleet of paid robot taxis in Austin, which still operate in Model Y vehicles.
The problem is not the hardware
It is worth being fair to Tesla here, because the production is really impressive. Its boxless assembly process works and the Cybercab is the most efficient vehicle the company has ever made.
The Giga Texas lot reportedly has more than a hundred ready-made Cybercabs in stock. Tesla can do these things.
The bottleneck is software, and it’s brutal. Without a steering wheel and pedals, there is no deceleration, so if the self-driving system fails, the car simply cannot be steered.
It can survive at a cruising speed in a car park. It’s a different proposition on the public street.
A record so far
Tesla’s autonomy numbers remain elusive. TNW reported that Austin robotaxis a crash about every 57,000 miles, about four times worse than the human average.
The scale gap is still stark. There is a Tesla 42 cars have been approved for self-driving in Texas, compared to Waymo’s 577this is more a matter of public record than opinion.
However, progress is real and clearly worth mentioning. Tesla began engineering road tests of the production Cybercab, a passenger-seat safety monitor, in late June in Austin, and now Robotaxis operate in Miami without any safety monitors.
The story that matters
Here’s what’s hidden beneath the video. On July 9, two days before the clip appeared, the NHTSA administrator said the agency would “absolutely” consider repealing the rule requiring driverless vehicles to have steering wheels and manual controls.
This is the limitation that keeps cybercab in the legal gray zone. It’s difficult to make a car without a control system comply with federal standards written on the assumption that a person might need to drive it.
Demolition is already underway. It’s in Washington proposed reducing the brake pedal requirement for autonomous vehiclesand does now pull the steering wheel.
Tesla’s strategy suddenly makes sense in this regard. He flatly refused to apply for individual exemptions limited to 2,500 vehicles a year, betting instead that the rules would act on their own.
So far, that bet is paying off. Musk has made it clear that how Cybercab will scale is not exceptions, but broad regulatory approval.
Why is there a park video
A company mass-producing a car it can’t yet legally or reliably field needs to act. The golden Cybercab passing by the factory is doing something, moving.
Not exactly dishonest. It’s a smaller stage than the reaction suggests, and Tesla conveniently left the frame vague.
The rigorous test is unchanged. Buy a Cybercab that carries paid passengers on public roads in Austin with no one in the front seat.
Until then, the most impressive thing that has happened to this car is not being towed in a car park. It is written in the Federal Register.
