Tesla Should Start Selling Cybercabs by the End of the Year

• The Cybercab is a two-seater driverless vehicle that doesn’t feature pedals or a steering wheel.

• All Cybercabs produced are currently funnelled to Tesla’s robotaxi network in Austin, Texas.

• Starting late 2026, Tesla will also sell Cybercabs to private buyers in limited numbers.

A little over a month after it started operating a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, Tesla says its Cybercab driverless vehicle will be available for purchase by the end of 2026.

Indeed, the company says private customers will soon be able to purchase the vehicle, which doesn’t feature pedals or a steering wheel, something that had been previously teased by Elon Musk.

Despite this, it is clear that robotaxi fleets will remain the primary purpose of the Cybercab, with Tesla saying that only a small number of private sales will take place by the end of the year.

These sales will form a pilot run that will allow the automaker to monitor how private ownership of a fully driverless vehicle works outside of its immediate control.

This is unlikely to change in the near future, as Tesla is aiming to scale its robotaxi network over the coming years, which means it will require a large supply of Cybercabs and will therefore take priority over private buyers.

While the Cybercab is equipped with Tesla’s Full-Self Driving (FSD) system, it differs from current customer versions of the technology in a few key ways.

Indeed, the latest version of FSD currently available to drivers of the Model 3 and Model Y is V14.3, a level 2 system that requires constant driver supervision. In fact, the technology’s official name is Full Self-Driving (Supervised).

Like previous versions, FSD V14 is capable of driving the car from point to point on all types of roads in the vast majority of circumstances. This means that drivers only have to input an address into the car’s navigation system and then supervise to make sure the system is performing adequately.

One of the main advantages of FSD over competing systems such as GM’s Super Cruise and Ford’s Blue Cruise is that Tesla’s technology can function in areas that haven’t been previously mapped by the automaker, meaning it isn’t geofenced.

In comparison, Cybercabs uses a more advanced V15 version of FSD, but they are currently geofenced to mapped areas on account of the lack of driver controls.

In addition, Cybercabs also rely on a team of human employees who can monitor conditions remotely and close routes where something could cause problems for the robotaxi. These employees can also guide the Cybercab around unusual obstacles.

This is in line with how other robotaxi services like Waymo operate, but it remains to be seen how this will apply to privately owned vehicles.

Complete autonomy for the Cybercab is currently expected in the second quarter of 2027, when an unsupervised version of FSD should be released, according to internal targets.

While Tesla says to expect the first private deliveries of the Cybercab by the end of the year, there is still something that could prevent the company from doing so.

Indeed, the driverless vehicle is currently under review by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), who wants to make sure Tesla was correct in claiming that the Cybercab meets are relevant federal motor vehicle standards.

The doubt comes from the fact that the automaker dismissed some requirements, such as having a brake pedal and rear-view mirrors, as non-applicable to a driverless vehicle while the rules themselves haven’t yet been updated with the possibility of such vehicles existing.

Therefore, the NHTSA could determine that the Cybercab is not road legal in the United States if it decides that its current rules still have authority over driverless vehicles until a proposed updated set of regulations is adopted.