By Chris Kirkham and Akash Sriram
Sept 3 (Reuters) – Tesla will unveil its two-seater Cybercab at an event in Texas on Thursday, offering a closer look at the autonomous vehicle that CEO Elon Musk has said is key to transforming the company into a dominant force in driverless vehicles.
The electric-vehicle maker has a limited “robotaxi” ridehailing service with a network of autonomous Model Ys, some with human safety monitors and some without. Over time, it intends to make the no-steering-wheel Cybercab the main driverless vehicle model operating within a larger robotaxi network.
Apart from christening it the “Cybercab Launch Event”, Tesla has given few details on the convention. Cybercab engineer Eric Earley on X said the event would begin at 5:45 pm ET on Thursday in downtown Austin and that details would follow for those invited.
Musk has promised for years that driverless Teslas are imminent, including at a similar Cybercab unveiling in October 2024 at a Los Angeles-area movie studio, but Tesla’s robotaxi rollout has fallen short of his targets, and some analysts in recent months have flagged the slower-than-expected growth.
Since launching a small pilot in Austin, Texas, in June 2025, Tesla has expanded its robotaxi service to a handful of other cities in Texas and Florida. Service is often limited to outlying areas that are simpler to navigate than urban centers.
Analysts and investors see driverless vehicles as key to Tesla’s future and a central underpinning of its $1.4 trillion market value, far higher than any other automaker. Tesla’s core electric-vehicle business faces intense pressure from global competition, particularly Chinese EV makers.
Musk has said the Cybercab will eventually be Tesla’s largest-volume vehicle, supplying a global network of robotaxis and allowing individual owners to add or remove their vehicles from a Tesla-managed driverless ride-hailing fleet when they are not using the cars. Tesla said production began in April 2026, though Musk cautioned in April that initial production “will be very slow.”
It is unclear how quickly Tesla will be able to deploy the vehicles.
Federal regulations limit the number of vehicles any manufacturer can sell without a steering wheel and pedals. Manufacturers can deploy an unlimited number of such vehicles for testing, but that would limit Tesla’s ability to collect fares.
In California, a key market, Tesla does not have permits to operate a robotaxi service or to test driverless vehicles without a safety driver who can take over in the front seat.
In July 2025, Musk said the company’s robotaxi network would expand at a “hyper-exponential rate” and be available to half the population of the U.S. by the end of 2025.
Those predictions didn’t pan out, and Musk and his executives have struck a more cautious tone in recent months, saying the company is taking a careful approach to avoid injuries or fatalities.
Reuters tested out the robotaxi service in the weeks after the Dallas and Houston launches earlier this year and found long wait times, with sometimes no availability at all.
On three occasions when a reporter managed to get a ride in Dallas, the robotaxi wouldn’t drop him at his downtown destination within Tesla’s advertised service area. Each time, it left him about a 15-minute walk away.
Tesla had 420 autonomous vehicles registered in Texas as of Wednesday evening, according to state records, including 45 Cybercab vehicles. Earlier on Wednesday, state records showed Tesla had registered 314 vehicles. Alphabet’s Waymo, the current U.S. leader in driverless taxis, has 988 vehicles registered in the state.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
