Tesla began offering paid rides in its two-seat Cybercab on the streets of Austin, Texas, marking the first commercial deployment of a production vehicle built with no steering wheel, pedals, or mirrors. Roughly 1,000 of the gold-colored, gull-winged vehicles were added to the city’s roads as part of the launch.
The celebration was short-lived. Within hours, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened Audit Query AQ26002, a formal review of how Tesla certified the Cybercab as compliant with federal vehicle safety standards. Under U.S. rules, automakers are permitted to self-certify that their vehicles meet federal requirements without seeking advance approval, and regulators say they want to examine whether Tesla was correct to treat certain standards — ones written with human drivers in mind — as simply not applicable to a car with no manual controls.
Importantly, the audit is not evaluating how well the Cybercab drives itself; it is focused squarely on the paperwork and technical justification behind Tesla’s compliance claims. The review comes as NHTSA separately expands its scrutiny of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software across roughly 3.2 million vehicles, including unsupervised robotaxi operations already running in Texas and Florida.
Texas’ light-touch regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles allowed Tesla to put Cybercabs into commercial service without state-level, vehicle-specific approval, leaving federal regulators as the primary check on the design. Observers have drawn comparisons to a similar audit NHTSA once ran on Amazon’s Zoox, which eventually secured a formal safety-standard exemption before scaling up commercial service — a path Tesla may now have to consider for the Cybercab as well.