The Verge rides Tesla's steering-wheel-free Cybercab: comfortable cabin, hesitant driving, awkward stops

Tesla's two-seat Cybercab — a vehicle built with no steering wheel and no pedals — is now carrying paying passengers in Austin, Texas. The Verge spent close to an hour riding one over a weekend and delivered a split verdict: a cabin that feels genuinely designed around passengers rather than drivers, paired with autonomous software that works but does not yet inspire complete trust.

Paid rides are live in Austin

According to The Verge, the service operates inside a geofenced zone covering roughly 288 square miles of the Texas capital, and the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles lists 45 Cybercabs registered in the state. The launch builds on Tesla's earlier Robotaxi service, which started last year with autonomous Model Ys and drew mixed reviews. The Cybercab is a bigger bet: an entire vehicle conceived from the outset to drive itself, with nothing for a human to fall back on.

Capacity is thin for now. The Verge's reporter requested a first ride shortly after 6PM on a Friday and was quoted a wait of more than an hour for a sub-two-mile, $15 trip; the car arrived in about 45 minutes, and the following waits ran roughly 40 and 25 minutes. Across three trips, fares landed between $15 and $21, comparable to a basic Uber. The first ride lasted about 15 minutes.

A cabin built for passengers

Inside, two seats sit in a single row with a sparse gray interior and a large central touchscreen. That one display does everything: it renders the trip as a live 3D view including surrounding cars and pedestrians, starts the ride, and then switches to entertainment duty. The reporter linked Spotify, Netflix and YouTube accounts and played games through the built-in Arcade app using a PlayStation controller.

The butterfly doors open from a button in Tesla's app. Some passengers have reported the doors swinging out so fast they strike anyone standing nearby, though The Verge encountered no such problem. There are also no mirrors, which the reporter found disorienting from the driver-side seat — the ingrained habit of glancing over has nothing to land on as traffic passes.

On pure comfort, the Cybercab reportedly came out ahead of a Waymo ride taken the same day, with more legroom (helped by the absence of a wheel and pedals), better ride quality, a cleaner app and stronger in-cabin entertainment.

The software is competent, not confident

Nothing went seriously wrong, but the driving repeatedly called attention to itself. The windshield wipers switched on by themselves during a sunny, 95-degree afternoon. Midway through one trip, at a downtown underpass the reporter knows well, the car moved into a lane that would have forced a left turn onto the highway, then corrected course after several cars had already passed.

Drop-off behavior was the most consistent flaw. Riders posted videos over the weekend of Cybercabs stopping in the middle of busy roads, sometimes without pulling to the curb, and The Verge's reporter was let out at Austin's Barton Springs pool in a spot that partially blocked a narrow road while drivers queued behind it. These are not the dramatic lane-blocking failures seen from other autonomous vehicles, the reporter notes, but they are frequent enough to stand out — and unlikely to win over drivers who are already uneasy sharing roads with robotaxis. The car's gold paint and unconventional shape drew stares, including one motorist who rolled down a window to confirm there was truly no wheel.

Regulators are already circling

Almost immediately after paid rides began, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an Audit Query examining how Tesla self-certified that a vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals meets Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Zoox, whose purpose-built robotaxi also lacks conventional controls, went through a comparable review years ago and ultimately secured a formal exemption — a step Tesla skipped before launching. NHTSA said it does not comment on active investigations, and Tesla did not respond to The Verge's request for comment.

Why it matters

The Cybercab is the clearest test yet of whether purpose-built, control-free robotaxis can move from concept to paying service at scale. As The Verge observes, the coming weeks in Austin will shape how quickly Elon Musk can pursue his stated nationwide expansion, with vehicles already spotted in Orlando and parked outside Miami International Airport. Every awkward drop-off and hesitant lane change now happens under an open federal inquiry, and a single high-profile mistake could stall that timeline while rivals such as Zoox press ahead with their own purpose-built fleets. The hardware looks ready; the open question is whether the software, and the regulatory paperwork, catch up.