Big LoL
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't NHTSA currently limit every OEM to the production of only 2500 vehicles without driver controls per year? If so, then why isn't anyone in the EV blogosphere covering that point? I did a google search earlier today for the weekly thread checking on this, which returned the following: >Yes, there is currently a limit of 2,500 vehicles per manufacturer annually for autonomous vehicles (AVs) without traditional driver controls (steering wheels, pedals, or mirrors) allowed to operate on U.S. roads. This cap is enforced through the NHTSA's "Part 555" exemption process, which allows for temporary relief from certain Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. >Key Details Regarding the 2500 Limit: >Purpose: The limit enables manufacturers to test and deploy self-driving cars, such as robotaxis, that do not have conventional controls. >Current Status: As of early 2026, this 2,500-vehicle cap remains in place, though it has been criticized by industry leaders as too restrictive for meaningful commercial deployment. >Proposed Changes: Proposals in Congress have discussed raising this limit significantly—potentially to as many as 90,000 vehicles annually—to accelerate the deployment of autonomous technologies. >Requirement: To use this exemption, manufacturers must prove to NHTSA that the vehicles are safe. Clearly there's pressure from Musk, and possibly Waymo, to attempt to lift that limit. Without doing so, Tesla won't be able to start mass production of these vehicles. I think someone mentioned in another post that Musk had claimed Cybercab production would be incredibly slow to start due to manufacturing challenges, but then they may have been confused and that was said about Optimus robots. There's nothing complex about Cybercab production; the only reason production would be restricted is if Tesla didn't have government approval to exempt more than what they're currently limited to... 2500 per year. Not that increasing this limit does Tesla much good right now... when they haven't shown any evidence their cars can safely operate fully autonomously, which is a requirement for exemption. Begging the question, if Tesla hasn't proven to NHTSA that the vehicles are safe, how did they get the exemption to produce even one of these vehicles? Unless of course this Cybercab has the controls installed; contrary to the headline.
Was it intentional, or did they just forget to install the wheel?
Someone obviously will be remote driving it.
It's all corporate theater. It doesn't matter if these things ever hit the streets. The picture has been taken and the pressitiutes are eating it up. It will all be forgotten in a week.
The steering wheel is available via monthly subscription.
Everything this company does is for propaganda. With all the failures they’re having, media only paints them as green.
They literally just quietly updated an accident that happened 6+ months ago to include it resulted in hospitalization....
Just more Headline Engineering! Hey, look at our Robotaxi assembly line! (Just don't ask us anything about the fact that we can't legally use these anywhere outside of tightly controlled testing under special permission.)
Yep. Removing steering wheel is easy. Way to go Elon !!!
FUCK IT! WE'LL DO IT LIVE!
guys it'll be totally fine elon said it's all good to go no worries
Not for long, because the production model supposedly needs a special wireless charger and doesn’t even have a physical charging port - unless they made a u-turn on that.
In 9 or 10 years we will read about how fields of never uaed Cybercabs are getting crushed and shredded so they can be replaced with ones built with hardware model 42, which can run FSD version 69 or higher. "We should have Cybercab 42 available for 50% of the population by the end of 2036! Built by Optimus!" (Cause, you know, Optimus put on the valve stem caps.)
100%. This is a stock pump amidst a falling stock price. Musk himself stated recently that mass production wouldn't start until April, so this is nothing more than a test unit for tooling and training purposes. AFAIK, they don't even have NHTSA approval to produce these, which will be necessary to start mass production... and for which, AFAIK, Tesla is limited to producing only 2500 of these per year, unless that regulation is increased. Even if they increase it, my understanding is they're only trying to increase it to 90k - 100k per year... begging the question of how Tesla's supposed to double the number of robotaxis on the roads every month, getting up to around his 1 million taxi claim. Unless of course his plan was to do it with cars with driver controls... aka Model Ys... or he was once again confidently lying to investors. Why boost the stock now? Maybe exit liquidity. Prop up the price so major investors can exit. In other words, blatant stock manipulation / insider trading. Not much can be done about that... Musk bought himself into the US administration.
Gonna love when they lose the Internet connection and strand someone in the middle lane of massive highway ..
Perhaps it fell off. This happens regularly enough with the rest of the wheels.
I don’t think safety is a relevant consideration for the current administration.
Might as well start mass producing the Optimus robots that don’t work (and no one wants) while they’re at it.
I am expecting an extra extra extra long extension cord. Because of course Leon made the other stuff up.
That so-called "unboxing" manufacturing method is just an excuse to slow-roll and not commit to capital expenditure for tooling. Probably mostly use spare Model S parts. They'll drive a few around Austin for some pictures and claim thousands by the end of the summer, and nothing substantial will change, again.
You still coming by to complete the purchase on this bridge? I may have other offers.
The train-wreck continues - lol. Expect Tesla stock to go up again
I am concerned about the general public due to Teslas historical dishonesty
“machines there full of kids” (movie 43)
it’s in the mandatory follow car
Is it every one combined is 2500 or per manufacturer?
The "deep state" aka anyone in government past one term who has an agenda regardless of the administration, still exists in many places and operates without massive influence that the current executive seems to have over most things especially the judiciary.
Did Jesus take the wheel?
Failed autonomy aside, I'd be embarrassed to show up somewhere in that ugly thing.
Tesla is hoping to get the law passed which allows automakers to make more than 2500 cars. realistically tesla does not need 1 million robotaxis Waymo has only 2500 and they make quite a huge dent. Tesla really only needs 10K and uber drivers in big cities will feel it
yes and yes
someone should make art of the "cybercab" follows by the follow car with someone in a full vr setup and another steering wheel :D that would be banger.
Help me understand: Tesla AI5 hardware won’t be ready until mid-2027, maybe even late 2027 or 2028 - given Tesla’s usual delays. The Cybercab therefore has to use FSD HW4/AI4. Why would the current 2026 Cybercab work/drive better than a Tesla Model Y with similar HW4? We know that Teslas still generate far too many crashes with the current HW/4AI4: “Tesla ‘Robotaxi’ adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month — 4x worse than humans” https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-crashes-austin-month-4x-worse-than-humans/ And these numbers are for a tightly controlled area in Austin, TX. most of them with a human safety monitor in the car. Imagine a Cybercab driving anywhere and everywhere - without any momitoring (as Elon once promised..) PS: Speaking of everywhere. Why can Teslas STILL NOT drive autonomously in Las Vegas in simple, one-way Boring tunnels!? This should be one of the easiest deployments (IF FSD really worked on current HW4!)
Not solving self driving and removing the steering wheel and pedals is literally a 21st century version of putting your cart before the horses.
More Cyberjunk from Tesla.
As an engineer - I'm happy when I get 1 vehicle to test with, what the fuck are they doing with 2500?
Yeah but as we can see now, the stock is detached from the company, and Musk. It has a life of its own, just like crypto. It's just a bubble waiting for it's time to bust open.
Dude knows what's coming https://imgur.com/a/Bz9cvt6
A 2 door taxis. Talk about stupid ideas
probably to meet a contractual obligation
not getting in this johnnycab ripoff shit, not a chance! elon can remote pilot you off a cliff in these (and in the regular tesla models). maybe he can remote burn down the car when its in your garage too?
Per manufacturer
I bet is a empty carcass.
A great steering wheel that doesn’t fly out the window while you are driving!
Felon Musk managed the Orange Shitgibbon election, so all laws/rules are gone.
Corporate puffery!!
They used the wrong glue. Could have happened to any of us.
So, more cyber death mobiles on the road? I thought the moron was just shutting down everything?
Tesla will just hire some of the same firms in India that drive Waze cars "autonomously" and bam, we have "full self driving"...
Stock boost now because they need the SpaceX IPO to happen and a falling TSLA would not help.
It reminds me of the AI-generated compiler that was recently announced. In the announcement, they admit that it often doesn't work on even the simplest programs. But they got the headline they wanted. One of the worst things about being a Musk employee for me would to be forced to clap and cheer when anything happens. Like spacex blowing up a rocket. It always seems weird to hear cheering when one of their rockets crashes. It's like they are all short the stock or something.
‘Production’ unit? Total B.S., and so obviously a publicity stunt. All those factory workers forced into a photo op with the one, and only, Cybercab ever coming off the ‘assembly line.’ Does anyone, even the most rabid Elon fanboy, actually fall for this?
>Waymo has only 2500 and they make quite a huge dent. I must have missed a big announcement - is Waymo worth $1.3 trillion?
Not true!!! A TEAM of people will be remote driving each "robotaxi".
Elon is going to stuff servers in these cabs and launch them into space as datacenters. Nobody understands how disruptive this is!!! TSLA won't be able to build them fast enough to even keep up with Xitter's CSAM needs.
They can produce as many as they want, the limitation is on registering them for use on roads.
Mission accomplished
So would this chassis be what they were going to use for the Model 2? Brilliant gambit sir!
Please don't cite ai
The trick in blowing up a rocket is, you get paid whether it blows up or not, but if you blow it up lower to the ground it takes less fuel, so it’s more profit
Tesla seems to be taking the “damned the consequences” approach. Just like the Trump admin. Do first, ask later…if they even ask at all. With Trump admin I’m sure they’ll be very favorable to Tesla doing whatever they want, no matter how dangerous to the public. And there will be no recourse for anyone killed by these things
“We’ll solve autonomy and update the software… next year.”
Hello - I’m from Space X and we are looking for young engineers that think outside the box. Would be free for an interview this week? Engineering qualifications are preferable but if you have a dodgy physics degree you might not have completed that’s fine too.
The steering wheel is coming sometime next year
It won’t be forgotten in a week. Next week they’ll make two, and Musk will tweet about doubling production every week. Then it’ll be forgotten.
It can sit and rot on the lot with all of the CyberTrucks.
Wait… the existing cyber cabs have steering wheels? I thought that very feature was a big thing when Elon first presented them…
Ah, maybe true! I'll have to look up the exact language. Quick google search didn't pull up NHTSA 's 2500 limit documentation.
Has the North Korean rocket scientist expat pool dried up?
I’m confused - i thought optimus was building the car. Why all those humans involved
I need to see A Day in the Life of Elon, being driven around in one of these for at least 4 hours non-stop, before I would even think about letting anyone I care about near one of these.
How about a laggy Starlink connection to someone in India or Southeast Asia who is actually controlling about 12 of these out on the road at the same time.
The BlackBerry PlayBook of electric vehicles.
In a brilliant move it only seats 2.
Behind all those smiles: "we are sooooo fucked."
SaaS
Those off shore folks are going to be working hard as fuck
you know how you might actually write game inputs in a chat, because you didn't properly tab out of a window? that, but for deadly 2 ton vehicles :D "oh damn there was no child in front of the 4th car, but there was one in front of the 2. car and i thought i pressed 4 to switch to that one, but didn't work... oh well i guess another child gone"
ROFLMAO...sure. robocabs driven by someone in a cubica.l
I tried getting ChatGPT and Grok to write short pieces of code and both have huge problems understanding what I want it to do, and both haven't even written code that's actually wrong syntactically.
Now Elron is going to claim he uninvented the wheel.
This will end tragically.
It's called testing in prod
Given the whole point of the cab IS the steering wheel, it would seem this whole exercise is a joke. Just look at a "yard tractor" it's only a cab big enough for an operator and the minimum parts to make it go. Without the cab the power unit could be placed under the trailer making the whole thing more compact. At the same time it would seem solving autonomous yard tractors that could pull and spot trailers and they never go far from home so their doesn't need to be a charging network, just one or two in the places it works.
Heck no, they are the R&D branch of the North Korean military.
More vaporware!!!
Is this like the "automated delivery" from factory to customer stunt they pulled then never heard from again?
Kind of worried about targeted attacks to block their network access.
I’d give you an award if I had one 😂
WaaS.
Y(oke)aaS
By a fortunate coincidence, Austin Auto Salvage is just across the highway from the Gigafactory. So the Cybercabs ought to be able to drive themselves over there without too much difficulty. Roughly a mile and a half, with two left turns - surely they can do that autonomously.
I have to keep reminding myself that Elon is not bound by “regulations” or “laws,” except perhaps in China.
Tesla robotaxis also frequently make large dents…
Fake it til you make it
They were cutting cost. Now they can’t afford to have steering wheels
Dont worry, they will probably work exclusively with Starlink! Just wait til it goes into a parking garage then :)
That would be funny as hell, because most airports have obstructed views of the sky. Well I guess it belongs to the airport now, wonder if the cops will ticket the Tesla for blocking a loading zone?
I mean didnt he claim that when he came out with the steering Yoke that literally no one liked?
That wasn't an original idea either. There have been various designs for decades involving different controls, but they don't make it past the concept stage.
It fell off because they used the wrong glue
“You go ahead. I’ll take the next non-Tesla cab”.
Yup... Yokes work in airplanes because you don't need to turn them past 90 degrees in either direction.. how someone thought that would be a good idea for a land vehicle that the wheel needs to be turned a full 360 or beyond ... Lol
Wait, first to roll off the production line? How many is being made besides the first one?
Yep more smoke and mirrors.
Look who is president. GOAT grifter.
The answer is simple. Grift.
I remember the cult going crazy when they delivered one (just ONE ☝️) to a customer autonomously. Haven’t heard a thing about autonomous deliveries since. How many times are these people going to fall for Lucy’s football?
True story. SaaS is an Australia company that makes steering wheels. [https://www.shopsaas.com/steering-wheels/saas-steering-wheels/](https://www.shopsaas.com/steering-wheels/saas-steering-wheels/)
I’ve actually had some decent success with Claude Code. It removes some of the drudgery of coding particular things. It is not a cure all but I’ve been pretty amazed in a lot of cases.
Yeah. I’m sure they can build one single car. It’s a whole 'nother thing to mass produce it at scale.
Yeah, whatever happened to the whompy wheels?
Here it comes now! file:///var/mobile/Library/SMS/Attachments/fb/11/15E97CDA-C5EA-4F78-9F12-77BC22DAAB71/tmp.gif
You need to push more hot air into the balloon before it hits the ground.
It will be mass produced just like the "250K units per year" of Cybertruck. No one needs these cybercabs. They're not safe and there is no demand. He will pump out a few K and force SpaceX to buy them.
There are pedos sitting in the office. Do you think they give a fuck about limts and enforcements?
This is brilliant! The steering wheel does so much damage to a driver in a crash, removing it will give the driver a better chance of surviving the FSD crash.
PS: More delays for FSD AI5 are probable, Elon keeps contradicting himself on its progress: Jan 2026: Elon Musk says Tesla ‘almost done’ with AI5 design, 6 months after saying it was ‘finished’ https://electrek.co/2026/01/17/elon-musk-tesla-almost-done-with-ai5-design-6-months-after-saying-finished/
Just recycling the Hyperloop scam.
They can be helpful, but they don't replace humans and a human really does need to go over the code to see it's right.
Production isn't the problem. The problem is the cars don't work! Without a true fully-functional FSD system, this is essentially like setting loose and angry monkey wiith a machine gun. It reckless endangerment.
I saw this on the street in Austin this week. Only caught the back quarter and rear end so not sure if there was a human in it.
China's been one of Musk's largest benefactors, giving him and Tesla everything they could ever ask for. Sounds like there's also some Chinese investors into SpaceX that Musk was trying to keep on the down low. Tencent, with the permission of the Chinese government, bailed Tesla out in 2017, then a little over a year later there was suddenly an agreement between Tesla and China to build their Shanghai plant... which I'm pretty sure China took care of the entire planning, construction, equipping, hiring, etc for that plant. A massive freebie. Throw in subsidies, lack of waste regulations, etc... This makes sense for Musk. He's not loyal to any country. He's loyal to himself and his own plans. He thinks the world is his video game, and he insists on being the best gamer. Grimes knew this... she wrote a song about it! lol
Not sure why you got downvoted. Technically they don't need a million cars to make a dent, albeit, 2500 isn't a whole lot that'll make huge returns for the company, but presuming the claims about huge profitability are true (doubtful), it could generate a lot of profit. Especially if that number doubled every year. I believe there are an estimated 2 million taxi/ride share drivers in the US, and if an autonomous could operate 24/7, then they could potentially replace as many as 2 drivers each, so 2500 isn't a huge dent in the overall sector. Now that I say that, it's also possible that Tesla could ship these units abroad at higher amounts if they got regulatory approval to operate in other nations. They're currently attempting to get approval in the Netherlands. \_\_\_ I could be wrong, but I don't believe it's a law that set the 2500 car limit. It was a federal regulation set by NHTSA, so I believe all Musk would need is for NHTSA to change the regulation... which given that he bought himself a President, I imagine is likely to happen. I'm not sure why they haven't yet... maybe because Tesla doesn't actually have an autonomous taxi capable of large scale roll out yet, and thus by keeping the restriction in place, they're stopping other companies, like Waymo, from rapidly expanding before Tesla can get in the game. It's also very possible that this is nothing more than a stock pump trick. If Tesla's autonomous taxis aren't close to ready yet, but Musk keeps hyping them as being nearly ready to go, then by showing Cybercab production lines operating, and the threat of increasing the limit to allow Tesla to start Cybercab mass production (whether they're planning to or not), it'll keep the stock price pumped. If they were to increase the limit, and Tesla still wasn't able to expand their fleet, it would show that Tesla isn't being limited by regulation, but by their own progress on their autonomous vehicles.
What is the market for these? Where can a car with no controls be licensed?
How his Stans don’t see he is deeply compromised is a marvel. Do they honestly think that he isn’t fearful of PRC actions to affect his Tesla factory? Your answer says it better. Thank you.
I'm sure he has a lot of stans, but also a lot of his stans are just investors trying to get rich quick off his companies. I've seen some really cult like investors in my days, not just for Tesla. People thinking they need to rush out and buy all a company's products to support their investment. And the more they buy, the more monetarily and emotionally invested they become. I imagine a lot of the investors are people that piled into Tesla after the pandemic as brand new traders, getting Robinhood accounts for the first time, throwing their life savings into Tesla stock... and they got massively rewarded for it with that \~1000% run up from the pandemic lows in less than a year. A lot came in before that too, making even more money as the stock continuously got more and more overinflated. At least until late 2021. Then the stock just went sideways for 4.5 years...
I regularly use ChatGPT to good effect. But I also have very specific instructions and can frame the questions with basic understanding of the language. I find you need to be able to communicate as between developers. If you don’t know the terminology, or haven’t clearly framed issues or cases, it might not work as well. It builds off your prompt. I’m sure if I tried to use it for fixing a car (something I don’t know a lot about), I’d get bad output because I don’t know the terms and can’t accurately describe the problems.
If you can’t do Austin, Texas… that’s the absolute best case scenario for a self-driving car. Very rarely is there snow, heavy rain, ice, fog. No narrow streets, no complicated double-lane roundabouts and so on. If you can’t do Austin with a nearly perfect record, you don’t have a shot with much of the rest of the world.
Tesla also has a little trick of disabling self-driving just moments before a crash, so it won’t register as a self-driving accident in their stats. 50 milliseconds before hitting a wall: “whoah, you better take over - I’m out. Oh, look what you did!”
*"When it builds thousands of vehicles with no steering wheel and the software doesn’t work, there is no retrofit."* Actually they could put back in a steering wheel and pedals like a video game setup, after all it's not mechanical steering. Legally they would still need a mechanical brake pedal, I believe. But the steering wheel and accelerator could be a plug and play module. Or better yet a suction cup play one to stick to the dash like Maggie Simpson uses.
Seems foolish…
I think the idea is that it has no human driver…
Considering where in the picture they placed it, they can't be that proud of it. I mean, when they showed off the first Polestar 4, it was atleast in the middle of the image and visible, with more of them in the back. [https://media.polestar.com/global/en/media/pressreleases/675432/related/676745](https://media.polestar.com/global/en/media/pressreleases/675432/related/676745)
Based on how the picture was setup, it looks like they're intentionally trying to obfuscate it. The passenger door is partially open and the glare from the windshield blocks any images of the interior getting out.
Sure, that is how mechanical things work We are weeks away from 50K CyberSemis
That is the joke...
Musk might not be personally popular anymore. But there is no question he has created avenues to new frontiers in our modern world. Still believe he is one of a few in the last 50 years.
Early on, Musk was excessively rewarded for primarily inconsequential companies he built. He was propped up by Daddy's money and Daddy's friends. I mean... just look at Paypal. Musk had very little actual involvement with the end product that was sold to Ebay, but on account that he was friends with Thiel and merged his shit company with Thiel's company, briefly took the reigns as CEO, was quickly forced out from his position because he sucked at it but held onto his shares, then was quickly rewarded with the sale of the company to ebay, making him excessively rich for doing almost nothing. This whole ordeal only took a few years. A few years of doing almost nothing and suddenly making $180 million as a result. Mind boggling. Afterwards, Musk started jumping on other peoples ideas and ran with them with the help of massive levels of government assistance and funding, or regulations that forced their competitors to transfer large sums of money into their coffers. I mean, Tesla alone has likely pulled in a good $30 billion in tax credits and regulatory credits by now. The US government bailed them out in 2009, massively subsidized their factories, then massively subsidized their end products. Tesla nearly went bankrupt again in 2017 until China stepped in to bail them out, subsidizing their operations in China ever since (after building Tesla a plant in Shanghai in 2019) SpaceX certainly has seen some achievements, built on the back of massive levels of subsidies, and direct NASA intervention with providing the company with R&D that Americans spent a cumulative $600 billion or so building up over the preceding decades. Musk is a leach. And this claim that he/Tesla were pushing EVs before other companies is also a myth. Other companies were working on EVs, but EVs didn't take off until battery breakthroughs reduced the price of the cells. Tesla just happened to be in the right place at the right time, with their only possible way of surviving being to rapidly and massively increase volumes and sales. It was such a high risk that even Musk was trying to sell off Tesla in 2013 to Google, and then again to Apple in 2017. He was so confident that he tried to sell the company off multiple times. And those are the attempts we know about. Every single one of Musk's major companies that succeeded survives on massive levels of government subsidies. Every single one of them. Even SolarCity relied on massive government subsidies and investment, and yet Musk and his family still drove that company into the ground. Twitter, non-subsidized, Musk drove it into the ground, forcing xAI to buy it out. xAI... even with lucrative government contracts, it was still losing money hand over fist, forcing SpaceX to buy it out, where its financials could be hidden under the massively subsidized SpaceX. Did you know that Musk didn't come up with the idea for Starlink? He stole it from Greg Wyler, the founder of WorldVu, who brought it to Musk's attention in 2014. Ironically, Starlink is the primary reason SpaceX needed and benefited from re-usable rockets. Wyler decided to go with another rocket company to implement his idea, so Musk rushed the construction of a Starlink satellite factory to beat Wyler to the punch. Even Neuralink was an idea he copied from his friends' company, NeuroVigil. xAI was copied from openAI... which ironically he did help start. Seeing openAIs success (even if they're now losing money hand over fist), he essentially just leaned on his immense wealth to rapidly build a competitor, fueled by the AI rage. Tesla's share price is enormous to be sure, but based on what exactly? Vaporware and stock manipulation. Not based on any real deliverables and incredible financial results. Because of Tesla's massive over valuation and SpaceX's massive over valuation, he was able to take advantage of the financial system and tax systems to avoid paying his fair due, while further boosting his net worth by pumping his stock.
Ironically, because of that huge amount of money the Paypal founders made from the sale to ebay, nearly every single one of them has gone on to massively increase their wealth and become billionaires. Are they all genius visionaries, or are they all going off the same playbook of venture capitalism? And to be clear, while Tesla certainly innovated, likely more out of desperation than anything else... they really haven't even made a dent in global emissions. They've produced like 9 million cars over 23 years. That's less than Toyota produces in a year, and doesn't even scratch the surface of the nearly 1.4 billion gas cars in use on the planet today.
Obviously you have researched it much more than I have. But I do not think the precursor to PayPal was an “inconsequential” company. And if subsidies are a sign of negative development, then let’s look at the 100’s of Billions provided to Oil and Gas companies who invent nothing, just holes in the ground, and pollute the environment. I am not a fan of his current politics, but I do think he has “created” companies that have advanced society. I.e. the boring company and neuralink etc. I strongly wish he stayed consistent with his goal of renewable energy as the future. Just my 2 cents.
Watch out for these on the roadways. Don’t trust anything musk says or does
1. Sell hype. 2. Stonks go up. 3. Fail to deliver in every aspect seveal years later than promised. 4. Stonks go down a little. 5. Do drugs. 6. Sell more hype. 7. Repeat. Now you know fElons get rich quick technique.
The future’s coming FAST.
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