Tesla says it will sell the Cybercab, which has no steering wheel, to consumers by the end of this year

Tesla said on its third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 21 that it is trying to get the Cybercab, its two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals, into customers’ hands by the end of 2026. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of engineering, gave the target. The same call made clear that most Cybercabs will stay in company hands, which leaves the size and shape of any consumer sale an open question.

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The statement is a turn from how Tesla has described the car since its October 2024 unveiling, when it was shown as a vehicle for riders rather than owners. Tesla’s own investor materials could not be opened for this report, so the quotations below come from coverage of the call by Electrek and InsideEVs, with each attributed to the Tesla executive who spoke.

What Tesla said about selling the Cybercab

Electrek reports that Moravy said Tesla is trying to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year, and that Tesla will mainly deliver fully designed autonomous vehicles to customers, with the Cybercab first in line. InsideEVs recorded the same promise as a goal to reach customers “by the end of this year,” 2026. The two outlets word the quotation differently, so only the shared phrase appears in quotation marks here. Both describe a target, not a delivery date.

Musk has talked about a Cybercab price below $30,000 in the past, according to InsideEVs, but Electrek’s report notes that no price was given on this call, so the cost of a consumer Cybercab remains unstated. Electrek also reminds readers that Musk predicted in 2025 that robotaxis would reach half the U.S. population by the end of that year, a forecast that did not come true, since the service today covers small parts of six cities.

Who would own the cars

Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, told the call that the vast majority of Cybercabs will be Tesla-owned and operated as a transport service, according to InsideEVs, which quoted him as saying “The vast majority of the Cybercab stuff will be essentially Tesla-owned and transport as a service.” By that account, customers who do receive a Cybercab by year-end would be a small group, and InsideEVs likens them to beta testers. Production vehicles, the outlet says, are going into Tesla’s own robotaxi fleet, where a few hundred have been built for development and paid rides run in Austin, with Dallas planned.

That picture sits awkwardly beside a step Tesla took on Sept. 3, the day of its Cybercab launch event. Electrek found that Tesla was circulating a Robotaxi interest form with four categories, including Cybercab fleet vehicle purchasing, aimed at fleet buyers and infrastructure partners rather than individual owners of Tesla’s FSD software.

A car without a steering wheel

Tesla’s stated position is that the production Cybercab has no steering wheel, pedals or other driver controls. Electrek’s Sept. 11 report on a pre-production car photographed in Berkeley, California, found a Cybertruck steering wheel bolted to an exposed column, which the outlet read as a temporary rig because public-road test vehicles need a human driver. The same report says Tesla began building units without a wheel at Giga Texas earlier in 2026. Electrek also notes that Tesla hid a virtual joystick in the touchscreen that lets a person move the car around a depot, reported on Sept. 8, a control meant for depot moves rather than for driving on public roads.

The design raises a practical question the call did not answer. InsideEVs says the lack of a steering wheel leaves open how a private owner could drive the car at all, and notes that Tesla is under federal investigation for operating a vehicle without some federally required equipment. It also points to Zoox, which received NHTSA approval to offer rides in a vehicle without typically required controls.

The software gap behind the sales promise

A customer-owned Cybercab would depend on self-driving software that Tesla has not yet released for private cars. On the same call, Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of AI, moved the target for unsupervised FSD in customer vehicles to the second quarter of 2027, and Electrek reports he described the first step as owners adding their cars to Tesla’s managed Robotaxi fleet, with unsupervised operation confined to existing Robotaxi zones.

Electrek’s results coverage adds that Tesla said Robotaxi reached nearly 2 million cumulative unsupervised miles by the end of the third quarter, about a month after the Cybercab joined the Austin fleet, with service in six U.S. metropolitan areas and small geofences. Read against that record, a year-end consumer delivery looks like a limited first batch, not a general on-sale date, and Tesla has not said how many cars it has in mind or what a buyer would be allowed to do with one. The company’s own shareholder letter, which Electrek links in its third-quarter results report, was not readable for this article, so the wording of any formal commitment remains unconfirmed.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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