Tesla’s order page for the Cybercab shows a price of $29,990 and, just below it, a pre-checked box for a $299 monthly Autonomy Subscription. The car has no steering wheel and no pedals, so without that subscription Tesla says it cannot be operated at all.
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Invitations to order began going out on Friday, Nov. 13. Delivery is slated for December 2026 in Austin, Texas, and only customers Tesla has invited can place an order.
A $29,990 price, a $1,000 deposit and an invitation list
Electrek’s Fred Lambert reported on Nov. 13 that Tesla is inviting “select customers” to buy a Cybercab for personal use at $29,990 before taxes, with a $1,000 non-refundable deposit required to order and with the announcement made from Tesla’s Robotaxi account on X, including screenshots of the order page and the invitation email, according to his report. Teslarati’s Joey Klender described the sale as limited to invited customers rather than an open order page, and Not a Tesla App reported that Tesla’s email tells buyers an advisor will follow up after an order is placed.
The car as listed seats two, carries a 21-inch center touchscreen and offers 20.1 cubic feet of cargo space. Elon Musk promised a Cybercab “below $30,000” when he unveiled it in 2024, and Lambert wrote that the sticker price technically meets that promise while leaving the monthly fee out of the arithmetic. Cargo space is the one number Not a Tesla App set against an existing car: 20.1 cubic feet in the Cybercab, compared with 24.1 cubic feet of combined frunk and trunk space in the Model 3. Before the personal-use sale, Tesla’s only buying route was a fleet purchasing interest form for businesses, which it launched in September.
The $299 Autonomy Subscription and the five-year math
The subscription is pre-checked on the order page at $299 a month, with the first month included in the purchase. Tesla’s order page states that the subscription and regular vehicle maintenance are both required to operate the car, and the invitation email repeats that subscriptions are required for operation. Teslarati noted that the missing steering wheel and pedals leave an owner dependent on Tesla’s software and service network.
At $299 a month the fee comes to $3,588 a year. Lambert estimated about $47,600 over five years for a two-seater, before insurance, maintenance, taxes and charging, which matches the $29,990 price plus 59 billed months after the included first month. That total is Electrek’s estimate, not a figure Tesla publishes. Lambert argued the fee is hard to justify unless a buyer’s rideshare spending runs above $300 a month and the buyer lives and works deep inside the service area.
Because the car is sold for personal use, an owner would not pay Robotaxi fares. Not a Tesla App’s Nuno inferred that business uses such as Uber or DoorDash are off the table, though that is the writer’s reading and not a rule Tesla spelled out on the page.
Robotaxi zones in Texas and Florida as the only roads
Per Electrek, the Cybercab works only inside Tesla’s Robotaxi service areas in Texas and Florida, which cover eight cities: Austin, Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and San Antonio in Texas, and Miami, Orlando and Tampa in Florida. Tesla’s own page says initial availability is limited, and delivery is shown for Austin only, the one place Tesla currently runs Cybercabs.
The advertised boundaries and the usable ones differ. Independent tracker Koby Pierce tested thousands of addresses, and his findings put pickup and drop-off areas at 59% to 78% of the advertised geofences in the six cities he checked, with Austin near 59%. In Houston, the creator of Robotaxi Tracker found the app quoting about 40 minutes to travel two blocks downtown, apparently because the vehicle routes around rail crossings, Electrek reported.
Lambert’s own forecast is blunt. He expects a “total mess” and reads the invite-only Austin delivery as an attempt to show an unsupervised customer delivery before 2026 ends. The Cybercab runs the same AI4 computer as the current Model Y, he noted, and Tesla already operates unsupervised Model Y robotaxis inside these geofences while Model Y owners with Full Self-Driving do not get unsupervised operation there. Tesla has pushed that for owners to next year, around the second quarter of 2027, so a Cybercab buyer would hold a capability that a Model Y owner will not have for months.
NHTSA’s open question about a car with no brake pedal
Federal regulators have not said the car meets the rules. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ordered Tesla to demonstrate under oath that a vehicle without a brake pedal satisfies federal safety standards that call for one. Tesla answered on Oct. 30 and asked that its entire response be kept confidential, a request covered in Electrek’s filing report, and the agency has not ruled.
The unresolved question for December is whether NHTSA acts before the first customer deliveries in Austin. On the third-quarter earnings call, executives said most Cybercabs would stay Tesla-owned for rideshare, with some placed with customers by year-end, per Not a Tesla App, so the first private buyers will be a small group whose cars depend on both a monthly fee and a pending federal answer.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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