Elon Musk put dozens of self-driving taxis on the streets of Austin, Texas, on Thursday. The cars have no steering wheels and no brake pedals, giving passengers no way to take control if something goes wrong.
The gold-colored vehicles, called Cybercabs, launched as an invitation-only event. Tesla teased the rollout on X before the launch with the message, "No steering wheel, no pedals." Musk later posted an image of a giant Cybercab floating above the Austin skyline and wrote, "A Storm of Cybercabs."
According to a report by ABC News, Tesla shares rose more than 5% Thursday on the news, a bright spot for a company that has struggled with declining vehicle sales. Tesla posted a second consecutive annual decline in sales last year, lost its position as the world's best-selling electric vehicle maker to China's BYD, and saw its stock battered after Musk took over President Donald Trump's government cost-cutting campaign known as DOGE.
The Cybercab launch puts Tesla in more direct competition with Waymo, the current self-driving taxi leader. Waymo has more than 4,000 unsupervised robotaxis deployed across 14 cities. Tesla, by contrast, has more than 200 unsupervised vehicles operating in six cities in Texas and Florida, according to the monitoring site RobotaxiTracker. Austin has had a Tesla robotaxi service since June of last year, but those cars carried steering wheels, brake pedals, and initially had safety drivers aboard.
The technology difference between the two companies is significant. Tesla relies on a camera-only system to navigate streets and detect pedestrians. Waymo and Amazon's Zoox both supplement cameras with radar and lidar, a laser-based sensing technology.
Public skepticism about self-driving vehicles remains a major obstacle for the industry. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in February found that seven in 10 U.S. adults were not too or not at all comfortable riding in a driverless car. Only 7% said they would be extremely or very comfortable. Separate Gallup polling from 2025 also found widespread skepticism about safety.
Tesla has not confirmed how quickly it plans to expand the Cybercab service to other cities.
