Tesla opens Cybercab rides in Austin with 45 wheel-free cars on the Texas register

Tesla told customers in Austin they could book a Cybercab through the Robotaxi app from 5 p.m. Central Time on Friday. The company had run a closed event in downtown Austin on Thursday for invited riders. Gold two-seat coupes with butterfly doors and no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors rolled past mounted police for photographs. Public service, Tesla said, would start in limited parts of the city the next afternoon.

Texas Department of Motor Vehicles records listed 45 Cybercabs on Friday. Tesla's wider robotaxi fleet in the state is about 420 vehicles, most of them Model Ys running the company's Full Self-Driving software. It is not clear how many of the 45 wheel-free cars will take paying passengers in the first days. Several were used on Thursday for influencer footage.

The cabin is built around a 22-inch touchscreen. Promotional clips promised theatre, music and games on that screen and said later cars would carry V5 Starlink hardware. There is no driver's seat in the ordinary sense. Elon Musk has called the design one made for "maximally efficient autonomous operation." On Thursday he joked that the gold paint marked a "golden era of transport." Tesla separately says the colour is applied in the factory to speed production and cut a painting step.

Cybercab is not on sale as a private car. Tesla posted a form for people who want to buy a fleet vehicle and has repeated a price target below US$30,000. The company says it has installed capacity to build more than 125,000 Cybercabs a year, in the same volume band as the Cybertruck. Compliance notes for the model allow a few miles on the odometer at delivery, a sign that factory test loops are already running.

The Austin service sits on top of a robotaxi network that Tesla has already opened in Tampa, Orlando, Miami, Dallas and Houston with supervised or remotely monitored Model Ys. Safety monitors were removed from some Austin Model Ys earlier this year. Cybercab is the first Tesla product that cannot fall back on a human in the seat because there is no seat for that human and no wheel to grab.

That is why the first-week numbers matter more than the paint. Forty-five registered cars in one state is a demonstration fleet. Waymo and other operators already run larger driverless services in US cities with different sensor sets. Tesla is betting that cameras and its software stack are enough. Regulators in several countries are still writing rules that assume a brake pedal exists. Those rules will have to move if the car is to leave Texas in volume.

Investors have heard Cybercab timelines before. Friday's booking window is the first time a member of the public in Austin can tap the same app used for a Model Y robotaxi and be assigned a car with no controls. How many of those trips complete without a remote intervention will be the figure Tesla does not put in the launch post and the figure everyone else will look for.

For now the service area is a slice of one city. The gold cars are real. The commercial claim is that they can work as taxis. The register says there are 45 of them in Texas. That is the launch.