Tesla’s Cybertruck Powershare feature can now back up your home at the same time as a Powerwall 3, the company announced Thursday. Run together, the truck and the battery add more than three days of backup power, which Tesla says is the equivalent of nine extra Powerwalls.
It’s a feature Tesla first promised for 2025, and it’s showing up nearly two years after Cybertruck deliveries began. But it finally closes one of Powershare’s most annoying gaps.
A 2024 Tesla Model Y ran off Interstate 35 in rural Missouri, struck a guardrail, and killed its driver, a 64-year-old woman from Raymore. Troopers reported a single-vehicle wreck and said the car “went off the road.”
What they didn’t say, and likely didn’t know, is that Tesla’s own report to federal regulators says the car’s driver-assist system was engaged. This is part of an ongoing Electrek investigation matching reported crashes to Tesla’s redacted NHTSA data.
A US congressman is demanding the Department of Transportation explain what it’s doing about Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving after an NBC News investigation surfaced dozens of videos of drivers apparently asleep at the wheel.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi gave Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy until September 30 to answer five questions about the systems, which Tesla itself says “require active driver supervision and are not autonomous driving systems.”
Tesla’s flashy unveiling of its Cybercab robotaxi in 2024 left some glaring questions unanswered.
The sleek, gold-colored coupé impressed with a futuristic design, but baffled onlookers with its cramped two-seat interior, lack of a charging port, and a dubious, far-too-good-to-be-true $30,000 price tag.
Just under two years later, the first Cybercabs are starting to hit the streets in Austin, Texas — and Tesla is just itching to sell you one. Last week, the EV maker started handing out a “Robotaxi interest form,” as Electrek reported at the time, in an apparent effort attract would-be entrepreneurs willing to buy an entire fleet of the unusual vehicles.
Put simply, the idea is to share revenue from ride income with Tesla while the vehicles operate on the carmaker’s network, using its self-driving tech.
It’s part of a much broader plan. For many years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised that its Full Self-Driving-enabled vehicles, including the Cybercab, could effectively turn into an appreciating money-printing machine, allowing owners to sit on their couch and magically watch the money roll in.
As early as 2018, Musk promised investors that he saw the “future as kind of a shared electric autonomy, so that you’d be able to do ride-hailing or share the car any way,” likening it to “some combination of like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.”
But there are plenty of reasons businesspeople should hesitate before takeing Tesla up on the offer of operating a Robotaxi fleet, as Electrek‘s Fred Lambert argued in a compelling essay this week.
Basically, he pointed out, “if running a fleet of Cybercabs were actually profitable, Tesla wouldn’t sell you a single one.” It’s like claiming you’ve found an infinite money glitch — and then instead of quietly profiting off it, selling a get-rich-quick book on how to do it yourself.
There are also looming technical questions. Musk’s lofty promises of a vehicle that completes ride-hailing requests autonomously while also appreciating in value has little, if any, bearing with reality in 2026. To the contrary, the EV maker’s offerings are among some of the fastest depreciating vehicles on the market today.
Then there’s the questionable value proposition. Tesla controls the entire network, the self-driving software, and prices. It even “sets the split,” as Lambert argues. Instead, fleet owners are stuck eating the “capital cost and the depreciation, while Tesla keeps the software margin and its cut of every fare.”
In other words, “you don’t own a business in that arrangement. You own the downside.”
It’s a dubious business opportunity closely reminiscent of Tesla’s infamous FSD advanced driver assistance software. Owners once shelled out a massive $15,000 — before it became exclusively a $99 a month subscription — to access a feature that’s still a complete disaster, leading to fatal collisions and terrifying close calls even after many years of development.
Not only are they spending the equivalent of a small car on faulty software, they’re willing to shoulder the risk as well. Tesla has a long track record of trying to wriggle out of lawsuits arising from these accidents, arguing it was the driver’s fault for engaging the software and not paying attention.
Much like its regular lineup of FSD-enabled vehicles, Tesla’s Cybercab relies entirely on a camera-based autonomous driving system, an approach that experts say is fundamentally flawed.
Nonetheless, as the Austin American-Statesman reports, local investors in Austin are chomping at the opportunity to run their own Cybercab fleet.
Meanwhile, regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are watching closely. The agency opened a probe into the Tesla, questioning that its new Cybercab “meets all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.”
The Boring Company has closed a $3 billion Series D funding round led by the United Arab Emirates, valuing Elon Musk’s tunneling venture at $23 billion.
That’s roughly four times its 2022 valuation of about $5.7 billion. And most of the case for it sits in tunnels the company hasn’t dug yet.
One of the selling points of Tesla’s much-hyped Cybercab — its purpose-built robotaxi — is that it doesn’t need manual controls. That’s why it doesn’t even come with a steering wheel or pedals.
But an early passenger who got to ride one of the self-driving cars after they launched in Austin last week discovered that they secretly have manual controls hidden in a touchscreen — the most practical way to control a car, as everyone knows — after its software glitched out and accidentally revealed them.
The passenger, Matthew Skrzypczak, wrote on X over the weekend that when he got in his Cybercab to take it for a spin, the display, instead of showing an interface to let him start his ride, showed a “virtual joystick for manual driving.”
“I have a feeling I wasn’t supposed to see this,” he wrote.
In a video he uploaded, the display shows a splitscreen view of various camera angles and an area that lets you control several of the car’s functions. Crucially, there’s also a touchscreen joystick for shifting the car into gear, which says “forward” at the top and “reverse” at the bottom.
Skrzypczak was able to close the door and honk the horn successfully, but when he tries to move the car it doesn’t budge — which is probably for the best, since there were pedestrians nearby — though this may be because he was simply using the joystick wrong.
This feature is almost certainly intended for Tesla employees, and it’s unclear why a passenger like Skrzypczak, and at least one other who noted the issue, was able to access it. To be clear, manual controls are obviously necessary in case an employee or emergency workers needs to move the vehicle when it’s malfunctioning. But putting it behind a slippery touchscreen is also far less practical than an old-fashioned steering wheel and pedal, which is all being done so CEO Elon Musk can have bragging rights.
The workaround hasn’t proved amusing to regulators. Shortly after Tesla launched Cybercab rides in Austin, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit into how Tesla self-certified that the vehicles were safe for the road despite their lack of conventional manual controls.
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