The Tesla Cybercab is innovating impressively impractical ways of getting from Point A to Point B.
One Cybercab passenger in Austin complained that what should’ve been a ten minute trip devolved into a 70-minute long nightmare as the steering-wheel-free robotaxi spiraled its way down the most circuitous route possible.
The driverless cab started the journey by driving in the complete opposite direction of the destination for miles, the exasperated passenger wrote in a Reddit thread, then turned around and took a “massive” detour through east Austin.
If it was instead a Google Maps car trying to image every inch of the city, you’d have to admit it was a job well done.
“My Cybercab held me hostage for an hour,” the rider wrote in the post, spotted by Electrek. “Guess the Cybercab wanted the scenic route today.”
According to Electrek, the reason that the trip took so long is almost certainly because the Tesla Cybercabs can’t drive on highways yet. The consequently tortuous routes that the cabs have to take may not immediately be clear to a passenger, though, as the app only shows a price estimate and not a projection of how long the trip will take, the blog noted.
Like other robotaxi services, the Cybercabs — which use a version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software that hasn’t been released to the public — operate only within a geofenced area that’s been extensively mapped. (Waymo, the leading robotaxi company, does already allow its cars to use highways in some cities.)
There are other signs that the Cybercabs (and Tesla’s confusing named “Robotaxis,” which are self-driving taxis in the form of modified Model Ys, instead of a purpose-built vehicle), are still walking on eggshells compared to its competitors. Some passengers say that the cabs also avoid railroad crossings, which could add to trip times. (Tesla is being investigated for FSD frequently going haywire near these crossings and driving into the path of oncoming trains.)
Do all these restrictions make for a properly autonomous cab? If you had a time machine, you could go back to 2019 and ask CEO Elon Musk for an answer: “If you need a geofence area, you don’t have real self-driving!” he infamously proclaimed.
There was no livestream and the media wasn’t invited. We didn’t even see a euphoric Elon Musk embarrassing himself on stage.
Tesla’s rollout of its two-seater Cybercab robotaxis on the streets of Austin, Texas, this month left investors scratching their heads. With little fanfare, the company stated on Musk’s social media platform X that “Cybercab rides” would “open to public” on September 4.
The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black at the time. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”
The lack of enthusiasm has reignited concerns over the company’s ability to catch up with some extremely steep competition. Its fleet remains extremely small and limited to a geofenced area of Austin. Major regulatory hurdles could make expansion into other states exceedingly challenging. Early testing and data gathering in New York City required the company to install steering wheels and hire human drivers for its Cybercabs, effectively turning them into glorified — and cramped — Tesla EVs.
Investors are already peering through the thin coating of gaudy, gold-colored paint. As a group of asset managers and traders, who — perhaps ironically — refer to themselves as the “Bears of Wall Street” noted in a post on Seeking Alpha, they’re maintaining a “rating of Sell for Tesla.” That’s in large part due to “mounting risks,” such as a “negative free cash flow, surging [capital expenditures] above $25 billion, intensifying competition, and regulatory audits delaying robotaxi expansion.”
The Cybercabs are one of three pillars Musk has bet the fate of Tesla on, along with its humanoid robot Optimus and AI. But without any meaningful strides almost two years after Musk first showed off its robotaxi to the world, investors are left wanting a lot more.
That’s especially true as regulators are starting to ask some tough questions, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opening a probe into the safety certification of its Cybercabs.
The company is also looking to a spend over a whopping $25 billion this year and taking on even more debt, with a “borrowing capacity” of up to $30 billion, as it attempts to stay relevant in the fast-moving AI race.
“Capex will grow for the next two or three years as we expand our Robotaxi fleet, expand our production capacity for Optimus, make investments for semiconductor fab, install solar manufacturing capacity, and AI compute infrastructure, in addition to all the other expansions we’ll do for other manufacturing for automotive,” the company’s CFO Vaibhav Taneja told investors in July.
Waymo continues to run circles around the company, offering its services across ten US metropolitan areas and providing half a million paid rides per week.
Meanwhile, its core business of selling cars continues to atrophy. While delivery numbers have recovered somewhat from a disastrous 2025 performance, the numbers still have a lot of ground to regain.
Then there’s the specter of a possible merge with Musk’s SpaceX, which is looking increasingly likely, at least in the long run. It’s a highly risky move that could saddle Tesla with even more debt.
“All of those risks make us believe that Tesla remains greatly overvalued even after the volatility of the last two months,” the Bears of Wall Street argued, valuing the company’s stock at “around 78 percent below the current market price.”
“The Cybercab launch was the catalyst that was supposed to justify Tesla’s valuation, and it delivered almost nothing that investors could measure,” the group concluded. “Instead of a fleet expansion plan, the company got a federal investigation, while its main competitor keeps adding cities.”
Driverless cars, once a distant techno-optimist’s dream, are making their way into more cities, racking up miles and attracting a loyal fan base. They’re also increasingly racking up tickets and driving in ways that would land a human driver in hot water.
During July Fourth celebrations this year, several Waymo autonomous robotaxis operating near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge reportedly hit technical trouble that led to at least one vehicle driving over an exploding firework with two passengers inside. The riders (who luckily escaped harm) said they smelled smoke coming out of the vehicle and promptly bolted at the next intersection.
A couple of months earlier, a California driver claimed a pair of Waymos cut her off and blocked her from moving forward for nearly 50 minutes, causing a traffic pile-up and frantic 911 call. Halfway across the country, as many as five Waymos in Austin blocked police and emergency crews responding to an active shooting that left four people dead and a dozen injured.
“The question is not if this is going to turn into a deadly situation for someone, but when,” Austin City Council member Paige Ellis said at a meeting following that incident.
Human drivers in any of these situations would likely face a confrontation with police and the real possibility of a citation—or worse. But that calculus changes when there’s no one behind the wheel. Across the country, cities and states are still figuring out how to sanction a driverless vehicle that breaks the law, even as the well-financed companies operating them rack up thousands of dollars in parking tickets with seemingly few consequences.
To call the situation a work in progress is an understatement. Many localities that allow these vehicles on public roads still lack clear legal mechanisms for issuing moving violations. Where laws do exist, enforcement remains light-handed. Experts in autonomous vehicle (AV) policy tell Popular Science that this seemingly basic question, “what happens when a driverless car breaks the law?”, is still surprisingly complicated to answer.
“In principle, AVs are licensed drivers and someone owns and operates them,” University of Southern California Gould School of Law professor Gregory Keating tells Popular Science. “They should be treated like any other licensed driver.”
Despite spending years studying this very issue, Keating says the path forward remains hazy.
“In practice, I don’t know what’s going on,” he adds.
Driverless cars are racking up parking tickets
Cars breaking laws, whether driven by humans or algorithms, fall broadly into two categories: traffic violations and moving violations. Anyone who’s gotten a parking ticket is familiar with the former, and increasingly, so are driverless cars. In 2024, Waymo, by far the most common robotaxi operating today, accrued over 589 parking tickets in San Francisco and $65,065 in fines, according to The Washington Post. The Post reported another 75 tickets further south in Los Angeles. In Austin, where the company more recently started commercial operations, Waymo has reportedly received 20 parking-related citations as of June 23. Zoox, another robotaxi firm backed by Amazon, also received a citation for parking in a tow-away zone.
Cops issuing those tickets basically approach it the same way as they would a car with a human driver. Matthew Raifman, autonomous vehicle and traffic lead at UC Berkeley’s SafeTREC, tells Popular Science that in these cases, it’s the vehicle, not any individual behind the wheel, that’s on the hook–the same as it would be for a human-driven car. Parking tickets already work this way: If you borrow a friend’s car and get a ticket, it’s the car’s registered owner who pays, not the friend who parked it. Since an AV’s registered owner is the company that operates it, that same logic extends easily to driverless cars. A traffic cop who comes across an empty, illegally parked driverless car can simply print a ticket and place it on the windshield. At the end of the day, perhaps after picking up more passengers, the AV returns to a depot where a human employee collects the ticket and sends it up the chain for payment.
How cops are supposed to arrest a car with no driver
Ticketing driverless cars for more serious moving violations gets more complicated. Most municipalities still don’t have clear mechanisms for citing these vehicles when they block traffic, make illegal U-turns, or commit other mistakes that would normally lead to tense conversations with police. The core issue is confusion over who is held responsible when no human is actually making the mistake.
If a police officer observes an AV committing a moving violation, they generally flash their lights to signal the vehicle to pull over. Robotaxis are programmed to use their onboard sensors to detect police flashers, though some vehicles have struggled to do so in the past. If the AV pulls over, the officer must determine who the rogue car belongs to. Today, with only a handful of robotaxi firms operating, that detective work is pretty simple. But it could get much trickier in the near future as more AV companies enter the market, or if individuals begin owning and operating their own autonomous vehicles.
“Just because robotaxis are dominant right now doesn’t mean that robo taxis will dominate in the future,” University of South Carolina law professor and AV policy expert Bryant Walker Smith tells Popular Science. “We could have one company that develops the automated driving system, another company that puts it on a vehicle, another company that buys the vehicles.”
A clear example of how this confusion can play out occurred late last year in Northern California. San Bruno police, conducting a DUI operation, say they spotted a driverless Waymo make an illegal U-turn in front of them. Officers pulled the wayward Waymo over and contacted a human representative through the car’s speakers to report a “glitch.” But because there was nobody behind the wheel, no ticket or citation was issued the way it would have been if a human driver were involved.
“Since there was no human driver, a ticket couldn’t be issued (our citation books don’t have a box for ‘robot’),” a San Bruno Police Department Facebook post explained following the incident reads.
“That’s right… no driver, no hands, no clue.”
“I’ve been in a Waymo but, being a mere passenger, I’ve never poked around in the glove compartment to see if they carry their ‘papers’ around approximately the way that human beings do,” Keating says.
Worries about AVs breaking the law aren’t hypothetical. A recent CNN analysis of federal government records and social media footage found hundreds of driverless cars running red lights, driving into oncoming traffic, ignoring emergency road closures, and executing other potentially dangerous maneuvers. Around that same time, Waymo temporarily pulled its vehicles from highways following reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of at least 13 instances where they drove into active construction zones. The company has since started resuming highway routes.
Waymo and independent supporters of AV rollouts generally have repeatedly claimed that, even when taking these issues into account, autonomous systems get into fewer crashes and drive safer than humans. Recent research lends credence to that argument in certain cases, but AVs are still limited in where and how they can operate.
“No technology is perfect, but while human drivers can only learn from their individual experiences, Waymo takes community feedback and applies those safety learnings to our entire fleet,” a Waymo spokesperson told CNN in June.
A new type of ‘ticket’ for autonomous vehicles
Regulators hope some creative new legislation can help clear up the confusion. California enacted a law allowing police to issue a “notice of noncompliance” to AVs. The whole point of these notices, and why they mark an important step forward, is to create an official record for when an AV makes a mistake, Raifman notes. Those notices are then updated in the California DMV’s system within 72 hours. Prior to this, police didn’t have a clear way to document when an AV violated the law, creating a gap that contributed to uncertainty about how well the technology works in the real world.
Still, actually punishing human drivers and AVs isn’t a one-to-one comparison. When humans make mistakes, they receive points on their driver’s license. Rack up enough points, and a driver risks losing their license altogether. As Raifman points out, notices of noncompliance attempt to apply a similar deterrent for AV companies. The notices are recorded, added up, and factored into whether state regulators continue granting those companies permits to operate autonomously. Too many violations, especially those causing major traffic issues or injuries, could lead to a company’s permit being revoked. But unlike humans, AV makers don’t have to worry about individual monetary fines for these moving violations.
An autonomous Waymo car drives into the blocked off Potrero Annex construction site while a construction worker watches. Image: Getty Images Thomas Hunter II/Alamy Live News
“It’s an indirect mechanism to enforcement, but it is not enforcement through money and points,” Walker Smith said.
Raifman compares this enforcement method to how regulators manage pollution from power plants. Local governments often grant permits allowing a facility to emit certain pollutants, but only up to a specified amount. If a plant exceeds that or otherwise violates its permit, regulators can issue a notice of violation, which, depending on its severity, can lead to a permit suspension or even cause operation to shut down.
That’s a different process than the one facing an individual resident who pollutes their own backyard. In that case, they’d likely just receive a citation. In both the power plant case and now with AVs, enforcement relies on an ongoing back-and-forth between corporations and regulators, rather than a single punishment to an individual.
That may make sense on paper, but it’s also frustrating for everyday drivers, many of whom are just now seeing AVs spring up in their towns and on their roads without their input. The frustration shows up in comment sections and forums, with some describing what can seem like two separate rules or laws–one for humans and another for robots and their owners.
“They pay the fine and just keep doing what they are doing,” one Reddit post on the topic reads. “This is the corporate reality we live in, where corporations are supposedly people, but have none of the responsibilities or need to deal with things like following the law that the rest of us do.”
Raifman believes enforcement and accountability for driverless cars are broadly improving, but he also empathizes with annoyed drivers who feel the status quo is unfair. One major issue contributing to that frustration, he notes, is that the “pain” felt by a human driver and an AV company violating the same law isn’t equal. A robotaxi company accruing hundreds of thousands of dollars in parking tickets can simply shrug it off as a cost of doing business. For a human driver living on a budget, however, just a few tickets can severely impact their finances.
“I think that’s where there’s an asymmetric relationship compared to humans, and I think that’s a source of frustration,” Raifman says.
Autonomous vehicles are a physical manifestation of growing AI anxiety
That pent-up frustration stems, in part, from a familiar pattern in tech: innovations move fast, maybe breaking some things along the way, and regulators end up playing catch-up. Right now, cities with the most exposure to driverless cars (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin) have just begun to sort out what fair and consistent enforcement looks like, even as the technology keeps expanding well ahead of it.
In just the last year, Waymo has nearly quintupled its fleet, from around 700 vehicles to nearly 4,000, according to The New York Times. Zoox and Tesla are both preparing significant robotaxi launches in multiple cities, and changes to federal rules mean many of these vehicles won’t even have visible steering wheels or pedals. Driverless 18-wheelers are already barreling across Texas highways, and the prospect of individual car owners swapping on true hand-off, eyes-off driving features in their own vehicles gets closer every day.
And even if the AV supporters are right that the technology is ultimately safer than humans, sheer scale means more and more people will end up watching these vehicles behave badly. In a climate where public trust in automation and AI broadly is souring, driverless carmakers may have more incentive than ever to keep their cars from running afoul of the law, not just to satisfy regulators, but because the cars themselves have become a material stand-in for how people feel about AI writ large.
“I think people are going to put a lot of their hopes and fears about AI generally disproportionately on automated vehicles because they’re so visceral and physical and real and obvious,” Walker Smith said.
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Elon Musk’s Tesla has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to its Robotaxi autonomous ride-hailing network.
The company is currently operating a fleet of just 45 of its cramped Cybercabs in Austin, Texas, still falling well short of investor and Tesla bull Dan Ives’ lofty expectations of the company adding “$1 trillion of value” for Tesla “over the coming years” with the service.
And unlike their counterparts in Texas and Florida, the Cybercabs that were recently spotted on the streets of New York City are featuring an unusual relic of a supposedly soon-to-be-bygone era: a steering wheel.
As Gothamist reports, the golden-hued cabs in the Big Apple are being overseen — and perhaps even operated — by a human in the driver’s seat with an old-fashioned steering wheel. It’s a significant departure from the original, steering wheel- and pedal-less Cybercabs Musk unveiled in 2024.
Officials confirmed the drivers are testing a “supervised” self-driving system, which still requires them to be able to take over control at any point. But Tesla refuses to say how many Cybercabs there are in the city or for how long they will be testing.
There’s likely a good reason Tesla has opted to go with more traditional controls. After all, it hasn’t even started the permit application process for autonomous vehicle testing with the New York Department of Motor Vehicles, as the Gothamist confirmed.
The EV maker is looking to collect driving data, not imminently launch a robotaxi service in the city.
In short, Tesla has a very long road ahead of it before it could ever roll out its Cybercabs nationally, let alone in other major urban areas. Other companies, however, have a massive head start, with Waymo claiming that it has already completed over half a million paid rides a week throughout the first quarter of this year. While Tesla has remained notably quiet on the matter, its numbers likely fall far short of that, considering it’s only operating with a fleet of a few dozen vehicles.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s Zoox vehicles received approval from regulators in late July to begin charging for rides in cars that don’t have a steering wheel. The company has been operating services free of charge in Las Vegas and San Francisco since 2025, according to the Associated Press.
Tesla’s mawkishly sleek new Cybercab has begun rolling out to Austin, Texas this week, with more sighted in cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Diego. It’s the latest development in the world of self-driving taxi cabs — and in one dubious economic indicator, the nation’s personal injury attorneys are on high alert.
Case in point, the New Jersey based law firm Sarofiem and Antoun already has a blog post up courting customers wronged by Cybercab accidents. Billing himself as a “Tesla Cybercab accident lawyer,” Kerollos Antoun poses an important question: “if a driverless Tesla Robotaxi causes an accident, who is responsible when there is no human driver behind the wheel?”
Though Antoun concedes that Cybercabs don’t appear to currently be active in New Jersey, his blog registers a laundry list of considerations considering who can be held liable in accidents involving the autonomous vehicles — each highly theoretical and short on concrete answers.
“Could autonomous-driving software cause an accident,” for example? “Potentially,” Antoun writes. “If an accident occurs, attorneys may need to determine whether the autonomous system perceived the environment correctly and whether the vehicle’s response contributed to the crash.”
Other firms, like Funes Law in Miami and Angel Reyes and Associates in Austin, offer similar pitches: if you’re in an accident with a Cybercab, they want to litigate your case.
Though the tailor-made Cybercab blogs follow a familiar pattern of opportunism by corporate law firms, their point is fair enough. The technology behind Cybercabs is in a very early stage, and the legal precedent is even younger.
Whichever firm happens to scoop up the first Cybercab injury case would be making legal history — a chance to litigate a brand new product made by one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Though self-driving cars are only a few years old at this point, they’ve already resulted in startling legal firsts. In August of 2025, a jury in Miami handed down a landmark verdict against Tesla over a fatal crash involving a Model S being driven on the company’s “Autopilot” mode.
In that case, the total damages came out to a whopping $243 million — a landmark verdict that the nation’s accident attorneys are eager to replicate as Tesla’s gold-tinted coupe hits the pavement.
It’s no secret that car owners have handed an immense amount of control over their vehicles to software. From infuriating touchscreens and convoluted user interfaces, to advanced — albeit flawed — driver assistance programs, we’ve never been more removed from the actual driving experience.
The situation become particularly harrowing for Sydney native Narghiza Ergashova, who watched helplessly as her former partner — who she says had already been abusing her for four years — started remotely controlling her Tesla from his smartphone.
As The Guardian reports, police records detail her terrifying experience at the hands of her domestic abuser, 50-year-old businessman Enrico Pucci, last year. Ergashova found that Pucci had activated a “parental control” profile on the vehicle, going as far as to tail her in his own car as he yelled at her about her new partner.
“You thought you’d get away with this,” he yelled, according to police records quoted by The Guardian. “I am in your car. I am in your maps.”
While Ergashova technically owns the vehicle, Pucci had previously offered to “assist her” by using the accompanying Tesla app, giving him extensive control over the car.
According to Tesla’s website, parental controls can be accessed via the accompanying mobile app and allow the user to change a long list of settings.
It also allowed Pucci to bring the Tesla to a crawl at just 25 mph on main roads, for instance, by activating a “Valet Mode” intended to only be used by valets. That caused “significant safety issues for the victim on the road,” according to the police documents.
Pucci also started setting the cabin temperature of the vehicle to extremely cold and hot temperatures and could even predetermine when the car could be driven by implementing curfew hours, features clearly intended for young learners.
“The victim has not had any control of her vehicle since she noticed the parental control profile added on the 1st November 2025,” law enforcement noted. “The accused has been the only one with access to the vehicle’s controls utilising the Tesla app. This has caused the victim significant stress, mental harm and fears for her physical safety when operating her own vehicle.”
Ergashova’s abuser has an extensive track record. Pucci has been convicted of 30 domestic violence-related offences, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, including eight counts of stalking, two counts of choking, one count of coercive control, and assault leading to bodily harm. He has also been convicted of creating revenge porn and theft.
Fortunately, he has been brought to justice. Pucci pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison last week.
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