- A bunch of Tesla Cybercabs have been spotted roaming the streets of Austin.
- Tesla now has 45 Cybercabs registered to its Robotaxi fleet, according to filings with the state of Texas.
- Tesla's official Cybercab launch event is set for Thursday.
If you happen to live in Austin, Texas, you may have found yourself surrounded by four-wheeled golden wedges today. As Tesla gears up to launch the futuristic Cybercab later this week, many have been spotted testing in the city, and Tesla has started registering them with the Texas DMV.
Tesla has now registered 45 Cybercabs with the Texas DMV as part of its Robotaxi fleet. As recently as a few days ago, Tesla's autonomous ride-hailing business only had Model Ys listed in that database, according to Tesla watcher Sawyer Merritt.
While Tesla has been testing Cybercabs in Texas and elsewhere, mostly with human drivers, it looks like the company is stepping things up ahead of Thursday's event. A video posted to X shows a herd of Cybercabs driving around a busy intersection in Austin. The cars can be seen picking up and dropping off passengers while navigating city traffic. It's not clear if any were driving autonomously, and one can spot drivers and steering wheels in some of them. (In others, it's hard to tell.)
Tesla plans to launch the two-seat, purpose-built robotaxi at an event in Austin on Thursday. Central to Tesla's self-driving ambitions, the steering wheel- and brake pedal-free car—which Tesla plans to make 125,000 of per year—will test whether the automaker's camera-only autonomous tech can scale more widely, and how quickly it can do so. Right now, Tesla operates driverless Model Ys in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. But the service is fairly limited, especially outside of Austin.
Cybercabs have been spotted across the U.S. as far east as New York City. And Tesla has been making Cybercabs at its Texas factory for months. But it's not clear yet how quickly it will actually deploy those to ferry around paying passengers.
If the launch is anything like what Tesla has done in the past, it will offer up some rides to those in attendance—which could be exactly what the automaker is practicing for ahead of time. Whatever happens on Thursday, it seems that Tesla is preparing to put quite a few more of these on the road in the near future.
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