US safety regulator says it is evaluating Tesla’s Cybercab rollout

America’s road safety regulator is looking into Tesla’s newest robotaxi just a day after it began carrying passengers.

“NHTSA is in contact with Tesla and is evaluating the situation,” a spokesperson for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said, according to Reuters.

The service began on Thursday in limited areas of Austin. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of AI, said it is open to the entire public, although the company has not said when it will start charging fares.

The agency is looking at the vehicle itself rather than the software. The Cybercab is a two-seater with butterfly doors and no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors, all of which federal motor vehicle safety standards generally require a car to have.

Tesla has not announced an exemption covering those requirements. The usual route for a vehicle without manual controls is a formal NHTSA exemption, which is capped at a small annual volume, and nothing of that kind has been made public.

The company appears to be relying on self-certification instead. Under the US system, manufacturers certify their own compliance with federal standards and the regulator checks afterwards, which helps explain why NHTSA is evaluating a service that is already carrying passengers.

That distinction is central to the story. In Europe, a vehicle needs type approval before it can carry passengers, while in the US it can go into service first and face regulatory questions afterwards.

Washington has been moving in Tesla’s direction anyway. The Department of Transportation has proposed dropping the brake pedal requirement for autonomous vehicles, which would remove one of the requirements the Cybercab currently does not meet.

The launch itself was unusually low-key. Tesla held the event behind closed doors in Austin on Thursday evening rather than staging the public reveal its followers might have expected, a quiet introduction for a vehicle designed to attract plenty of attention.

The fleet is small for now, with 420 autonomous vehicles registered in Texas, including 45 Cybercabs, compared with 988 vehicles registered in the state by Waymo.

Those numbers are more significant than they might appear. A robotaxi service depends on having a car close enough to pick someone up when they open the app, and 45 vehicles spread across a city are unlikely to provide that consistently.

Reuters put the service to the test and found several problems. Its reporters encountered long waits and trips that ended short of the advertised destination, with one journey leaving passengers around a 15-minute walk from where they were supposed to arrive.

Waymo spent years working through those problems before opening its service to the public. It started with supervised miles, moved to employee rides, and then a waitlist before eventually removing the human monitor, a progression Tesla has compressed into a much shorter rollout.

Moreover, Tesla has been reducing human oversight in stages across its markets. It launched in Miami with no safety monitor and operates Model Ys in Texas and Florida with monitors in some vehicles, making the Cybercab an extension of an existing approach rather than an entirely new one.

State regulators have not always been persuaded: Tesla asked Nevada for permission to operate 5,000 robotaxis in Las Vegas but was granted 10, and it still lacks the permits needed to run a driverless service in California.

The pace makes more sense when viewed against Tesla’s valuation and its broader business. Analysts see autonomy as a key justification for a $1.4 trillion valuation while the company’s core electric vehicle business faces tougher competition, giving visible progress on robotaxis considerably more weight.

NHTSA has not opened a formal investigation or identified a specific standard it believes Tesla has breached, while Tesla has not publicly responded to the agency’s statement. The evaluation is therefore not an enforcement action, but it could eventually lead to one, with possible outcomes ranging from no further action to a requirement that the vehicles come off the road until the exemption question is resolved.

What other manufacturers will be watching most closely is the precedent this creates. If a car without the controls required by federal standards can carry members of the public while regulators determine whether it is legally allowed to do so, the exemption process risks becoming less of a gate than it was designed to be.