Tesla has produced its first official steering and pedaless two-seater Robotaxi, the Cybercab, at its factory in Texas, marking a huge step for autonomy.
A gold Cybercab at GigaTexas was seen in a photo shared by Tesla on X and shared with the caption: “First Cybercab off the production line at Giga Texas”.
The Cybercab is surrounded by the team at Tesla’s Austin, Texas, factory and has both scissor doors open, highlighting a unique feature of this two-seater, fully autonomous vehicle as it nears official mass production in the coming months.
This Cybercab is parked at what appears to be the end of the final checks and inspections tunnel, hinted by the bright lights inside the tunnel, located behind the parked Cybercab.
There are also engineering, manufacturing and assembly team members spotted on the mezzanine floor above the vehicle.
Tesla first showed the Cybercab at the company’s “We, Robot” event in late 2024 which was an invitation-only event.
Hundreds of fully autonomous test rides with the Cybercab and Model Y Robotaxis were held at the event on closed roads at Warner Bros. studios in California.
Since then, plenty of sightings of the golden model have been made, with most either at Tesla’s test track near Fremont California, on the roads, at Tesla showrooms in the US and even Europe as part of a 6-city tour in Europe, covering Paris, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Oslo and Amsterdam.
The Cybercab is expected to cost around $A45,000 as a self-driving robotaxi, with good boot space and fewer interior components than Tesla’s other passenger-car products.
On component count, a lead Tesla engineer previously said the company’s upcoming Cybercab is expected to have 50% fewer parts than the Model 3.
This cost factor will help the company scale much more quickly than the highly specialised vehicles used by its autonomous driving competitors, such as Waymo in the US.
Production of the unique two-seater vehicle is expected to start in April 2026 and was confirmed at Tesla’s Q4 shareholders meeting held last month.
With the first production unit coming off the line, Tesla is expected to have a slow ramp-up of the Cybercab, given the manufacturing and assembly methods it’s deploying at scale, also known as the unbox assembly method.
This was also recently confirmed by the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, who shared that production will ramp up to super high volumes in time.
As production ramps up in the coming months, it would be interesting to see how quickly these early units are deployed onto the Tesla Robotaxi network in the US. Afterall, the competition appears to be coming with competitors like Waymo expanding in multiple countries in 2026 and beyond.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.