Tesla Is Carrying Passengers in a Car With No Steering Wheel. Washington Is “Evaluating the Situation.”

Before you climb into the back of Tesla’s Cybercab, you should know what isn’t in the front. As of today, Tesla is offering rides in Austin, Texas, in a two-seater with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no mirrors, and the federal agency responsible for auto safety has responded with exactly eleven words: “NHTSA is in contact with Tesla and is evaluating the situation.”^[1] That’s it. That’s the whole regulatory posture, delivered to Reuters on the same day passengers started boarding.

Now for the part that should bother you as a consumer. Every car sold in America is self-certified: the manufacturer declares it meets the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, and NHTSA spot-checks afterward. That system was designed around a human driver holding a wheel. FMVSS 101 governs the placement of driver controls. FMVSS 111 requires mirrors. FMVSS 203 and 204 regulate what the steering column does to your chest in a crash.^[2] Delete the wheel, the pedals, and the mirrors, and you have not exactly violated these standards. You have made them inapplicable, which is a much more interesting trick, because there is no crash-test protocol on Earth written for a passenger who can never, under any circumstances, take over.

Tesla’s regulatory strategy, as reported by Electrek, is to self-certify the Cybercab against every FMVSS as written, which sidesteps NHTSA’s 2,500-vehicle annual cap on exemptions for noncompliant designs and removes any ceiling on scale.^[3] Meanwhile the actual federal rule is narrower than the hype: manufacturers may deploy unlimited vehicles for testing, but selling them, or collecting fares, without standard controls is restricted. Tesla updated its robotaxi site today to offer the rides and declined to say whether anyone pays.^[1] Keep an eye on that detail. Musk calls the Cybercab his future highest-volume vehicle and the pillar of a $1.4 trillion valuation; a taxi company that cannot legally charge fares is a hobby, and hobbies do not justify $1.4 trillion.^[1]

Fairness requires the other side at full volume. Self-certification is not a Cybercab loophole; it is how your Camry was regulated too, and NHTSA has always enforced after the fact rather than approving designs in advance. Texas law explicitly authorizes commercial SAE Level 4 operation with insurance and registration, which Tesla holds, and 45 vehicles in limited areas of Austin is a pilot, not a fleet.^[4] Waymo has carried paying passengers for years under this same federal regime, and NHTSA’s current leadership has said openly it wants to modernize standards written for human drivers rather than strangle pilots in paperwork.^[5] “Evaluating the situation” might be exactly the right amount of government for 45 cars. It just happens to be indistinguishable, from the outside, from no government at all.

What this article does not know, stated plainly: NHTSA has said nothing about its legal theory, so whether the agency sees an exemption, a reinterpretation, or a shrug is unknowable today. There is no public crash or safety data for the Cybercab specifically, so nothing here is a claim about how safe the vehicle is; it is a claim about the visibility of the oversight. The self-certification strategy is press reporting, not a filed federal document I verified. And the Texas registration figures come via automotive press, not the state registry directly.

So here is your consumer checklist, since nobody else is handing you one. If you are offered a ride: ask who the insurer of record is and what precisely happens when the system disengages mid-ride, because there is no wheel to grab and no pedal to stomp, which means the fallback plan is entirely software and remote humans. Watch the fare question, since charging money is where the “testing” rationale gets thinnest. And if anything goes wrong, file it at nhtsa.gov, because early pilots are where the data record gets built, and a terse “evaluation” only grows teeth if the complaints file grows first.