Musk's Cybercab: driverless taxi now operating in Austin

The steering-wheel-free Cybercab is already driving in Austin, and Europe sets a date

To request one, you open an app. You sit down, the door swings upward and the thing sets off with nobody at the wheel. Because there is no wheel. No pedals either. The Cybercab, the two-seat autonomous vehicle with which Tesla wants to build its Robotaxi business, is already circulating in operational fleet service through downtown Austin, and that is the detail that separates this announcement from the long list of promises Elon Musk has racked up. For some, it is the beginning of the end of the taxi as we know it. For others, marketing wrapped in neon.

A two-seater taxi, not a car for you

It is worth starting with what it is not. The Cybercab is not intended, at least for now, as a private vehicle: it is a fleet unit, with a subscription and a form for companies. Two seats and a huge trunk. The justification is as simple as it is uncomfortable: around 90% of taxi trips are made by one or two people. The fleet is rounded out with four-seat Model Ys for when the group is bigger.

The upward-opening doors are not an aesthetic whim —they take up less space when parking and have been commonplace in Japan for decades—, even if in the video they look more like a video-game spaceship than a runabout. Several people point out that the typography looks too much like Cyberpunk 2077. We will see if the car comes out of the factory looking the same.

Level 4, geofencing and the line you should not cross

Here is the fine print the headline skips over. The system operating in Austin is SAE Level 4: one hundred percent autonomous within pre-mapped zones, supervised outside them. It is not Level 5. The distance between the two, the optimists argue, would not be technological but regulatory: the car already knows how to do it, the law does not let it. Supervised FSD, the one in Teslas on the road, is still Level 2, just like its competitors'.

Autonomous driving without LiDAR, based on cameras alone, is Musk's bet and also the biggest target of suspicion.

The European calendar: Slovenia already, Spain waiting

Supervised FSD was approved first in the Netherlands and six EU countries now have the green light, Slovenia the latest. France, according to current forecasts, would come next month. Spain, for the moment, is waiting on a general European vote set for October 6, with the Ministry of Transport and the DGT (Spain's traffic authority) watching how the others move. In Madrid, tests are already underway with a human supervising.

Brussels, with France leading the way, wants Tesla to remove the option that allows the system to override estimulante ilegal limits. The underlying argument: banning it would not stop people from speeding, it would just push them to switch off the assistant and press the accelerator by hand.

Subscriptions, ads and the ghost of 99 euros a month

The business model has little that is free about it. FSD runs on a subscription, around 99 euros a month, which can be switched on and off. Premium connectivity adds another 9.99. The software updates over the air, even eight years later, without setting foot in a dealership. And some are already sketching the next step: ads on the taxi's screen, paid wifi and tiered fare hikes.

While the novelty is being sold in Austin, Chinese manufacturers are already operating autonomous taxis and buses in several cities with a flat fare of two euros per ride. The unsettling figure is not how long it takes Tesla to get there. It is that it arrives somewhere where someone else was already charging.