Tesla has begun public rides for its Cybercab robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, nearly two years after Elon Musk first unveiled the steering-wheel-free vehicle. The launch is a major test of Musk's long-held, contrarian bet that self-driving cars can rely solely on cameras and AI, rejecting the lidar and radar sensors used by rivals such as Waymo, with Tesla now bearing full legal responsibility for any incidents since there is no human driver to fall back on.

The Cybercab runs a modified version of Tesla's Full Self-Driving software, which remains a supervised, Level 2 system in ordinary Tesla vehicles and has been linked to dozens of deaths and thousands of crashes; in the robotaxi it will instead be overseen by remote operators. Musk dismissed lidar as "a fool's errand" at Tesla's 2019 Autonomy Day and removed radar from Tesla's sensor suite in 2022 despite internal engineering concerns, leaving the cars reliant on two-dimensional camera images that critics say are more vulnerable to glare, rain, snow and fog than multi-sensor systems.