Tesla Wants to Sell You a Car With No Steering Wheel. The Rules Aren't Ready.

On October 21, Tesla said it's trying to put a car with no steering wheel, no pedals and no mirrors in customers' hands by the end of the year. 2 days later, NHTSA proposed a light for it.

The car is the Cybercab, the 2-seat robotaxi Elon Musk unveiled in October 2024, when he said buyers could have one for under $30,000. The first one came off the line at Tesla's Texas factory in February, production started in April, and since early September Cybercabs have been carrying paying riders in Austin, and more than 300 are now registered in Texas to Tesla's robotaxi company, according to the state's registry. "We're trying to get [Cybercabs] to customers by the end of this year, 2026," said Lars Moravy, Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering, on the third-quarter earnings call. Musk added that "the vast majority" would stay "essentially Tesla-owned" and be sold as rides, and Tesla has asked businesses whether they'd like to buy Cybercab fleets. It gave no price, and it hasn't said who its first customers will be.

The rules were written for a driver

American cars aren't approved by the government before they're sold. Automakers certify for themselves that a car meets every Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, and NHTSA audits them when it doubts it. Many of those standards assume someone is sitting behind a wheel. The brake standard, for one, says, "The service brakes shall be activated by means of a foot control." The Cybercab has no pedals.

NHTSA opened an audit of how Tesla certified the car on September 3, the day Tesla launched it in Austin. "NHTSA fully supports the safe development and deployment of automated vehicles," said Jonathan Morrison, its administrator. "But as the federal regulator, we need to ensure that all of our laws are followed." A week later, the agency's chief counsel ordered Tesla to answer 21 questions under oath, including whether temporary human controls were fitted to certify the car and how it can be sold without an exemption. Tesla asked for 8 more weeks to answer and got 30 days. The answers are due October 30. Tesla says the car complies with every standard that applies.

There's a well-worn route for cars like this, and Tesla hasn't taken it. Under federal law, a manufacturer can get an exemption to sell vehicles that don't meet a standard, but only up to 2,500 a year, for 2 years at a time. Zoox, Amazon's robotaxi company, got the first commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi on July 30. Moravy said in April that the cap doesn't apply to the Cybercab, because Tesla certifies it as compliant. A bill that would raise the cap to 90,000 has passed a House committee but not the House.

Sources: NHTSA and the Federal Register, 2026; 49 U.S.C. § 30113; House Energy and Commerce Committee.

NHTSA is rewriting the standards one at a time. It has already proposed versions of several for vehicles without manual controls, and Morrison has said he wants the first performance standards for automated vehicles by 2028. Until each rewrite is final, the old version stays in force.

A color for no driver

Drivers communicate constantly without thinking about it. A glance through the windshield, a small wave or the visible movement of a steering wheel helps pedestrians and other drivers judge what a car is about to do. A driverless car can follow every traffic rule and still remove those familiar signals. NHTSA's proposal for standardized cyan marker lamps, announced October 23 and published October 26, is an early effort to give automated vehicles a visible language of their own.

Under the proposal, the blue-green lamps would show that a vehicle is "operating without the expectation that an occupant is monitoring the roadway." That definition matters. The light wouldn't mean that every automated feature is on, that the car can't make a mistake or that a person could never step in. It would mark a specific state: the automated system, not a supervising driver, is responsible for driving at that moment. There would be 4 to 8 of them, on the front, sides and rear, steady rather than flashing, mounted at least 15 in (38 cm) high. NHTSA picked cyan because the existing colors, amber, red and white, "would not have clear meaning" for the job. Police officers could use it to tell whether they're signaling a person or a machine. Pedestrians might use it as one more clue about whether a car has seen them, and other drivers might understand why no one inside is answering a wave.

Source: NHTSA, proposed rule on FMVSS No. 108, Federal Register, October 26, 2026.

What the light can't tell you

The weakness is that the lamps would be optional. An optional signal can't become a universal language if some automated cars show it and others don't. There's also a danger that people will read the light as proof of safety rather than a statement about who's driving. A cyan lamp can't show whether the sensors are blocked, whether the software has misread the scene or whether the car is about to make the right decision.

The idea isn't new. Mercedes-Benz got approval in California and Nevada in December 2023 for turquoise marker lights on cars using Drive Pilot, its system that let drivers look away in heavy highway traffic. California has allowed marker lamps on automated vehicles since January 1 under a 2025 law, and NHTSA says its federal rule would likely override state rules that differ from it. The car that made the light famous is gone, though: Mercedes paused Drive Pilot this year, saying it didn't offer customers enough benefit.

The road needs a standard visual contract between automated machines and the people who have to live around them.

Who's responsible when no one is driving

A light is the easy part. The harder question is who answers for the car. No federal rule says who's liable when a driverless car crashes; that's left to the states. Texas, where the Cybercab runs, says the automated driving system is the vehicle's operator, sends tickets to the owner or the company authorized to run it, and requires insurance, though a privately owned automated car needs no state authorization. California's new rules, in force since July, let police issue a "notice of autonomous vehicle noncompliance" to the manufacturer, which must report it to the DMV within 72 hours.

That's one reason the rest of the industry runs robotaxis as a service rather than selling them. Waymo, which gives more than 500,000 paid rides a week, began rides at Las Vegas's airport on October 21, and said the day before that it will launch in Madrid in 2027. Zoox started charging for rides in Las Vegas in August. Neither sells its cars to individuals. Tesla wants to do both, and its unsupervised software for the cars people already own is a step behind: Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla's self-driving software, said the first customer-owned Teslas could join its robotaxi fleet "somewhere around Q2 next year."

Tesla's Cybercab plans make the timing especially relevant. Cars without traditional controls force regulators to deal with both the technical rules and the public's understanding of them at once. The strongest Carveyance story isn't that driverless cars may get a new light. It's whether the road needs a standard visual contract between automated machines and the people who have to live around them, and whether it'll be written before the first Cybercab goes home with someone.