- Tesla could add a steering wheel to the Cybercab after all.
- Board chair Robyn Denholm suggested to Bloomberg that it may need to appease the feds by adding the equipment back in.
- Under current regulations, the automaker could sell up to 2,500 cars without the equipment annually.
Tesla pitched its futuristic Cybercab as a pedal-free, steering wheel-less entry into an autonomous future. In fact, just last week CEO Elon Musk told the world that the car would launch next year and definitely would not have either.
However, in an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, Tesla chairwoman Robyn Denholm said the company may make some concessions and install them in the car after all.
“If we have to have a steering wheel, it can have a steering wheel and pedals,” Denholm told the outlet.
Photo by: InsideEVs
And it may need to do just that to sell the purpose-built robotaxi in the high volumes it hopes to. The reality is, under current regulations, Tesla won’t be able to make the Cybercab a mainstream hit without the proper safety controls. That means installing a steering wheel and pedals if it plans to sell more than 2,500 units per year and can muster up approval to do so legally.
That figure is set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Part 555 temporary exemption process. It allows vehicles that don’t meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to be put on U.S. roads—but only 2,500 of them annually. That’s what Denholm seemed to be referring to in her comments, but it wasn’t perfectly clear.
“The original Model Y was not going to have a steering wheel, or pedals,” continued Denholm. “If we can’t sell something because it needs something, then we’ll work with regulators to work out what we need to do.”
When Tesla CEO Elon Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars helping to elect President Donald Trump, and subsequently played a major role in his administration, there was an idea that the federal government would waste no time clearing the way for Tesla’s robotaxi ambitions.
That hasn’t exactly happened, although Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency did fire NHTSA employees who oversaw autonomous vehicle safety. Back in June, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy noted that his agency would work to streamline that approval process, but the ceiling of 2,500 “non-compliant” vehicle sales during any 12-month period remained intact.
That streamlining in itself may be very helpful to robotaxi companies like Tesla. General Motors went down the Part 555 exemption rabbit hole when trying to put the Cruise Origin, a purpose-built autonomous shuttle, on U.S. roads. After waiting years for approval, it not only scrapped its plans, but would up shuttering its Cruise self-driving unit entirely. So far Nuro and Zoox have received exemptions from the federal safety requirements.
Photo by: InsideEVs
The statement from the chairwoman comes as pressure is mounting from shareholders for the automaker to deliver a more affordable vehicle for normal people. Musk said last year that building a $25,000 vehicle that wasn’t a robotaxi would be “pointless.” Tesla reportedly scraped a Cybercab-based affordable model, unofficially dubbed the “Model 2.” Instead, it released stripped-down, slightly cheaper versions of the Model Y and Model 3 last month, which didn’t exactly impress the public.
At the same time, Tesla is begging shareholders to pass a $1 trillion pay package for Musk so that he doesn’t quit.
Let’s say that Tesla does happen to add a steering wheel and pedals to the Cybercab, creating, effectively the Model 2 that never was. Does that mean anyone will buy it?
Maybe. The market for a two-seater, two-door coupe is pretty limited. It’s also pretty clear that the Cybercab isn’t tuned to be some sort of sports car. But I’d consider it if it were actually planned to be a driver’s car and not just a econobox with a steering wheel added as an afterthought.
The problem is that Tesla has designed the Cybercab for taxi duty, not to be a fun driver’s car. Musk said so on the company’s third quarter earnings call last week.
“[I]f you’ve got steering wheels and pedals and you’re designing a car that people might want to go very direct past acceleration and tight cornering, like high-performance cars, then you’re going to design a different car than one that is optimized for a comfortable ride and doesn’t expect to go past sort of 85 or 90 miles an hour,” he said.
“It’s just aiming for a gentle ride the whole time. That’s what Cybercab is.”
The one cool thing worth pointing out here is that Denholm seems to acknowledge that adding a steering wheel and pedals is technically possible. Maybe that means the car can be easily fit with the controls thanks to tech like steer-by-wire found in the Cybertruck.
Even with human-oriented controls, it’s really not clear how well the Cybercab could sell. On one hand, cheap EVs could move like hotcakes. On the other, a car with only two seats has a narrow audience. Plus, adding a steering wheel and pedals really does undermine the entire idea of how the car is marketed—as a robotaxi that can earn you money on the side.
I guess we’ll know more next year—if the automaker sticks to its timeline.
