Tesla Cybercab Rollout Being Investigated

This one is about a driverless car, not a home upgrade, but here's what happened. Tesla launched its Cybercab robotaxi in Austin, Texas, this week. The vehicle has no steering wheel, pedals, or side mirrors. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the federal agency that sets safety rules for vehicles, is now investigating whether Tesla properly certified these cars as meeting federal safety standards before putting up to 1,000 of them on the road.

Automakers are required to certify that their vehicles meet federal safety rules, and NHTSA steps in when a certified vehicle looks like it doesn't meet those requirements. The agency is looking at how Tesla decided that certain standards, including ones covering manual controls like steering wheels and brake pedals, simply didn't apply to the Cybercab. NHTSA had proposed in June dropping the manual-brake requirement for fully self-driving cars, but that's still just a proposal, not a rule, so the old requirement technically still stands.

By contrast, another robotaxi company, Zoox, got approval last month to run paid driverless rides after formally petitioning NHTSA for an exemption. Tesla did not file any such petition before its launch. It's unclear what penalty, if any, Tesla could face, or whether the cars would need to come off the road while the investigation continues.