When was the last time anyone heard Robyn Denholm, the chair of the Tesla board of directors, say anything about the products the company manufactures? Usually, she is in the background acting as the head cheerleader for the next ginormous pay package for Elon Musk and praising him to the skies.
So, it was somewhat of a surprise this week when she sat for an interview with Bloomberg on October 28, 2025, and announced the so-called Cybercab — the car that Elon himself has said will be the fully autonomous robotaxi he has championed for years — will in fact be the basis of the next new model from Tesla. “If we have to have a steering wheel, it can have a steering wheel and pedals,” she told Bloomberg‘s Kara Carlson and Craig Trudell.
Does Denholm believe an interim step to the Cybercab plan is needed?
A cheaper Tesla for the masses until the Cybercab plan can be implemented?
Which leads to the question whether an autonomous vehicle can be perfected? Obviously Musk & Waymore believe it can.
I’ve wondered why this is a big deal. Yes, it would cost a couple bucks to include a steering wheel and pedals, but all of the functions they provide are (supposedly) going to be done anyway: steering, braking. It seems it would be pretty trivial to put a couple of implements in place, the whole thing is going to be “fly by wire” anyway.
I can’t imagine it costing more than a couple hundred bucks at mass production level, less if designed in from the start.
The CyberCab has only 2 seats.If one of them has driving controls, then it’s almost a certainty that a passenger can’t sit in that seat (as you can’t sit in the driver’s seat in a Waymo), so it becomes a 1-person robotaxi, which probably reduces the available market even more.
Yes, Im sorry. I meant designing it in so the car can’t be used as a cyber-cab, but can also be sold as a self-standing vehicle on its own.
There are plenty of 2 seat vehicles: Mercedes, Miata, Porsche, BMW, Corvette, and others. Why is this not a market segment worth thinking about, particularly if you’re going to do 98% of the engineering anyway?
It’s not like the steering wheel or brakes have to do something novel: read a meter, translate it into the same servo-mechanical or magnetic control that the car will already contain. Leave a hole in the floor and a couple of bolt holes; install it if the customer wants. Disable the “cyber-cab” part, sell it as a sports coupe. Paint all the cyber-cabs yellow or something
I suspect it’s because even though there are “plenty” of 2 seat vehicles, it’s still a tiny segment. Google tells me <2% of the market in their AISlop section - that exact figure might not be accurate, but close enough for government work.
And most of those cars are higher-end performance cars. Sports cars, not the super-low-cost vehicle that Tesla’s trying to get to with the Cybercab. If Tesla were to have an offering in that segment, it would seem to make more sense for it to be Roadster 2.0, rather than a conventionally-driven Cybercab fitted out with a steering wheel and pedals.
Dunno - it’s hard to see a place in the U.S. market for a two-seat car outside the performance/sports car segment. That type of car might work well in some markets abroad, but the Cybercab is probably too big to be a true City/A-segment car, and the lack of rear seats make it a tough sell for a B-segment sedan.
It’s a pretty damn small market segment, and I think today just about everyone in it goes for sporty. The BMWs, Corvettes, and Mercedes versions are expensive, the Miata is a convertible. Back the in day, Pontiac had the Fiero, but that failed because it looked sportier than it was, and had reliability problems. Heck, even the “popular” Miata sells less than 9k copies a year.
As for doing it, my point is that without NHTSA changing the rules, even the robotaxi version would have to have steering wheel, acceleration and brake pedals, controls for turn signals, controls wipers, etc. Because that’s what FMVSS currently says all vehicles on the road for which you sell more than 2500 (or thereabouts) a year have to have.
