On September 3, Tesla began charging fares for driverless rides in its new Cybercab, rolling the vehicle onto the streets of Austin, Texas with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no mirrors. Tesla had already certified, on its own authority, that the car met every federal safety standard that applies to it.
Hours later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit. By September 10, that audit had become something much sharper: a Special Order, signed by NHTSA’s chief counsel and addressed directly to Tesla’s head of litigation, demanding sworn answers to 21 detailed questions by September 30.
The dispute isn’t really about whether the Cybercab is dangerous. NHTSA has been careful to say it isn’t alleging that. What it wants to know is narrower, and in some ways more consequential: on what basis did Tesla decide that rules written for cars with human drivers simply don’t apply to a car that has none?
That question already has an answer on the books, from a company that tried almost the same thing four years earlier, and took a very different road to get there.
A Launch, an Audit, and a Sworn Order — All Inside Two Weeks
Tesla’s Cybercab program had been building toward this moment since February, when the first steering-wheel-less unit rolled off the line at Giga Texas. By July, more than 100 had been spotted testing across roughly 40 cities. On September 3, that testing became a business: Tesla opened paid Cybercab rides to the public in Austin through its Robotaxi app.
NHTSA moved fast. Audit Query AQ26002 opened the same day, hours after the launch. An audit query is the agency’s standard first step: a request for the technical basis behind a self-certification, not yet a legal demand.
That changed on September 10. NHTSA Chief Counsel Peter Simshauser issued a formal Special Order, a tool the agency last used against Tesla in 2023 during its Autopilot investigation. A Special Order carries legal weight. Tesla must respond in writing, under oath, with a company officer’s signature attesting the answers are complete and truthful.
The stakes attached to that signature are real. NHTSA’s order notes that failing to answer fully and honestly can bring civil penalties up to $139.35 million and, if the sworn statement is later found false, criminal penalties of up to 15 years in prison. Tesla’s deadline is September 30.
How a Car With No Brake Pedal Got Certified in the First Place
The United States doesn’t pre-approve car designs the way some countries do. Automakers self-certify that each model meets every applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, and NHTSA checks after the fact, stepping in when a certification looks wrong. Tesla certified the Cybercab as fully compliant with every FMVSS that applies to it, the operative word being applies.
Most of those standards were written assuming a human sits behind the wheel. FMVSS No. 135 states plainly: “The service brakes shall be activated by means of a foot control.” The Cybercab has no foot control of any kind. Request 19 of NHTSA’s order asks Tesla to explain, in detail, how it certified compliance with a rule that describes equipment the car doesn’t have.
A cluster of the other questions probes what NHTSA calls the make-inoperative trap. Tesla is known to use temporarily attached steering wheels and pedals during parts of its testing and certification process. If those controls were present when compliance was demonstrated and then removed before the car reached a customer, that could violate the federal prohibition on certifying a vehicle with required safety equipment installed and then stripping it out before delivery. The order lists the standards this touches: No. 101 on controls and telltales, No. 102 on shift-position display, No. 108 on self-cancelling turn signals tied to steering-wheel rotation, No. 111 on mirrors and rearview images, and No. 126 on stability-control telltales, each one written around a driver’s seat that, in the Cybercab, doesn’t exist.
Tesla’s likely defense is straightforward, and NHTSA’s order seems to anticipate it directly: rules built around a human operator shouldn’t apply to a vehicle whose driving task is handled entirely by software. NHTSA’s counter is just as direct. The agency is, in fact, in the middle of rewriting exactly these rules. It proposed eliminating the foot-brake requirement for automated vehicles back in June, one of eight rulemakings underway to, in Administrator Jonathan Morrison’s words, unleash American innovation. But a proposal is not a rule. Until that work is completed, NHTSA said, existing standards remain in force.
The Road Zoox Took, and the Bet Tesla Is Making Instead
Tesla is not the first company to build a robotaxi with no steering wheel. Amazon’s Zoox got there first, and chose the opposite strategy. In 2022, Zoox also self-certified its cube-shaped, controls-free pod as fully compliant. NHTSA asked the same questions it’s now asking Tesla, opened its own audit query, then a special order. The two sides were effectively deadlocked for about two years.
Eventually Zoox changed course. Rather than keep defending its self-certification, it applied for a Part 555 exemption, a formal regulatory pathway built for exactly this kind of vehicle. It won a demonstration-only exemption in August 2025, then cleared the final hurdle for a commercial exemption in July 2026. That approval lets Zoox charge for rides in its no-controls pods in Las Vegas, but it comes with a hard ceiling: no more than 2,500 vehicles added to the commercial fleet per year, through 2028.
Tesla built a similar vehicle and took the road not taken. It skipped the exemption application entirely, certified the Cybercab as already compliant, and started charging fares, with no cap, no waiting period, and no Part 555 filing on record. Axios described the situation as a regulatory game of chicken: both Tesla and the Trump administration’s NHTSA want fewer barriers to autonomous vehicles, but they may not agree on how fast Tesla gets to skip the line other companies are standing in.
Tesla’s engineering chief, Lars Moravy, said on the company’s most recent earnings call that Tesla has a great relationship with NHTSA and has been open and honest with the agency for years about its Cybercab plans. That confidence may be well founded, or it may not be. Until the Special Order is answered, Cybercab rides in Austin continue inside a limited, geofenced service area, at lower speeds, avoiding railroad crossings, restrictions Tesla adopted on its own, ahead of any requirement to do so.
What’s actually being tested here isn’t whether the Cybercab is safe to ride in tomorrow. It’s whether a company can scale a driverless vehicle to the millions of units Elon Musk has promised by treating decades-old safety rules as inapplicable by assertion, while a company that tried the same thing four years ago is still capped at 2,500 vehicles a year. NHTSA will have Tesla’s sworn answers by the end of the month. What it does with them is the part nobody outside the agency can yet predict.
Sources
- NHTSA, “NHTSA Opens Investigation into Tesla Cybercab Self-Certification Following Austin Deployment,” Sept. 4, 2026
- TechCrunch (Sean OKane, Kirsten Korosec), “Feds launch investigation into Tesla’s Cybercab deployment,” Sept. 4, 2026
- Axios (Joann Muller), “Tesla’s Cybercab triggers regulatory game of chicken,” Sept. 4, 2026
- Electrek (Fred Lambert), “NHTSA orders Tesla to prove its Cybercab is legal to sell, under oath,” Sept. 15, 2026
- Teslarati (Gene), “NHTSA just escalated its Tesla Cybercab investigation in a big way,” Sept. 16, 2026
- NHTSA Audit Query AQ26002, Special Order, Sept. 10, 2026
