Anyone who attended the VivaTech tech fair in Paris, France, on Thursday got a peek at Tesla’s much-hyped Cybercab, a two-seater robotaxi that won’t include a steering wheel or pedals. It’s unclear if Cybercabs will ever be hitting the roads, as Elon Musk’s company is still working to develop them, but the Trump regime announced Friday it wants to make the approval process much easier, since any vehicle that doesn’t have a steering wheel needs to get a special exemption that can take years.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a letter on Friday to say it was going to “prioritize safety” and “unleash innovation” by streamlining approvals for exemptions to basic safety standards for automated driving systems.
“To facilitate automated driving systems (ADS) technology reaching its full potential to transform roadway safety, NHTSA is streamlining its exemption process for commercial deployment of vehicles and adopting a dynamic and flexible approach to evaluating these exemptions,” the letter reads.
“These improvements will allow NHTSA to process ADS and other exemptions more quickly while also allowing NHTSA to prioritize safety through a tailored and progressive operational oversight approach,” the letter continued.
Federal safety standards require that vehicles driving on U.S. roads feature the kinds of basic things that you’d expect, because if something goes wrong, humans need to be able to control the vehicle. But the new letter from NHTSA says approvals for these kinds of vehicles can result in “long processing times,” and the agency wants to “ensure that exemptions remain effective tools for nurturing groundbreaking safety technologies.”
The Cybercab doesn’t exist yet, though Musk promised during the big announcement event back in October 2024 that they’d be available in 2-3 years. Musk is planning to launch a different kind of robotaxi service in Austin this month, though the final date is still uncertain. There had been rumors it would occur on Thursday, but that didn’t happen, and it sounds like it’ll be later this month, according to Musk.
“Tentatively, June 22. We are being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift,” Musk tweeted on June 10. “First Tesla that drives itself from factory end of line all the way to a customer house is June 28.”
Unlike the Cybercab, Musk’s new robotaxi service in Austin just uses regular Tesla Model Y vehicles that anyone can buy. It’s still not clear how much remote control will be used by operators at a distance. If history is any guide, there could be a lot of teleoperation, just as Musk has used in his public demonstrations for his Optimus robots.
As Bloomberg notes, Musk contributed over $250 million to help get Trump elected, and streamlining regulatory approvals for his companies was considered a top priority. But he does need to make the product first. Several articles have claimed Cybercab production will start in late 2026, but Musk has a long history of missing deadlines, if not failing to deliver on products entirely.
If the billionaire oligarch is ever able to produce the Cybercab, the regulatory approvals will probably be much, much easier, provided Musk stays in the good graces of Trump. The Tesla CEO did essentially accuse Trump of being a pedophile recently. But what’s a little pedo accusations between friends?
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