Name: Tesla Cybercab
Brand: Tesla

Tesla is now taking orders from private buyers for the Cybercab, its two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel and no pedals, and the price Elon Musk promised turns out to be only half the bill. The car costs just under thirty thousand dollars. It will not move at all unless the owner also pays Tesla every month for what the company calls an Autonomy Subscription.

That changes what owning a car means. A conventional car goes anywhere once it is paid off. This one works only where Tesla says it works, and only while the subscription is active, so the first owners are buying a vehicle tied to the company’s Robotaxi service areas, a recurring fee Tesla controls and no way to take over when the software declines a route.

The order page, shared by Tesla’s official Robotaxi account on X together with the invitation email sent to “select customers,” lists the Cybercab at $29,990 before taxes. The $299 monthly subscription comes pre-checked, with the first month included, and the fine print reads: “Subscription and regular vehicle maintenance required to operate.” The email is blunter: “Only available in supported service areas. Subscription required for operation.” Placing an order takes a $1,000 non-refundable deposit.

The car itself matches the prototype Tesla has been touring: two seats, a 21-inch center touchscreen and 20.1 cubic feet of cargo space, slightly less than the 24.1 cubic feet a Model 3 offers across its front and rear trunks in a much larger body. Tesla calls the Cybercab fully autonomous and says owners will manage their rides through an app.

Musk promised a Cybercab “below $30,000” when he first showed it on stage, and the sticker technically delivers. The subscription is the number that matters. At $299 a month it adds $3,588 a year, and Electrek puts the five-year total at about $47,600 before insurance, charging, maintenance and taxes. Not a Tesla App points out that the fee is a subscription, which means Tesla can raise it later.

Where the car can go is the bigger catch. Tesla runs its Robotaxi service in eight cities, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and San Antonio in Texas and Miami, Orlando and Tampa in Florida, but it has not said which of those zones a privately owned Cybercab may use, and Austin is, according to Not a Tesla App, the only city where Tesla operates Cybercabs at all. The zones are also smaller than the maps suggest. Independent tracker Koby Pierce tested thousands of addresses in the Robotaxi app and found Tesla accepts pickups and drop-offs in only 59% to 78% of the advertised areas in the six cities he checked, and in about 59% of Austin’s.

A safety question is still open as well. NHTSA has ordered Tesla to show under oath that a car without a brake pedal meets federal safety standards that require one. According to Electrek, Tesla answered and asked for its entire response to be kept confidential, and the regulator has not ruled. Tesla is taking consumer orders anyway.

Current Tesla drivers have their own reason to frown. The Cybercab runs on the same AI4 computer as today’s Model Y, and Tesla already operates unsupervised Model Y robotaxis inside the same zones, yet owners who paid for Full Self-Driving are still waiting for unsupervised use on their own cars, which Tesla now points to around the second quarter of 2027. The purchase is also strictly personal: Not a Tesla App reads Tesla’s wording as ruling out ride-hailing or delivery work with the car.

The offer is US-only, invitation-only and limited at launch, with no announced plans for Europe, Asia or Latin America. Estimated deliveries start in December 2026 in Austin, Texas. Tesla opened a fleet-purchase interest form for businesses in September, and on its Q3 2026 earnings call it targeted first customer deliveries by year-end, while Musk said the company expected to own the vast majority of Cybercabs itself.

The first private owners will soon learn what a $30,000 car is worth when its maker sets the map, the monthly fee and, with no pedal under the driver’s foot, the brakes.

Tags: Folarin Balogun, Elon Musk, tesla, Victor Wembanyama, robotaxis, self-driving cars, NHTSA, Cybercab