Tesla's steering-wheel-less Cybercab has a new problem: federal regulators want to know if the company skipped safety paperwork to get it on the road.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into Tesla's rollout of the Cybercab, a robotaxi built without a steering wheel or pedals. At issue is Tesla's self-certification process, the standard method automakers use to declare that a vehicle meets federal safety standards. NHTSA is examining whether Tesla decided that certain parts of that process simply do not apply to the Cybercab, rather than showing the vehicle meets them some other way.
Self-certification runs on an honor system: automakers judge their own compliance, and NHTSA polices it after the fact. A vehicle with no manual controls does not fit neatly into rules written with a driver in mind, and how Tesla filled those gaps is exactly what regulators are now probing. This is the kind of scrutiny that trails any vehicle designed around the assumption that no human needs to take over.
Tesla has leaned hard into robotaxi ambitions this year, and a design this unconventional was always going to draw a harder look than an ordinary car update. Whether "inapplicable" holds up as an answer is now NHTSA's call, not Tesla's.