Tesla's camera-only Cybercab robotaxi service begins in Austin

Musk has staked his company and his trillion-dollar pay package on the Cybercab, a purpose-built autonomous vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals. It uses a modified version of Tesla's Full Self-Driving software, which remains a Level 2 driver-assist system for ordinary car owners. In the Cybercab, the software is overseen by remote operators who could in theory intervene if something goes wrong. Musk's core argument has long been that people drive with their own two eyes, so cameras should be enough for a robot.

Tesla removed radar from its vehicles in 2022 despite internal warnings that cameras alone could be fooled by rain or sunlight. Cameras return two-dimensional images, so depth and distance must be approximated by neural networks, leaving the system vulnerable to glare and bad weather, while lidar and radar can often pierce through such conditions. Musk has nonetheless called lidar "a fool's errand" and said in 2019 that "anyone relying on lidar is doomed."

The Cybercab must navigate complex, unpredictable city streets without human supervision. The Verge notes that Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving have been linked to dozens of fatalities and thousands of crashes. With no human fallback inside the vehicle, Tesla will now bear full legal responsibility if its technology fails—a departure from its past practice of blaming accidents on drivers.

Waymo, which pairs lidar with cameras and radar, currently operates 4,000 fully driverless vehicles in as many as 14 U.S. cities, making it the largest robotaxi fleet in the country, and perhaps the world. Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov recently said that if the goal is to beat human drivers on safety, "weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early."

Few of Musk's past predictions about self-driving cars have come to pass, yet the Cybercab is now carrying passengers on public roads. The question of how safe is truly safe enough is no longer theoretical.