DID-YOU-KNOW · Did you know
Two Kinds of Gold: The Cybercabs Testing in Chicago Are Not the Ones Giving Rides in Austin
Tesla's own first responder guide says Cybercab test vehicles can carry a steering wheel. A Chicago tracker who has followed the city's test cars since February says every Cybercab there has one.
Riley Cho, Features writer, Live desk
Published · 3 min read
CHICAGO - Not every gold Cybercab is the same car. The ones carrying riders in Austin have no steering wheel and no pedals. The ones learning the streets of Chicago, according to a local tracker, have both.
Trent, a Chicago photographer who posts about autonomous vehicle sightings as @tnertz, wrote on Wednesday that all the Cybercabs in Chicago have a Cybertruck steering wheel and pedals rigged in. Only Cybercabs with the "Cybercab" badging, he wrote, are the Level 4 cars without traditional controls, and so far those have been seen only in Austin, with Dallas coming soon.
Tesla's own paperwork allows for both. The company's Cybercab guide for first responders says the car "is not typically equipped with a steering wheel or acceleration and brake pedals," then adds: "Cybercab test vehicles can occasionally include a steering wheel for manual operation." The guide walks police and firefighters through moving those test cars with their controls. Joe Tegtmeyer, who posts as @JoeTegtmeyer, shared that page in June next to overhead photos of two Cybercabs, asking his followers if they knew there are two kinds of Cybercab.
Why keep a wheel in a car designed without one? Trent's answer is the cameras. The Cybercab's cameras sit in different places from those on the rest of Tesla's lineup, he wrote, so the self-driving AI model needs hundreds of thousands of validation miles on the new car. The wheel and pedals give a human driver a way to step in while those miles build up. A Cybercab photographed in Berkeley, Calif. showed what that looks like up close: a squared-off Cybertruck wheel bolted onto an exposed column.
Chicago has been a long classroom. Trent wrote that he has watched Cybercab "grow up" in the city since February. The first focus seemed to be neighborhood streets around Lakeview and a large six-way intersection, then highway driving. On Monday he posted a diagram of a Cybercab working a tight merge from South Canal Street onto Interstate 290, where there is only about 500 feet for the merge and an immediate lane change. Next, he wrote, may be the street closures around United Center events.
The test fleet's base is moving, too. On Wednesday, Trent marked the end of the South Loop Cybercab depot, where about a dozen Cybercabs were staged at a Tesla service center for six and a half weeks, from Aug. 28 to Oct. 14, before being moved to an asphalt lot on the Near West Side. A night earlier, he filmed a Cybercab gliding along the West Side.
So when a gold Cybercab shows up in a new city, check the badge, and look through the glass for a wheel. In Austin, the cab with no wheel is carrying riders. In Chicago, the cab with a wheel is still doing its homework, one tricky merge at a time.
