Inside the cabin: two seats, a screen, and nothing to hold

The first thing you notice is the missing thing. There is no steering wheel occupying the left half of the cabin. There is no column. There are no pedals waiting for a foot that is not supposed to exist. Two black lounge seats sit side by side, a pair of cupholders between them, and a landscape screen hanging in the middle of a dashboard that is really just a wall.

Tesla engineers have said the two-seat layout is not a styling stunt. It is how you make a robotaxi cheap to clean, cheap to build, and efficient to run. Four seats would have meant a longer floor, more doors, more carpet, more of everything that riders destroy. Two seats means the car can be a coupe. A coupe can be small. Small is the point of a vehicle that is supposed to cost less than $30,000 to manufacture.

The cabin is utilitarian to the edge of rudeness. Carpet. Leather-ish seating. A screen that, in the cars shown so far, plays promotional video of the Cybercab itself — a hall of mirrors Tesla cannot resist. There is room, Tesla says, for a service animal and some assistive devices. There is not room for a family, a week of groceries, or the American idea of a car as a closet that moves.

That deletion is the feature. Ride-hailing already trained people to sit in the back of someone else’s car and look at a phone. The Cybercab removes the someone else. What is left is a quiet, slightly cheap lounge that drives itself. If you came for a cockpit, you came to the wrong vehicle. If you came for a ride, the missing wheel is the whole product.

Night video from Austin shows riders stepping up through a butterfly door that lifts like a canopy. The motion is theatrical; the interior is not. Tesla is betting that passengers will forgive the carpet if the door makes them feel like they boarded something from a different decade. So far the people boarding are employees. In two weeks, if the invite holds, they will not be.