Pittsburgh Leads the Sightings Board. Austin Still Takes the Fares.

PITTSBURGH - On the community sightings board that tracks Cybercab pins city by city, Pittsburgh sits first. MyCybercab.com lists 26 approved sightings here, 11 of them with photographs. Austin, Texas, is second with 24. That ranking is not a fare table. It is a count of where spotters have logged the gold two-seater. The paid product still lives in Austin.

The gap is small and the meaning is not. Two extra pins put a Pennsylvania metro ahead of the only city where a rider can open the Robotaxi app, book a Cybercab, and pay for the mile. Tesla opened that hail service in limited Austin zones on Sept. 3. Pittsburgh has no Book button in the same app. The leaderboard does not sell a ride. It counts hardware on the street.

Keep the lanes straight. Spotters have logged the coupe on the Parkway East approach to the Squirrel Hill tunnels, on Banksville Road, and on the Robinson-area pike toward Crafton. Those are the kinds of local marks that built Pittsburgh's lead. They prove presence. They do not prove a geofence, a depot ribbon-cutting, or a Pennsylvania hail launch. Readers who treat first place as a soft open will overread the board.

MyCybercab's national table still has the same shape the desk filed overnight. San Diego, Houston, and Salt Lake City hold the next rungs. San Francisco and San Jose keep California on the volume chart. Jacksonville, Dallas, and Memphis fill the rest of the top ten. Across the whole board the site has counted 425 approved sightings in 165 cities. Pittsburgh's edge is volume. Austin's edge is the product.

Austin's 24 pins come with 20 photographs, the denser camera record at the top of the table. Pittsburgh's 26 pins come with 11 photos. Last-seen stamps put Pittsburgh more recently in view than Austin's sighting clock. That is a map fact, not a service fact. Austin riders already know the other clock: wait times and quotes in the Robotaxi app.

The rest of the map is still learning. Testing corridors, charge stops, and community sightings are how the expansion story usually arrives first. Tesla has not announced paid Cybercab hail for Pittsburgh. Treat any claim that a leaderboard rank equals open service as false. Treat the rank itself as useful: the purpose-built coupe is accumulating more approved public pins in Pittsburgh than in the launch city, while the launch city remains the only place this desk can report a fare.

Street photographs already in the public record show what those pins describe. A gold Cybercab in express-lane traffic with a skyline ahead. The same silhouette on a Long Beach curb beside Atlantic Avenue and Fourth Street. A Supercharger stall beside strip-mall storefronts. Highway asphalt with a sound wall for a backdrop. None of those frames invents a Pittsburgh fare. Together they show why a ranking story belongs on the Robotaxi rail: the car looks at home on American streets, and the board is now keeping score.

For Tesla and for Cybercab as a product, the split is a good-light signal when it is read honestly. Hardware is traveling. Spotters in a steel city have logged it more often than spotters in the hail city, at least on this volunteer table. The company can keep collecting those miles while Austin carries the paid load. Expansion will still be measured by when a second city gets a real Book button, not by who sits first on a sightings leaderboard.

Watch the next clearances on MyCybercab. Watch for any Tesla notice that extends Cybercab hail beyond Austin. Until either arrives, the verified ranking story stops here. Pittsburgh leads the board with 26 approved sightings. Austin is second with 24, and Austin still takes the fares.

Sam Ellison is a staff writer covering the broader Robotaxi beat - app changes, fleet counts, and the stories that sit between production and policy.