The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into Tesla’s Cybercab on Friday morning, just hours after the company put the first of the driverless vehicles on the streets of Austin, Texas.
TechCrunch reports that Elon Musk’s Cybercab has no steering wheel and no pedals. That runs headlong into federal vehicle safety rules requiring manual controls even in robotaxis. The Department of Transportation has proposed dropping those requirements for vehicles built to drive themselves, but the change hasn’t taken effect yet. Tesla told NHTSA it self-certified the Cybercab as compliant with all Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards anyway, which is the normal way automakers bring new vehicles to market.
NHTSA said it opened the investigation to “examine the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the Cybercab and related issues.”
This also happened to Amazon’s robotaxi company, Zoox. In 2022, Zoox self-certified its own vehicle, a cube-shaped robotaxi that also has no steering wheel or pedals. NHTSA hit back that year with a “special order” demanding information from Zoox, then formally launched an audit query in 2023, the same process now aimed at Tesla. Zoox was still deep in testing at the time, and the investigation stretched out its path to commercialization even as the company kept insisting its self-certification was sound.
The scrutiny didn’t stop there. In 2025, regulators granted Zoox an exemption to demonstrate its technology, though not to operate it commercially. Zoox had filed for a temporary Part 555 exemption from eight separate Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. That exemption got final approval in July 2026, clearing one of the last obstacles between Zoox and a commercial robotaxi launch, and letting the company add up to 2,500 vehicles a year to its fleet over the following two years. A few weeks later, Zoox opened commercial service and now charges for rides in Las Vegas
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