The Cybercabs in New York have steering wheels — and 45, not 1,000, are registered in Texas

Gothamist reported on 10 September 2026 that sand-coloured Cybercabs, lacking side mirrors, have been seen across New York City's boroughs — with a person sitting in the driver's seat behind a steering wheel. The city's transportation department said Tesla is testing a "supervised" self-driving system there, one that drives itself while letting the driver take over at any point. Neither the number of vehicles nor the duration of the test has been disclosed. This is a different configuration from the cars Tesla put into paid service in Austin on 3 September, which are built with no steering wheel, no pedals and no mirrors — a fact confirmed by multiple outlets at launch and unchanged by the New York sightings.

Why it matters

Two things got conflated this week and both are worth separating, including one we contributed to.

The first is the New York cars. "Cybercab spotted with a steering wheel" travelled as evidence that Tesla's core promise was hollow. It is not: a supervised test fleet needs a driver, a driver needs controls, and running FSD validation in Manhattan traffic with a human ready to intervene is the conservative choice, not the embarrassing one. What the sighting does show is that "Cybercab" now names at least two different vehicles, and that the one most people will encounter first is the one with a wheel in it.

The second is ours. Our tracker entry repeated NHTSA's audit scope — roughly 1,000 Cybercabs — in a sentence about the Austin deployment, which reads as a fleet size. It is not one. About 45 Cybercabs are registered in Texas; the ~1,000 figure describes the self-certified population the audit query reaches, not cars carrying passengers. We have corrected the entry. The distinction matters beyond bookkeeping: a regulator auditing the paperwork behind a thousand vehicles while forty-five are on the road is a very different picture from a thousand driverless cars already in service, and the second picture is the one the coverage left behind.

Tesla has separately begun canvassing companies about fleet purchases, and has announced capacity for as many as 125,000 Cybercabs a year. Against 45 registered, that is the gap this tracker exists to keep visible.

What to watch

Whether Tesla discloses how many Cybercabs are actually deployed and where, whether the New York test converts into a driverless permit application, and what AQ26002 concludes.