Austin is shaken. An American carmaker has begun selling passenger rides in cars with no steering wheel and no pedals, which is a polite way of saying the human has been removed from the dashboard and invited to sit still.

Body shops may still have a future. Regulators do not look bored. One day after the rides started, the national safety office opened an audit of nearly 1,000 Cybercabs and asked how a car with no conventional controls got certified in the first place. Tesla did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. Won't somebody think of the steering columns?

Satire. AI-generated video & voice. Not independently fact-checked. Entertainment only. Not financial advice.

We'll say this for Musk: launch the wheel-less taxi fleet in public, then hand Washington a reason to open the binders. It takes a special mind to debut the product and the investigation in the same news cycle.

On Sept 3, 2026, Tesla began commercial passenger rides in Austin using Cybercab vehicles with no steering wheel or pedals, per AP. On Sept 4, CNBC and AP reported that NHTSA opened an audit covering nearly 1,000 Cybercabs focused on how Tesla certified FMVSS compliance without conventional controls; CNBC reported Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Separately in the same window: Tesla AI said FSD Supervised v14.3.9 begins rolling out with collision-avoidance intervention even during manual driving; SpaceXAI reported a Memphis compute outage that took Grok down about 3.5 hours from ~6:30 a.m. PT Thursday before restoration.