All press is good press, right? Cybercab event leaves more questions than answers

0:00Welcome to Quick Charge. It is September 4th, 2026 and I'm your host, Joe Boris. Today's episode we are going to be challenging the old adage that all press is good press talking about the cyber cab that is of course Teslas two passenger robo taxi that was first being shown at the i robot event back in October of 2024. Tesla opened the search for cyber cab fleet sales but full self driving owners are still left out. This is an article by Jamie Dow. He wrote this 19 hours ago talking about Tesla started distributing a robo taxi collecting interest from fleet buyers who would want to build a robo taxi network or provide related infrastructure services. It is the first step in allowing non Tesla entities to make money off of Teslas FSD drivers to software but the owners who were promised that they be able to make passive income with their cars are still out of luck today was supposed to be Tesla's big cyber cab launch event where it finally put its steering wheelless two-seater autonomous taxes on the road but unlike most Tesla events this one has had little to know.

1:28There is no live stream media has been turned away and we have little to base anything on except for reports from hand pick Tesla super fans posting on twitter the white supremacist deep faked board website that is of course Jamie Dow's own words. I'm just reading them. Those are not my opinions on twitter because of course it's not twitter it's ex so yeah someone should have fact check that one there Jamie don't disparage twitter in this way. There is a number of questions related to this launch about where the car might be rolled down when whether it would have a steering wheel or not and how many actual cybercabs will be seen in the wild rather than just on the opening day or two we don't have answers to those questions instead we're going to look at this interest form for fleet buyers the form is labeled help us build our robo taxi network complete our interest form to be considered for future robo taxi opportunities not much information beyond that as to why exactly the opportunities bite be or might exist but the form collects names. The email address phone number and of course your company name it has further for check boxes to indicate your level of interest you only allowed to click one of them cybercab fleet vehicle purchasing mobility hubs and infrastructure event collaboration or other this is of course nearly seven years actually more than seven years after Elon Musk very dutifully explained that Tesla owners would be able to make money using their full self driving vehicles as taxis while they slept.

2:54It happened way back in 2019 when Musk said that a single robo taxi would be able to make 30,000 a year that was of course running hardware with the re on full self driving which by the way is not full self driving it is full self driving supervised and is itself in a pile of legal trouble following a number of nitsa investigations and this week has been a rough week in the press the cybercab that launched less than 24 hours later is already under nitsa investigation the investigation is about to be done. On an open audit for a number to 826002 from nitsa's office of defects saying it was prompted by public information according to the filing open September 3rd and covers an estimated 1000 cybercab vehicles which it should be noted is all of them. Nitsa says it's examining the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the cybercab in limited issues Tesla told the agency it certifies the vehicles as compliant with all federal motor vehicle safety standards and a plans to gradually expand deployment to more vehicles and more locations the question is how Tesla got there nitsa says it will consider the extent to which Tesla certification depended on determinations that certain FMV SS are in applicable to the cybercab now in the US most automakers

4:11don't get their vehicles pre approved by a regulator they self certify that a vehicle is going to meet the federal safety standards and nitsa can investigate after the fact if they so choose the system runs into a problem with the cybercab because many of the safety policies were written around a human driver they assume a steering wheel with an airbag in it a brake pedal side mirrors and controls that a driver can reach the cybercab doesn't have any of those. Tesla's answer was to decide sort of on its own that those standards simply don't apply to a car with no human controls and now nitsa wants to see the work behind that decision this is not happening in a vacuum Tesla's driverless ambitions are already under a stack of federal scrutiny nitsa has an open probe into full self driving covering 3.2 million vehicles after a series of visibility related crashes and collected crash data showing a Tesla remote operator crashed a robot taxi earlier this year. The cybercab runs on very similar fsd software the same kind of software that killed a motorcycle while operating on autopilot fsd that's according to Tesla's own data Tesla settled another fatal autopilot fire truck lawsuit avoiding a jury trial that jury trial of course would have led to more open discovery and revelations of Tesla's data and tracking test also confirmed that full self driving was active in a crash that killed a mother of 5 earlier this year.

5:36And a second test driver died stopped on a freeway with autopilot driving on and this was all in the last five days of these new stories broke and i'm sure there's a lot more if you want to get into it which would be true of any auto manufacturer especially manufacturer producing hundreds of thousands of millions of vehicles the difference is that this is all related to full self driving and we are taking a look at that specifically on the night that a robot tax service is supposed to roll out seven years after this was promised to all Tesla owners so the issue here is not Tesla the issue here is not the full self driving is not safe although a lot of people might want to debate that in the comments the issue here is one of promises made versus promises kept and we are still a long way from that but just so you don't think we're picking on Tesla unfairly we're going to pick on Waymo a little bit Waymo racked up 8,300 San Francisco parking tickets and over eight

6:36million dollars and fines since it started operating in that city in 2025 the single most common violation was parking in stands which are sponsored for buses and specific vehicles with over 2038 tickets right there the rest of the list reads like a catalog of dense city curbside problems parking and prohibited zones obstructing traffic double parking and blocking bike lanes a handful of addresses account for an outside share a spot at 85 North Peer Street near Fisherman's Warp through 577 citations on its own another at 150 Beach Street got 369 and a stretch of drum street in the financial district picked up 288 that clustering matters this is course written by Fred Lambert our editor in chief it points to specific pick up and drop off spots where the waymo driver keeps making the same call in places with heavy foot traffic and little legal curbs phase now waymo driver of course is the name of their software system the one that has been autonomously driving in several cities with thousands of vehicles very safely now for many many months and again they're not the only ones doing it zoos also has autonomous service now operating in Las Vegas and there are others coming out every day as well speaking of coming out every day it is

7:47Labor Day weekend so you're going to be out on the road and if you're making a road trip this year you already know diesel prices are super high gas prices are super high but if you're in EV you're going to be able to save some money and now if you're stopping in a Iona station you're going to save even more they're not doing nearly 50% off EV fast charging trips throughout Labor Day weekend don't forget universal EV if you're in Illinois that's a $15 flat chart and others are going to save you money on that trip as well don't forget about that be sure to like and subscribe here and hey go down to the comments and let us know what you think about this Robotexie thing we are not here trying to pick on Tesla it's not what's happening we're simply calling out the fact that if you say that you're going to deliver something and seven years later you still haven't it's a little bit weird to still have a rabid foaming fan base and you know they like to come into the comments from time to time and complain they still haven't convinced me otherwise but we'll see if they do it this time this will be it guys this will be the one