Tesla's wheel-less Cybercab still has a steering wheel. It is a D-pad on a screen

Matthew Skrzypczak sat down in an Austin Cybercab on 7 September and found the car already in a mood Tesla did not intend to show a rider. The centre screen was split. On the left, a grey box with a virtual joystick, labelled forward at the top and reverse at the bottom, plus buttons to stop, honk and open the doors. On the right, camera views that looked frozen on a Supercharger stall from somewhere the car had already been.

"When I got in the vehicle, the display was in a different configuration with a virtual joystick for manual driving," he wrote on X. "I have a feeling I wasn't supposed to see this... but I try to manually drive the vehicle anyway!"

The car did not move. Autonomy watcher David Moss posted a similar clip the same day. Two riders, two glitches, one interface Tesla has never put on a stage.

The Cybercab's public pitch, since paid Austin rides began on 3 September, is that it does not need a steering wheel or pedals because it drives itself. NHTSA opened an audit of that claim the same day, covering roughly 1,000 vehicles and asking how Tesla certified a car with no permanently attached manual controls. YouTube riders who took the two-seater around town, including Devin Olsen, show the intended choreography: butterfly doors, a tap on Start Ride, and a quiet trip. Ride footage reviewed by InsideEVs describes hitting that button on a roughly 21-inch screen and letting the car take over. Sawyer Merritt, in footage InsideEVs reviewed, called the ride "perfectly boring," which is the compliment a robotaxi wants.

The joystick is the tool Tesla needed for the parking lot. InsideEVs, matching Skrzypczak's video with an earlier clip of a Tesla operator sliding a Cybercab at a Supercharger, put the speed cap at about 7 mph. Electrek's Fred Lambert treated it as the workaround for a car that still has to be nudged in a depot, then added the part that is harder to wave away: a touchscreen D-pad is a thin answer to a regulator asking what happens when a driverless car needs a human.

Tesla's first-responder manual, quoted by InsideEVs, is drier. "In situations where Cybercab is operable, Cybercab can be manually moved with onboard vehicle controls." Crews are told to call Tesla support and hold a badge up to the car's cameras to unlock that mode. In October 2025, Tesla chair Robyn Denholm had already left a door open: "If we have to have a steering wheel, it can have a steering wheel and pedals."

NBC News reported on 9 September that Austin's fire department is worried about a stalled Cybercab blocking a city street, with nothing conventional to grab. Firefighters were trained to move the robotaxi with its touchscreen. One captain who took that training told NBC it is "not the silver bullet" and wants federal standards.

Tesla's written first-responder plan, described by NBC four days earlier, also tells crews they can push the car to clear a lane. The same document warns that pushing it when it is not in Neutral or Tow Mode can overheat the motor and carry a shock risk. Gizmodo quoted a further line from the guide: "If necessary, manually turn the front tires by hand to help position the vehicle."

So the backup stack, in order, runs: call Tesla and flash a badge, poke a D-pad that two riders found already drawn on the screen, push the car, or put both hands on a tire. None of those is a steering wheel. The Verge's Andrew J. Hawkins noted that the on-screen controls would let depot staff rearrange cars without ringing a remote operator, which is a fair job for a joystick. It is a less fair job for a firefighter on an Austin street at 2 a.m.

Skrzypczak could drag the stick. The graphics followed his finger. The Cybercab stayed put, which is the one mercy in the clip. If a hidden service menu can be left up for a customer, the same menu can be left up for someone who should not have it. InsideEVs asked the question Tesla still has not answered in public: if random riders can see the controls, what keeps someone else from using them once the mode is actually live?

Tesla has not demonstrated the joystick. It has not explained why two Austin rides in the first week of service arrived with the depot interface still on the glass. The car that was supposed to make manual controls obsolete still needs a human to park it. For now, that human is expected to do the job with a finger on a screen, a badge in front of a camera, or both hands on a tire.