NHTSA Opens Audit Into Tesla Cybercab’s Road-Legal Certification

Tesla’s Cybercab has only just started carrying paying passengers in Austin, but federal regulators are already taking a closer look at how the company certified the two-seater was cleared for U.S. roads.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an audit on September 3, just hours after the first Cybercabs hit Austin streets as part of Tesla’s commercial Robotaxi service.

The issue isn’t a crash or a reported defect. Instead, NHTSA wants to know how Tesla certified the Cybercab as meeting federal safety rules when it has no steering wheel, pedals or traditional side mirrors.

Tesla says the Cybercab complies with all safety standards that apply to it. Now NHTSA wants to see the work behind that conclusion, including “the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the Cybercab and related issues.”

One question regulators are looking at is whether Tesla determined that some Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) simply don’t apply to a vehicle designed from the start to drive itself.

U.S. rules are currently written around vehicles with a human driver. The Department of Transportation has proposed updating some of those requirements, including rules around brake pedals, but those changes aren’t finished yet.

The audit covers roughly 1,000 Cybercabs, although Tesla hasn’t put anywhere close to that number into service in Austin. As we reported earlier this week, Texas records showed 45 Cybercabs registered with the DMV.

An audit also doesn’t necessarily mean Tesla did anything wrong. Zoox went through a similar review before receiving an exemption in July that allows it to deploy up to 2,500 purpose-built autonomous vehicles per year for two years.

You can read the full NHTSA audit query below.