A version of Elon Musk’s Tesla Cybercabs have hit the streets of New York City, a transportation department official said on Thursday, revealing Tesla is the latest tech giant seeking to enter the country’s largest market.
Tesla officially launched the Cybercab — a fully autonomous taxi without a steering wheel — across six different cities in Texas and Florida last week. The service is marketed as a “fully autonomous fleet” that uses artificial intelligence and can be called on an app. The announcement said nothing about New York City. But in recent weeks a Gothamist reporter and an editor spotted the unusual sand-colored vehicles — which lack side mirrors — around the five boroughs.
There was a person sitting in the driver’s seat, behind the steering wheel.
The city transportation department said Tesla has been testing a “supervised” self-driving system, which allows a car to operate itself while also giving the driver the ability to take control of the vehicle at any point.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many of the vehicles are on the road in New York or how long Tesla will be testing the Cybercabs.
Tesla did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The driver of a Cybercab declined to answer any questions when a Gothamist reporter attempted to flag him down last weekend on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan. Late last month, another cybercab was spotted by a Gothamist editor at the entrance of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
Both vehicles had Texas license plates in the back and a Cybercab logo in the front.
The Cybercab’s arrival comes months after another autonomous e-hail app faced major pushback over its attempt to launch in New York.
Last year, the city gave Waymo, which is owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, a six-month permit to test its autonomous vehicles — with a driver behind the wheel. That permit expired in March.
Waymo, which touts a fully autonomous taxi service but which has a steering wheel in the driver’s seat, has continued to collect data, but without the self-driving feature.
Earlier this year, Gov. Kathy Hochul reversed a decision to allow a limited deployment of Waymo cars outside of New York City.
Under current state law, a human driver is required to operate a car and to keep a hand on a steering wheel at all times. The city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission said its rules don’t currently allow for the operation of autonomous vehicles for for-hire services.
“We take the arrival of [autonomous vehicle] technology very seriously, and we are closely monitoring AV developments in other cities, including the operational challenges and impacts on safety, congestion, emergency management, and driver pay,” TLC Commissioner Midori Valdivia said in a statement. “Not least among our concerns is the potential impact on the livelihoods of the 180,000 hardworking drivers who keep our city moving.”
The state Department of Motor Vehicles said Tesla had not applied for any autonomous vehicle testing permit.
Autonomous vehicles also face opposition from the city’s cab industry, which has faced relentless competition since Uber began operating in the Big Apple in 2011.
Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, said Tesla is just another tech company trying to force its way into the ride-hailing market, and that major questions remain about the autonomous vehicles’ safety.
“I think the strategy continues to be to make themselves look inevitable and so they’re sprinkling themselves in a number of cities across the country,” she said.