EVwire brief: A Cybercab rider has captured video of a virtual joystick interface on the robotaxi's touchscreen, revealing the backup controls Tesla employees seemingly use to manually reposition the driverless vehicles. The manual controls happened to be onscreen when the rider entered a two-seat Robotaxi.
Matthew Skrzypczak shared the discovery on X:
Skrzypczak noted that the Cybercab's fender cameras were still showing a Supercharger location, suggesting a Tesla employee had last used the manual controls to reposition the vehicle at a charging station.
Interestingly enough, the virtual controls line up with earlier footage showing a Tesla employee inside a Cybercab at an Austin Supercharger, who was spotted seemingly using onscreen controls to pull the vehicle out of a stall.
Here’s that video (it’s at 0:17 in the second video):
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The controls make sense as an engineering solution. The Cybercab is designed from the ground up to be fully autonomous, but there are situations where a human needs to nudge it. Virtual directional buttons on the touchscreen give technicians a way to do that without bolting temporary hardware onto a production vehicle.
We’re speculating here, but there’s definitely a nonzero chance that the driver of the Cybercab at the Austin Supercharger was manually moving the vehicle from the screen.
The touchscreen controls make sense, but they’re not optimal for moving the Cybercab manually. (Source)
This Tesla employee definitely looks like he was pressing on the touchscreen when the Cybercab was moving. (Source)
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Context:
Tesla's Cybercab launched on September 3 in Austin, Texas, as a purpose-built, two-seat robotaxi without any traditional driving controls. Passengers request rides through the Robotaxi app and the vehicle handles all driving via FSD Unsupervised. The vehicle features butterfly doors that open automatically, motorized seats with touchscreen-adjustable recline, and a 20.2-cubic-foot (572-liter) trunk. Its dashboard runs on Unreal Engine and includes trip controls and media apps for passengers.
More from EVwire's Cybercab launch coverage:
Cybercab public rides start 4th September across the full Texas geofence, as Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi fleet crosses 1 million cumulative miles driven without a human behind the wheel.
The Cybercab motor uses zero rare earth metals, with a drive unit that is 18% smaller and 25% lighter than competing designs. A hairpin stator hits 70% slot fill factor, and ferrite magnets in a Halbach array replace neodymium.
The Cybercab Rider Guide covers butterfly doors that open automatically via phone detection, motorized seatbelts with haptic feedback, and an emergency stop button between the dome lights.
Tesla has also gone live with a page where interested customers can order the Cybercab.
Everything we know about the Cybercab: full specs, dimensions, cabin details, engineering breakdown, and safety features in one place.
Source: Matthew Skrzypczak and Robotaxi Radar on X
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