AINEWS
Tesla's Cybercabs are gold, two seat EVs with no steering wheel. A day before a 767 cargo jet killed five at MIA, a video showed 35 of them staged in a commercial lot.
An Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo plane overran the runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday, killing five people in a cleaning-crew cargo van and an SUV that were struck just past the airport fence. The plane came to rest a few dozen yards from a parking lot where, the day before, EV influencer Sawyer Merritt had filmed 35 Tesla Cybercabs staged in rows.
The Federal Aviation Administration has closed MIA until further notice as investigators sort the wreckage. Five people died in the ground vehicles, not on the aircraft; the Boeing 767 crew survived. Amazon said the company is cooperating with the National Transportation Safety Board.
The Cybercabs were never in the plane's path. They sat in a truck-trailer rental lot on the airport's edge, a staging area, not a Tesla depot, and not part of any active Robotaxi fleet. The day before the crash, Sawyer Merritt posted a video of the lot, counting 35 Cybercabs in a single frame. A follow-up post the next day showed the same lot after the crash.
Cybercabs are Tesla's purpose-built robotaxi: a gold, two-seat electric vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals, intended to operate only through Tesla's app-based ride-hail service. Tesla launched the Cybercab service the prior week in a limited coverage area in Austin, Texas, the first public deployment of a vehicle designed without driver controls. Miami's Tesla robotaxi service is still running the older Model Y, a five-seat SUV with a steering wheel and pedals, as it has since the Miami service began in early July with two vehicles and grew to three two days later. The Cybercabs at MIA were not picking up passengers and were not part of any deployed fleet visible in Miami.
The Cybercab program is also under an open NHTSA investigation (INOA-AQ26002-17078), opened in the same window as the limited Austin launch. Tesla's Robotaxi rides in Austin had human safety monitors in the driver's seat until late last month, when the cars appear to have gone fully unsupervised, days before the Cybercab rollout began. The Cybercab launch has already produced federal scrutiny and at least one reported snag in the first week.
Elon Musk, asked about the near-miss, called it "Weird" on X. Musk has separately said Cybercabs are meant to be sold to individuals for personal use and as a source of passive income. Tesla has not published fleet numbers, deployment counts, or the geographic timeline for a Miami Cybercab launch.
Miami's active Tesla robotaxi fleet is three Model Ys; the lot a few hundred yards from the crash held more than ten times that many Cybercabs, not counting whatever else Tesla has staged. The mismatch is not a deployment failure on its own, pre-positioning is a normal fleet launch step, but the visible rows in a third-party commercial lot suggest hardware is arriving faster than the limited Austin service area can absorb it.
The 35-Cybercab count is an observation from a third-party video, not a Tesla fleet disclosure. The lot is a working truck-trailer rental yard, not a Tesla showroom or a robotaxi depot. The parked cars are staged hardware, the live service is three Model Ys in Miami and a week-old Cybercab launch in Austin, and the open question is what the staged cars are for: pre-positioning for a Miami Cybercab launch, fleet accumulation while demand is built, or overflow from a ramp that has outrun the geography the service can serve. NHTSA's investigation is the next read on the rollout, and the MIA crash is the next read on what, exactly, was sitting just past the airport fence.