AINEWS
Tesla's Cybercab specs are public. Its self-driving hardware isn't.
The EPA filing for Tesla's planned robotaxi confirms its weight and range, but says nothing about the sensors or software that would let it actually drive itself.
The EPA filing for Tesla's planned robotaxi confirms its weight and range, but says nothing about the sensors or software that would let it actually drive itself.
Tesla's EPA filing for the Cybercab gives us one number above all others: 3,113 pounds. That is the vehicle's curb weight, and it lands roughly 700 pounds below the lightest current Model 3 sedan, according to Utkarsh Sood's reporting for New Atlas on Tesla's EPA certification documents. The gap is a hint at what Tesla is trying to build: a small, light, short-trip urban robotaxi, not a long-range cruiser.
The rest of the spec sheet, drawn from the same EPA filing and Sood's summary of it, fits that brief. A 47.6 kWh battery pack pairs with a 219 horsepower front-mounted AC permanent-magnet motor and a front-wheel-drive layout, both unusual choices for Tesla. Regenerative braking is routed through the front wheels. EPA estimates put the Cybercab at about 418 miles of mixed range and 375 miles of highway range on the agency's multi-cycle test. Tesla rolled the first Cybercab off the line at Gigafactory Texas in February, per the same filing.
What the documents do not list is, for a vehicle Tesla has been pitching as a robotaxi, the more important page. The filing says nothing about the sensor suite (cameras, radar, lidar, ultrasound), the onboard compute platform, the software version, or any reference to the autonomy level the vehicle is designed to operate at. Those omissions are not unusual for an EPA certification, which is built to verify emissions and range, not driver-assistance capability. But they leave unanswered the only question that matters for a robotaxi: can this car actually drive itself, and under what conditions?
The mechanical choices hint at Tesla's answer. A 219 hp front motor and a curb weight under two tons point to a vehicle tuned for low-speed city work and frequent stops, not highway merging or long routes. Compare that to the lightest Model 3, which is rear-wheel-drive and roughly 3,900 pounds. The Cybercab is closer in weight to a Toyota GR86 than to anything Tesla has sold under its own badge. New Atlas notes the Cybercab is, mechanically, closer to a small sports coupe than to a Model 3, and a small front-driven coupe is exactly the body an urban robotaxi brief would ask for.
Still, a robotaxi pitch is not a robotaxi without the autonomy stack. Tesla has been promising unsupervised Full Self-Driving for years, and the Cybercab, with no steering wheel in the production design Tesla has shown, is the vehicle that pitch depends on. An EPA filing cannot tell us when that capability lands. For that, the readable signals are elsewhere.
The next data points to watch are the regulatory filings Tesla has yet to make public. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration exemption process, which Tesla would need for a vehicle without traditional controls, is one. The California DMV's autonomous vehicle testing and deployment permits are another, and the FCC equipment authorizations for any new radar or wireless compute hardware are a third. Tesla has also publicly committed to a next unsupervised-FSD milestone. The date Tesla sets, and whether it slips, will be the most direct read on the gap between the EPA-filed Cybercab and the working robotaxi the company has been selling.
The EPA document, in other words, is necessary and not sufficient. It tells us the Cybercab exists, what it weighs, and how far it goes on a charge. It does not tell us whether the vehicle that rolls off the line in Texas can do the one thing its name implies.