Cybercab (Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images)

It turns out Tesla’s Cybercab might need to have a steering wheel and pedals after all

Tesla’s Cybercab was supposed to be a steering-wheel-less alternative to its affordable mass market car.

10/29/25 8:24AM

When Tesla scrapped its plans for a low-cost consumer car, the company said that instead it would produce the low-cost Cybercab, an autonomous-only vehicle without a steering wheel and pedals meant for ride-hailing or personal use.

“I think having a regular $25,000 model is pointless,” CEO Elon Musk said on Tesla’s earnings call last October. “It would be silly, like it will be completely at odds with what we believe.” The vehicle was supposed to be available for ride-hailing this year and in “volume production” in 2026.

It looks like Tesla may be backtracking on those plans.

“If we have to have a steering wheel, it can have a steering wheel and pedals,” Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm told Bloomberg Tuesday.

Doing so would solve a number of problems for Tesla.

First off, it’s unclear whether Tesla’s technology is where it needs to be for cars to safely drive themselves without someone intervening. While Musk recently said the company now has “clarity” on achieving unsupervised Full Self-Driving, that’s not the same thing as rolling out unsupervised FSD to the public, which the company has long promised. Even the company’s robotaxis, which comprise about 30 Model Ys in a pilot program in Austin, still have a safety monitor in the passenger seat.

Then there’s also the thorny issue of getting approval for the driverless tech. Despite Musk’s lobbying efforts, regulators haven’t budged on certain safety standards, like requiring mass market cars to have steering wheels and pedals.

“The original Model Y was not going to have a steering wheel, or pedals,” Denholm told Bloomberg, saying the company has been here before. “If we can’t sell something because it needs something, then we’ll work with regulators to work out what we need to do.”

The release of the Cybercab could help solve issues with the company’s aging, relatively expensive lineup. Earlier this month, Tesla unveiled its “new” Model Ys and 3s, but they were mostly just lower-trim versions of existing Model Ys and 3s. Their lower prices had also been significantly undercut by the expiration of the government’s $7,500 EV tax credit. The Cybercab, which is supposed to cost around $25,000, would be both cheaper and newer than the company’s existing lineup.

Tesla hasn’t released a truly new model since the Cybertruck came out in 2023, and that has largely been a flop sales-wise. Tesla also generally offers far fewer options than competitors like BYD.

Jon Keegan48m

Meta reportedly expands Hyperion data center site, purchasing an additional 1,400 acres

Construction is humming along on Meta’s gargantuan Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana.

And Meta is seemingly already moving ahead with plans to greatly expand the site.

A new report from Forbes revealed that Meta has purchased an additional 1,400 acres adjacent to the construction site, increasing the overall size of the project by 62%. The massive size of the site is nearly 5-miles long, and 1-mile wide.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the site “will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.”

Meta is quietly expanding its $10 billion Hyperion AI data center, now sprawling to four times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park | Fortune

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the site “will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.”

$290K

Rani Molla2h

Tesla has been quoting the price of its long-awaited long-range Semi truck at $290,000, Electrek reports. The $290,000 price point represents a significant increase from the original $180,000, roughly 60% higher. However, it’s still well below the industry average for Class 8 electric semi trucks. California Air Resources Board data shows that the average cost of a zero-emission Class 8 truck was $435,000 in 2024, meaning Tesla is undercutting competitors by about $145,000.

On its last earnings call, Tesla said it would start production on the “designed for autonomy” electric commercial truck this year.

Jon Keegan3h

Report: OpenAI shuttering 4o model due to sycophancy that was hard to control

This week, OpenAI plans to permanently remove its 4o model from ChatGPT.

The model has developed an unusually devoted group of users. But it also has been criticized for being overly sycophantic and allegedly may have led to a series of dangerous outcomes for its users, including suicide, murder, and mental health crises.

The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI’s decision to shutter 4o stems from the fact that the company was not able to successfully mitigate these potentially dangerous outcomes, and wanted to move users to safer models. Thirteen lawsuits against OpenAI alleging harm from the use of ChatGPT have been consolidated into one case by a California judge, according to the report. At least some of them are tied to users of the 4o model.

The company says only 0.1% of ChatGPT users still choose to use the model, but with 800 million weekly users, that’s still a lot of people.

Fans of the 4o model are decrying the deprecation of the model, citing its unique ability to offer affirmation and support.

The decision to get rid of 4o illustrates the strange new world of moderation that AI companies must now figure out.

Inside OpenAI’s Decision to Kill the AI Model That People Loved Too Much

The company says only 0.1% of ChatGPT users still choose to use the model, but with 800 million weekly users, that’s still a lot of people.

Fans of the 4o model are decrying the deprecation of the model, citing its unique ability to offer affirmation and support.

The decision to get rid of 4o illustrates the strange new world of moderation that AI companies must now figure out.

Rani Molla3h

Morgan Stanley says solar manufacturing could add as much as $50 billion in value to Tesla

Tesla’s recently reported move into solar manufacturing could add $25 billion to $50 billion in value to the company’s energy business, Morgan Stanley writes.

The bank currently values the energy business at $140 billion, so an increase of as much as $50 billion isn’t anything to sneeze at, though it’s also a drop in the bucket of Tesla’s gargantuan $1.3 trillion market cap, or the $1 trillion opportunity Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives thinks is packed into Tesla’s AI and autonomy efforts.

Reporting on Tesla’s solar ambitions knocked First Solar shares lower last week. But Morgan Stanley writes that Tesla is unlikely to compete directly with the country’s leading photovoltaic panel maker, instead pairing it with its fast-growing energy business and using much of that production internally. Rather than adding solar panels to an already glutted global market, Tesla could use them internally to avoid supply chain bottlenecks and meet its own growing power demands.

The bank expects Tesla to vertically integrate its solar capacity to meet data center demand, including for data centers in space. (As we’ve noted, the mission of Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been seeming very similar to Tesla’s these days.)

“We believe the decision to allocate capital to adding solar capacity may be justified by the value creation and growth opportunities that having a vertically integrated solar + energy storage business can yield,” the Morgan Stanley note reads.

Notably, Morgan Stanley estimates the solar panel endeavor will cost Tesla $30 billion to $70 billion — a sum that Tesla didn’t include as part of its doubled $20 billion-plus capex plan this year.

Rani Molla

Hey Big Spender

How the Big Tech companies are spending their huge capex budgets

It’s mostly, but not all, for AI.