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 9:24AM

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.

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5