The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into Tesla’s deployment of its Cybercab autonomous vehicle on public roads, raising questions about the company’s certification process for a vehicle that lacks traditional manual controls. The probe was launched on Friday morning, just hours after Tesla put the first Cybercabs on the streets of Austin, Texas.
At the heart of the investigation is the Cybercab’s design, which features no steering wheel or pedals. This presents a potential conflict with federal vehicle safety regulations that currently require manual controls like brake pedals. However, the regulatory landscape may be shifting, as the Department of Transportation recently proposed removing these brake pedal requirements specifically for vehicles designed to operate autonomously.
Tesla informed NHTSA that it had self-certified the Cybercab as compliant with all Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, following the traditional process that automakers use to verify their vehicles meet federal requirements. The agency’s investigation will examine the process and technical data Tesla relied upon when making this certification, including the extent to which the company determined that certain federal motor vehicle standards were inapplicable to the Cybercab.
This is not the first time NHTSA has scrutinized an autonomous vehicle lacking traditional controls. In 2022, Amazon-owned Zoox self-certified its cube-like robotaxi, which similarly lacks a steering wheel and pedals. NHTSA opened a special order inquiry into Zoox the following year in 2023, launching the same type of audit query process now being applied to Tesla. The investigation slowed Zoox’s path to commercialization, even though the company was still primarily in its testing phase at the time.
Zoox maintained that the self-certification process was sufficient, but ultimately went through additional regulatory channels. In 2025, the federal agency granted Zoox an exemption to demonstrate its technology. The company then filed for a temporary Part 555 exemption from eight Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to enable commercial operations with paying customers.
Zoox received final approval for that exemption in July 2026, clearing one of the last major regulatory hurdles before launching commercial service. The exemption includes specific limitations: Zoox can add 2,500 vehicles per year to its commercial fleet over a two-year period. Following this approval, Zoox launched its commercial robotaxi service in Las Vegas several weeks later, now offering rides to paying customers.
Whether Tesla will face a similarly lengthy regulatory process remains uncertain. The precedent set by Zoox suggests that even with self-certification, autonomous vehicles without traditional controls may face heightened scrutiny and require additional exemptions before receiving full approval for commercial deployment on public roads.
