Tesla has changed how a driverless ride is booked. The Robotaxi listing in the App Store was updated on 3 September 2026 to show two vehicles side by side, and riders now choose which one they want before hailing.
What the app shows
The two options are the Cybercab, described in Tesla's own listing as "our first purpose-built autonomous vehicle", and the Model Y. The first is a two-seater with no steering wheel and no pedals; the second is the four-seat SUV that has done all of Tesla's driverless work so far. The screenshot that surfaced the change, posted by Sawyer Merritt, shows a gold Cybercab offered in Austin.
Cybercab availability is listed for Austin first. The service remains reachable only through the Robotaxi app.
Why a picker is the interesting part
Every ride-hailing app has vehicle tiers, so a chooser looks unremarkable until you consider what Tesla is choosing between. The two cars are not different trim levels of the same service. One carries two people and cannot be driven by a human at all; the other carries four and, until now, has been the entire fleet.
Offering the choice means Tesla expects both to be available often enough that a rider picking one will not face an unreasonable wait. That is a claim about fleet size, not about software.
It also creates a genuine trade-off for riders. A two-seat Cybercab rules out a group of three, and it has no boot in the sense a Model Y does. Against that, it is the novelty — the car that has been shown at events for two years and never carried a member of the public.
What we still do not know
Tesla has not published pricing for either option, has not said whether choosing a Cybercab costs more or less than a Model Y, and has not given wait-time expectations. Nor has it said how many Cybercabs are in service. What is on record is that Tesla registered 45 Cybercabs on the Texas robotaxi register in a single filing, and that the driverless Model Y fleet grew sevenfold in three weeks. On those numbers the purpose-built cars remain a small minority.
Tesla's existing driverless Model Y service runs in limited parts of Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa. None of those cities except Austin is listed for the Cybercab.
The timing
The app change landed on the day of Tesla's Cybercab launch event in Austin, an invite-only affair at which members of the public are expected to ride in the vehicle for the first time. An App Store listing is a more reliable indicator than an event teaser, because it is a commitment Tesla has to honour when someone opens the app.
What it means for Europe
For European readers the vehicle itself is the open question rather than the app. A car with no steering wheel and no pedals has no route to type approval in the EU today, and TeslAnt has covered how Tesla plans to move one at all — through on-screen controls rather than a wheel.