Hours after Tesla's Cybercab began carrying its first riders in Austin, the NHTSA opened an investigation into how Tesla self-certified a car with no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors as meeting federal safety standards by treating some rules as inapplicable.
At Tesla's September 3, 2026 event in Austin, the two-seat gold Cybercab, which has no steering wheel, no pedals and gull-wing doors, began carrying members of the public on open roads for the first time. Event attendees rode first; wider access starts Friday through the existing Robotaxi app, geofenced to parts of Austin. NHTSA said the same day it is evaluating the rollout, and Tesla Asia is teasing Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai.
On May 20, 2026 a 2025 Tesla Model 3 left Brazoswood Drive in Clute, Texas and hit the pool at Clute Municipal Park; the driver, 23-year-old Steven Alvarez, died. Police said their preliminary belief was a medical episode. Electrek's review of Tesla's Standing General Order crash reports to NHTSA found the automation status marked "Verified Engaged" at 104 mph, a figure that never appeared in public accounts. The narrative, software version and operating-area fields are redacted as confidential business information, which Electrek says is the case for 99.9% of Tesla's reports.
Tesla sent invitations to a September 3, 2026 event in Austin promising exclusive access to the Cybercab, the two-seat vehicle it revealed at the We, Robot event in October 2024 and the first car it has built with no steering wheel and no pedals. Guests rode it on a closed circuit in 2024 and employees got rides in July 2025, making this the first public outing. On August 20, 2026 the Nevada Transportation Authority approved permits allowing up to 5,000 Tesla robotaxis in Clark County over the next 12 months.
On August 20, 2026 the Nevada Transportation Authority unanimously approved Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permits for paid driverless rides in Clark County: up to 5,000 vehicles for Tesla over the next 12 months, 1,000 for Waymo and 1,000 for Uber, which runs its fleet through partnerships with Motional and Zoox, a ceiling of about 8,000 robotaxis in one county. Tesla's Cybercab chief engineer Eric Early called 5,000 a ceiling rather than a plan and said the company would be extremely happy to have around 2,500 cars running by this time next year. Tesla's July permit allowed 10 vehicles inside a Strip geofence, capped at 45 mph, with no airport pickups.
Tesla and SpaceX confirmed on August 6, 2026 that they are building their own chip factory, called Terafab, in Grimes County, Texas. The initial investment is $16.8 billion with at least 3,000 jobs and a footprint of more than 100 million square feet, and total spend across all phases could reach $119 billion. The site is meant to combine logic, memory, advanced packaging and testing under one roof, serving internal customers: Tesla's Optimus robots and Cybercabs and SpaceX's planned orbital data centers. Texas extended a $30 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant to SpaceX for the project.
Tesla's Q2 2026 results showed revenue of $28.24 billion, up 26 percent, and a record 480,126 deliveries, its first time crossing $100 billion in twelve-month revenue. But adjusted earnings of 33 cents per share missed the roughly 53 cents analysts expected, per Electrek, operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, and free cash flow went negative as spending shifts to AI and robots. On Optimus, Tesla says it is installing first-generation production lines and will start production soon, with the first robots collecting training data rather than going to customers.
A Bloomberg feature based on interviews with about a dozen people familiar with xAI reports that after SpaceX absorbed the company, dozens of employees left, including most cofounders, and Musk redeployed trusted lieutenants from Starlink and Tesla. Longtime Starlink executive Michael Nicolls became xAI president in April with a mandate to catch up with Anthropic's Claude. Per SpaceX's IPO filing, xAI posted a $2.47 billion operating loss on $818 million of revenue in Q1 2026, with AI capex of $7.7 billion in the quarter; the combined listing targets a valuation around $1.25 trillion.