No service running/ Current step: Fleet operator selection
Where things standNWABentonville · Rogers · Springdale · Fayetteville · XNA
Tesla put a two-seat, steering-wheel-less cab into paid service in Austin on 3 September 2026, and the same day asked which businesses want to run fleets of them. We applied for this market. Nothing is operating here yet — not ours, not anyone’s — and this site will keep saying so until that changes.
01 — What is actually known
All of it from public reporting, none of it from a conversation with Tesla. Verified 6 October 2026 — if you are reading this much later, check it again.
Tesla launched it in Austin on 3 September 2026 and paid rides began the next day. It is a real vehicle on real roads, not a concept — but it is geofenced to Austin, and Tesla named no second city and gave no expansion calendar.
No steering wheel, no pedals, no side mirrors. 48 kWh, around 219 hp, roughly 293 miles of range, a consumer target price under $30,000 and a stated operating-cost target under $0.30 a mile.
The production car has a NACS port and DC fast charges at Superchargers. It has no onboard AC charger, so there is no Level 2 and no wall connector. Inductive charging has been demonstrated at 19–25 kW and is described as a planned fleet feature — a depot needs the cable now and the pads later.
Tesla removed Cybercab from its 2026 volume-production list six weeks before the Austin launch. About 45 were registered for commercial use at launch; by early October that was 169 in Austin, and NHTSA puts the US population at about 1,000. Its chief engineer told regulators to expect roughly 2,500 vehicles within the year.
NHTSA opened audit query AQ26002 the day paid rides started, covering about 1,000 vehicles, then escalated on 10 September to a special order: 21 questions a Tesla officer had to answer under oath by 30 September 2026. It asks how a car with no brake pedal meets a rule requiring service brakes be foot-operated, and whether temporary driver controls were fitted for the certification tests. Tesla holds no Part 555 exemption. The deadline has passed and neither Tesla nor NHTSA has said whether answers were filed or more time was granted. No recall, suspension or operating ban has been issued, and Austin service continues.
On 3 September 2026 Tesla published an interest form with four options — fleet vehicle purchasing, mobility hubs and infrastructure, event collaboration, other — and a field for your region. We submitted Northwest Arkansas.
02 — What nobody knows yet
Other regional sites fill this space with projected returns per vehicle. Those numbers are built on a take rate Tesla has never published. Here is the actual state of the information.
03 — Where a local operator fits
Waymo–Uber in Austin and Atlanta. Waymo–Lyft in Nashville. Avis in Dallas. Hertz for Uber in San Francisco. Four independent deals, one shape — and the right-hand column is a real operating business with staff, a building, and a phone that gets answered at 3am.
The manufacturer keeps
The local operator owns
This is the work we are building toward. None of it requires permission to start thinking about, and all of it is what an operator gets judged on.
04 — How we intend to run it
Written down now, in public, so they can be held against us later.
The production Cybercab charges by cable — a NACS port, DC only, with no onboard AC charger and so no Level 2 to fall back on. Inductive pads are a stated plan, not shipped hardware. So the depot gets built for the cable that exists and laid out for the pads that are promised, rather than costed on a 2024 render.
Waymo escalates cleaning to a dedicated role and treats biohazard work as routine rather than exceptional. Two to three cleaning and charging cycles per vehicle per day is the published shape of this work. We intend to staff it that way from the first car.
A vehicle with no steering wheel that stops in a travel lane cannot be pushed aside by a fire crew. Scene-clearance time is becoming a procurement question for AV fleets. Our responder page is published before we have a single vehicle, because local agencies should have it before they need it.
Autonomous fleets still need charging, cleaning, inspection and incident response, staffed by people who live here. Those are the roles this operation would hire for in Northwest Arkansas.
05 — Talk to us
Property, power & partners
robotaxinwa@gmail.com
Depot space, electrical capacity, or fleet services in Northwest Arkansas. This is the conversation we most want to be having right now.
Business & institutional
robotaxinwa@gmail.com
Employers, hotels and campuses thinking about what this means for getting people around when it does arrive.
Everyone else
robotaxinwa@gmail.com
Questions, corrections, or a reason we are wrong about something on this page. Corrections especially.
Fire · EMS · Law enforcement · Towing
Vehicle identification and safe-handling information, published in advance of any vehicle being here.
First responder informationAutonomous cab service for Northwest Arkansas, pending vehicle availability and state approval. See every step and where we are →
