Tesla’s fully autonomous Cybercab robotaxi, which has no steering wheel or pedals, revealed hidden manual control options less than a week after officially entering service in Austin, Texas. In at least two videos shared on X, passengers noticed a virtual joystick appearing in the lower-left corner of the central display. The square-shaped interface includes buttons for moving forward and backward, stopping, sounding the horn and manually opening the doors. Live camera feeds are shown in a side panel; however, in one video, the feed appeared to be frozen at a Tesla Supercharger at a previous location.
The controls are thought to have been designed for Tesla employees and fleet personnel who need to move Cybercabs at low speed in tight spaces. The system could eliminate the need to request assistance from a control center or remote operator to rearrange the vehicles in a parking lot. In theory, police or emergency crews could also use these options to move a Cybercab that needs to be cleared from the road. Tesla briefed the Austin Police Department on the Cybercab service; however, it is not known whether the manual controls were discussed during the meeting.
Customers who noticed the controls were unable to move the vehicle using the joystick. It remains unclear whether this was because the options were not functioning or because they were used incorrectly. The appearance of the controls during customer rides could be an early software bug that Tesla needs to resolve. The company had stripped the Cybercab of this hardware to send the message that manual joysticks were a thing of the past.
Why it matters
This finding raises the question of under what circumstances human intervention would come into play in a service without a steering wheel or pedals. The fact that passengers could see in-vehicle options that may have been designed for employees and fleet personnel shows that the boundary between operational needs and the experience offered to customers has not yet been fully defined. How the remote support mechanism would operate in situations such as repositioning the vehicle in confined spaces or removing it from the road remains an open question, particularly for police and emergency crews. Customers’ inability to operate this function and the freezing in the camera footage suggest that the issue may not be limited to the visibility of the interface; it has not been explained whether the controls were actually active or why they appeared during the ride.
Background
Tesla is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 7 news stories mentioning the name in the last 90 days; the latest is dated September 11, 2026.