SOUTHFIELD, Mich. - Tesla has put about two dozen of its Cybercab robotaxis on the roads of Metro Detroit, running them with test drivers out of the company's collision repair center on 12 Mile Road in Southfield, The Detroit News reported on Wednesday. The gold, two-seat cars have been seen on Interstate 696, M-10, Telegraph Road and Eight Mile Road.
The Cybercabs in Michigan are fitted with temporary steering wheels for their test drivers. The car is designed to have no steering wheel once the service is fully operational, and the move takes Tesla's newest vehicle from the Texas heat into a region with snow, ice and a full four seasons of weather.
Tesla has not said publicly that it is testing in Michigan. The company, which has no public relations staff, could not be reached by the newspaper, and its test drivers are bound by nondisclosure agreements. The public can ride in a Cybercab only in Austin, Texas, so far; Tesla's broader Robotaxi service uses Model Y vehicles in Austin, Dallas and Houston in Texas and in Tampa and Miami in Florida.
"The expansion of autonomous rideshare testing in different weather situations in different cities is important for developing the technology," Stephanie Brinley, associate director for automotive intelligence at Mobility Global, told The Detroit News. "Tesla has not officially said that they're testing here, so it's hard to say what they're specifically doing."
The cars share the region with Waymo, which began testing in Metro Detroit a year ago and started fully driverless operations there in October, with no human specialist behind the wheel of its Zeekr-built Ojai minivans. A Waymo spokesman, Chris Bonelli, told the paper there was still no timeline for opening the service to the public in Detroit. Waymo is also preparing to expand to Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago and Montreal, other cities with hard winters.
The two companies are taking different routes to the same job. The Cybercab drives with cameras alone, while Waymo's vehicles combine lidar, radar and cameras. Tesla's approach is expected to be cheaper to run as both services grow. Waymo has logged 270 million miles in cities from San Francisco to Atlanta; Tesla's website says its Robotaxi service has logged more than four million.
The Cybercab is built at Tesla's Gigafactory in Austin. It carries a 48-kilowatt-hour battery, about half the size of the one in a Model Y, weighs about 3,000 pounds and has a range of just under 300 miles on a charge, according to The Detroit News.