SpaceX might be stealing the spotlight right now with its blockbuster stock market debut, but things are moving just as fast over at Tesla.
The technical specifications of Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab have reportedly been leaked from its official U.S. Environmental Protection Agency certification documents.
The regulatory filing, certified on May 26, 2026, confirms several of Tesla’s design goals while revealing a few mechanical surprises regarding the robotaxi’s drivetrain and overall mass.
In February, Tesla announced that production of the upcoming two-seater Cybercab had begun. The company’s official X account shared a photo showcasing the first robotaxi rolling off the assembly line at Gigafactory Texas. However, not many details were disclosed back then.
The Cybercab serves as Tesla’s purpose-built, fully autonomous vehicle designed exclusively for Robotaxi service. The two-seater achieves an unusually light overall mass for an electric vehicle by eliminating driver controls such as a steering wheel or pedals.
According to EPA filings, Tesla has built an EV that weighs a mere 3,113 pounds. This puts the vehicle’s weight roughly 700 pounds below the lightest Tesla Model 3 configuration.
As it is so light, it doesn’t need a massive, heavy battery. It runs on a compact 48-kWh pack and a single front-mounted 219-horsepower motor.
According to The Verge, the Tesla Cybercab is poised to become one of the most efficient electric vehicles ever certified, boasting a 165-watt-hour-per-mile (Wh/mi) rating that yields an expected real-world range of 290 to 300 miles after EPA adjustments.
This hyper-efficiency allows the robotaxi to travel roughly six miles on a single kilowatt-hour (kWh) of power — outperforming standard EVs that typically get only three to four miles per kWh.
Yet, for all its technical brilliance, the Cybercab remains stuck.
Musk confidently promised investors last summer that autonomous ride-hailing would cover half the U.S. population by the end of the year. It didn’t happen. The service remains locked down to just three Texas cities: Austin, Dallas, and Houston.
The fleet itself is microscopic. Tesla currently holds permits for just 42 unsupervised Model Y robotaxis in Texas, and only 14 of those are actively driving without a human safety monitor behind the wheel.
Meanwhile, Alphabet’s Waymo is utterly dominating the asphalt. Waymo operates a rapidly scaling fleet of over 3,000 driverless vehicles across 11 major U.S. cities.
Tesla fans often point to safety data as a benefit. The company has logged only 18 automated driving crashes with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) compared to Waymo’s 697. However, experts say that it is simply a game of numbers. If you barely have any cars on the road, you barely have any crashes.
The pieces are moving behind the scenes, though. Tesla has quietly filed municipal plans to build dedicated “robocar” car washes and automated charging stations in Las Vegas and Austin. The infrastructure is coming. The engineering is certified. Now, Tesla just has to prove it can actually scale the service before its competitors leave it in the dust.
Mrigakshi is a science journalist who enjoys writing about space exploration, biology, and technological innovations. Her work has been featured in well-known publications including Nature India, Supercluster, The Weather Channel and Astronomy magazine. If you have pitches in mind, please do not hesitate to email her.
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