Tesla started shipping Cybercab from Giga Texas in February with no steering wheel and no pedals, ran an unsupervised Dallas and Houston service live on April 18, and is on a path to ten thousand units a week by year-end. Waymo closed a sixteen billion dollar round at a hundred and twenty-six billion valuation in February, has driverless mapping live in Tokyo and London, and is opening Detroit, Denver, Las Vegas, Nashville, San Diego, Washington DC, Miami, and Orlando inside this calendar year.

The consensus from 2018 to 2024 priced both stacks as decade-out demos. LiDAR-and-mapping was a science project hostage to per-mile cost, and vision-only was a press release that would die the first time fog rolled into San Jose. The analyst desks told every fleet operator that the binding constraint on autonomy was the perception layer, that perception had not been solved, and that any deployment narrative beyond a Phoenix geofence was sales theater.

Two stacks built on opposite assumptions, both at metro scale, in the same fiscal year. The perception bottleneck the desks priced as binding turns out to have been a stand-in for three different obstructions, each of which cleared inside the same eight-month window. The regulator wrote the operating permit. The manufacturer deleted the steering wheel from the chassis. The procurement contract underwrote a fleet without a driver seat.

Cybercab has no steering wheel. The fallback layer every safety case assumed could be retrofitted has been designed out of the chassis line. Once two thousand a week leaves Giga Texas, the human-takeover halo cannot be rebuilt around a vehicle that has nowhere to bolt the column.