A fleet of roughly two dozen Tesla Cybercabs is now testing on Metro Detroit roads, making the region a direct head-to-head proving ground with Waymo, which has been operating there for about a year2.
The gold, butterfly-door Cybercabs are running out of Tesla's Southfield collision repair facility on 12 Mile and have been spotted on I-696, M-10, Telegraph and Eight Mile. Test drivers are behind temporary steering wheels; the two-seat Cybercab is designed to ship without a steering wheel once the service is fully operational.
Detroit as a multi-season test bed
Detroit marks a meaningful expansion of Cybercab testing beyond Sun Belt cities. The Cybercab is currently accessible to paying riders only in Austin, while Tesla's broader Robotaxi service, which also uses Model Y vehicles, operates in Tampa, Miami, Austin, Dallas and Houston. Cybercabs have also been sighted at Miami International Airport and outside Philadelphia, according to teslarati.com. Michigan's winter driving conditions present a more complex environment than the southern markets where Tesla has concentrated so far.
Tesla's Robotaxi service has logged over 4 million miles, per the company's website. The Cybercab is built at Gigafactory Texas in Austin and operates on a camera-only sensor stack.
Waymo's Detroit head start
Waymo began testing in Metro Detroit roughly a year before the Cybercabs appeared. Alphabet-owned Waymo started fully autonomous testing in October without human specialists driving its Zeekr Ojai EVs. Waymo's vehicles use a combination of lidar, radar and cameras, a different sensor philosophy from Tesla's vision-only approach. Waymo Product Communications Manager Chris Bonelli said there is still no timeline for commercial deployment of the Waymo Driver service in Detroit.
Waymo has logged 270 million miles across cities from San Francisco to Phoenix to Atlanta and is preparing to expand to snowbelt cities Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago and Montreal.
The Detroit testing follows Tesla's launch of Fort Worth as its seventh unsupervised Robotaxi city on November 2, where a journalist completed a 15-minute paying trip, though the app initially canceled the ride and charged the fare three times[2].
ANALYSIS Detroit is the first market where both Cybercab hardware and Waymo vehicles are testing simultaneously, giving regulators and the public a direct comparison of camera-only versus lidar-equipped autonomous stacks in the same road conditions.