Editor’s Note: FlashPoint is our premium quick-strike column on market-moving China tech events. Today: Tesla’s Cybercab goes on display in Beijing and returns to Shanghai from September 17. Paid rides began in Austin two weeks earlier. A US federal audit opened a day after that. In August, I analyzed how US and Chinese rules had already split Tesla’s China business without a sale. Last November, I examined why China’s robotaxi IPOs fund a demographic bet. Now the vehicle itself meets a rulebook written for cars with a driver, in both countries.
Tesla will show the Cybercab at a Beijing showroom from September 17 to 27 and at a Shanghai mall from September 17 to 21. It first appeared in Shanghai at last November’s import expo. The event offers neither rides nor sales and announces no robotaxi launch in China. On September 3, paid Cybercab rides began in Austin. The next day NHTSA, the US vehicle safety regulator, opened an audit into how Tesla certified a car with no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors. In both countries the rules still assume a person drives. The car meets the same wall, and each side built it differently.
Both systems govern a vehicle’s physical configuration. Several current US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards are written around steering wheels, brake pedals and mirrors. China’s product access system, the MIIT catalogue a model enters before it can be registered, has not publicly admitted a purpose-built passenger car that permanently deletes those controls. A vehicle without controls has to find a door. In Austin, Tesla walked through one and is now asked for its paperwork. In China no such pathway has been published. The better question is how Chinese operators put thousands of driverless cars on the road without one.
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