The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has granted Amazon’s Zoox a landmark exemption from federal rules requiring steering wheels and pedals, clearing the company to commercially deploy up to 2,500 robotaxis entirely lacking in manual controls over the next year. The deployment, which doubles to 5,000 in the second year, is the first US approval for paid rides in a vehicle with no human controls whatsoever.

Standard federal vehicle safety rules assume the presence of a human driver and as such mandate features like steering wheels, brake pedals and mirrors, meaning any purpose-built driverless design is automatically non-compliant. Zoox had spent years pursuing a self-certification route before pivoting to the formal Part 555 exemption process, which comes with added reporting requirements for crashes or improper stops. NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison said the agency “will not hesitate” to pull the exemption if major safety issues emerge.

The approval covers Zoox’s rectangular, bidirectional robotaxi, which has inward-facing seating for four passengers and no manual controls whatsoever. It landed just weeks after Zoox recalled its entire 105-vehicle fleet when one robotaxi struggled to navigate through heavy smoke, part of a wider pattern of driverless vehicles interfering with emergency responders that prompted a pointed warning letter from Morrison earlier in July.

Zoox has been working toward this moment since 2022, when it first attempted to self-certify its bidirectional design under standard federal rules before NHTSA scrutiny pushed the company toward the formal exemption process instead. Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 and has backed its purpose-built approach ever since, rather than retrofitting existing car models the way most rivals have; the company already carries paying and non-paying passengers across parts of Las Vegas and San Francisco, with active testing under way in Austin and Miami ahead of the wider rollout this exemption now permits. 

Tesla’s own Cybercab, originally revealed back in October 2024, sits in functionally the same category of vehicle Zoox just won approval for: no steering wheel, no pedals, no mirrors, and already in production, albeit at Giga Texas. Unlike Zoox’s own purpose-built vehicle, it can accept only two occupants, and the seats face forwards. Also unlike Zoox, Tesla has not actually filed for the Part 555 exemption Z necessary for vehicles of this type to be permitted on US roads. 

To take Tesla’s own stated rationale at face value, then the reason is not caution but scale. The exemption caps deployment at 2,500 vehicles per manufacturer per year, comfortable for Zoox’s targeted rollouts across a handful of cities but, in Tesla’s own framing, practically useless against Musk’s stated ambition of producing Cybercabs by the hundreds of thousands or millions in the near future. Rather than accept that ceiling—or the plain reality of how ready its technology actually is for widespread deployment—Tesla is both lobbying for and waiting on the permanent rule changes NHTSA is targeting for 2028, which would eventually let every purpose-built robotaxi maker self-certify without any volume cap at all.

That bet leaves current Cybercabs on public roads relying on state-level testing permits with human safety monitors, or a far more limited Level 2 framework, rather than operating driverless commercially anywhere. Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm has said the company could fit removable steering wheels and pedals as a stopgap if federal rule changes lag behind Cybercab production, a tacit admission that the purpose-built design Tesla is already manufacturing currently has no clear legal path to operate as intended.

Waiting on a favourable federal rulebook while mass-producing a vehicle with no interim legal pathway is a bet that regulation moves faster than software readiness runs out of road. Zoox’s approval, using the exact mechanism Tesla dismissed as too small to bother with, shows that mechanism working precisely as intended for a company willing to work within it, leaving Tesla’s Cybercabs as ostensibly finished products legally forbidden from use on public roads.