A Tesla Cybercab was involved in a crash in Philadelphia this week, and it came out of it missing the entire outer panel of its driver-side door.
We don’t know who was at fault or whether Tesla’s software was driving. But Tesla has no permit to run automated vehicles in Pennsylvania, and that narrows down what this car was doing on Broad Street.
Reddit user ryephila posted photos of a gold Cybercab stopped on South Broad Street, a little over a mile south of City Hall, with the skin of its left door gone. The poster didn’t see the crash, but wrote that “it looked like a low speed incident ripped off the cybercab’s left door panel.”
The pictures back that up. You can see the door’s inner frame, window regulator, and wiring, all exposed. The glass is intact and the structure underneath doesn’t look bent. The rest of the damage is minor: crumpled rocker trim under the door and some scuffs on the rear quarter panel.
A second photo shows a dark sedan stopped right behind the Cybercab. It’s not clear whether that car was involved. There’s no word on injuries either.
The Cybercab’s plastic panels are built to come off
Tesla doesn’t paint the Cybercab. Its body panels are molded plastic with the color mixed into the material. Tesla engineering boss Lars Moravy and design chief Franz von Holzhausen walked Sandy Munro through the idea last year: the colored skin is joined to a plastic backing piece, and the whole panel is held on by fasteners you reach from the inside.
So a door skin that comes off whole is roughly what you’d expect from this design. The same hit on a steel-bodied car means a dented door, a body shop, and a paint booth. Tesla can, in theory, bolt on a new skin and send the car back out – albeit with some likely more significant damage at the bottom that might complicate things.
Tesla has no permit to run robotaxis in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania requires a certificate of compliance from PennDOT to operate a “highly automated vehicle,” which covers SAE Level 3 and up, with or without a driver on board. PennDOT’s list of certificate holders has seven names on it. Waymo is one of them, cleared for Philadelphia with a driver on board. Tesla isn’t on it.
Gold Cybercabs started showing up around Philadelphia in mid-September. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that several were photographed at a Tesla store in Devon, and that Tesla wouldn’t say what they were for.
Without that certificate, the car on Broad Street was most likely either being driven by hand or running Tesla’s software as a Level 2 driver-assist system, with a human behind the wheel who’s legally responsible. Tesla has been bolting Cybertruck steering wheels into test Cybercabs for that kind of work. We can’t tell from the photos whether this one had a wheel.
And that changes whether this crash ever shows up in federal data. Under NHTSA’s Standing General Order, a crash involving an automated driving system has to be reported even when the only result is property damage above a set threshold. A crash on a Level 2 system only gets reported if someone dies or goes to the hospital, an airbag deploys, or a pedestrian or cyclist is hit.
If it does, it’ll land in NHTSA’s database as a driver-assist crash, alongside the record 207 Autopilot and FSD crashes Tesla reported in a single month earlier this year, with the description of what happened redacted like every other Tesla entry.
Electrek’s Take
Caveats first. We don’t know who hit whom. If a human driver drifted into the Cybercab’s lane, then Tesla’s software had nothing to do with this, and there’s nothing in these photos that says otherwise.
The panel is the most interesting part in my opinion. It came off clean, and the structure under it looks fine. That could be the design doing its job: a cheap, unpainted plastic skin takes the hit and gets swapped quickly instead of the car sitting at a body shop waiting on paint. Or it’s a body panel that lets go too easily and ends up loose on a city street after a minor bump. We can’t settle that with just a couple of photos.
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