When the driver is gone, who should answer for the ride?
Tesla is now carrying paying passengers in a Cybercab with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no human aboard, backed by a remote operator for stalls and an arbitration clause for disputes. When a machine drives and something goes wrong, who should be accountable, and should that be decided by contract, by regulators, or by courts?
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In today’s episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, dated September 4, 2026, the hosts dig into Tesla’s Austin launch and ask what actually replaced the safety monitor once the seat went empty: a person at a remote desk, terms that route disputes to arbitration, and a federal regulator that says it is still evaluating. They contrast Tesla’s camera-only fleet of forty-five Cybercabs with Waymo’s larger, sensor-heavy operation, and note that seven in ten Americans still say they are not comfortable riding driverless. The bigger question is whether a license or a terms-of-service page can really carry the liability a human driver used to hold. Listen to the full episode and tell us where you think responsibility should land.
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