Tesla Cybercab filmed driving itself in heavy Austin rain
Ashok Elluswamy and Julian Ibarz both amplified the clip, with Ibarz calling it fully autonomous and laying out the training recipe.
A clip of a Tesla Cybercab driving through heavy rain in Austin, Texas is doing the rounds, and two Tesla people have pushed it along.
The video came from JoshWest247, who posted it with the line "Austin Texas heavy rains... Tesla Cybercab, hold my beer". Ashok Elluswamy quote posted it with a short line of his own, that the weather does not bother the cabs. Julian Ibarz went further and described what is under the hood.
The recipe, as Tesla describes it
Ibarz called the run "Heavy rain, fully autonomous" and said this is what end-to-end neural nets buy you, photons in and controls out, trained on fleet data and sharpened with RL (reinforcement learning, where the model improves by being scored on its own behavior rather than only copying human driving). He added that the hard part is reliability, not capability. He also said Optimus, Tesla's humanoid, is next, with the same recipe.
That last part matters more to robotics readers than the car does. The pitch is that one pipeline, camera pixels straight to motor commands with no hand written rule layer in the middle, carries from a vehicle to a humanoid. Nothing in the sources shows that transfer happening. It is a statement of intent from a Tesla employee.
Shown versus claimed
What is shown is a Cybercab moving through rain in a video posted by an enthusiast account. What is claimed is full autonomy in those conditions. The claim comes from Tesla people describing Tesla footage. Nobody outside the company has verified the conditions, the route, how long the drive ran, or whether a person was positioned to take over. The sources do not say either way.
Rain is a real test, because water on the lens, spray off other cars and reflections off wet asphalt are exactly the cases where camera only perception tends to get brittle. One clip is not evidence that the problem is solved. It is evidence Tesla is comfortable showing the case in public, which is its own kind of signal.
Brutally hard to make reliable. Unstoppable once you do.
The weather doesn’t bother the cabs