Words: Richard Edwards
Published 25 July 2026
New images posted to the Rare and Unique Car Spotting New Zealand Facebook page show a Tesla Cybercab moving under its own power on what appears to be Cardrona Valley Road, minutes from the Southern Hemisphere Proving Grounds.
A further image posted to the same group shows the car parked on snow at the proving grounds themselves, confirming what everyone assumed when the Cybercabs first surfaced here in June. At that point they were strapped to a transporter heading south through the North Island.
It is the first time one of the autonomous two-seaters has been photographed on a New Zealand public road. Whether the car was driving itself is not clear from the images, and there is no way to tell from the footage whether anyone was aboard.
The car wears the same gold finish as the production units coming off the line at Gigafactory Texas, along with flush aero wheel covers and a full-width rear light bar. It sits on the correct side of the road, working through the tussock country with the winter landscape looking suitably bleak behind it.
Tesla has confirmed it owns the pair of Cybercabs that arrived last month, and that they are at Cardrona for cold weather testing. The proving grounds operate through June, July and August, when northern hemisphere manufacturers need snow and ice out of season. Toyota and Sumitomo were among the first to use the site back in the early 1990s.
Details on the Cybercab come from an EPA filing released earlier this year. It runs a 48kWh battery and a single front-axle motor producing 163kW, with a lab range figure of up to 672km and a kerb weight of just 1.4 tonnes. That makes it lighter than a Model 3 rear-wheel drive.
Production cars have no steering wheel and no pedals. The examples spotted in New Zealand are left-hand drive and do have a wheel fitted, which suggests engineering mules rather than finished robotaxis.
