The woman in the car ahead of me pounds her steering wheel in frustration. Then she throws her arms in the air and finally leans on the horn. With an apologetic gesture (I must look like an idiot) I try to make clear to her: I cannot steer the car I'm sitting in the driver's seat of. Not even if I wanted to.

A huge screen hangs in front of me, sure. What's missing, though, is a steering wheel, a dashboard, a gas pedal and a brake.

It's almost 100 degrees at the parking lot in downtown Austin. Rush-hour traffic is backed up, with cars reversing and pulling forward again to untangle the chaos in the lot. I, too, am apparently supposed to back up to give the vehicles beside and in front of me room to reverse out of their spaces.

It's not a particularly complicated situation — but one that can really only be solved by communicating with other drivers. The problem: I can't communicate. I have no influence over what my car does — a gold-painted Tesla Cybercab, a fully self-driving vehicle that lacks all the classic features of a motor vehicle.

Then, suddenly, the car jerks into reverse.

Nervous because I can't see what's happening behind me — instead of a rear window, the car has a black panel, and there are no side mirrors — I look out the window. Sure enough, the robotaxi is backing up far enough to let the traffic ahead clear, swinging halfway into a parking space as it does. A few yards on, the Cybercab repeats the maneuver — a feat other self-driving vehicles might well have failed at.

Some 20 minutes earlier, the robotaxi — which strongly evokes the "Need for Speed" games of my childhood — had turned onto the street next to my hotel. There was no need to scan license plates the way you would with an ordinary taxi or Uber order. The shimmering gold vehicle was impossible to miss from a distance.

With this robotaxi, Elon Musk aims to take on market leaders Uber and Lyft. The world's richest man also wants to overtake competitors like Waymo. The car is supposed to cost just $30,000 when it eventually becomes for sale. It also does without the bulky cameras that adorn other robotaxis. With targeted operating costs of $0.20 to $0.40 per mile, it's meant to undercut Alphabet's Waymo or Amazon's Zoox by a wide margin. Musk has harbored these plans since at least 2016 — and this month the steering-wheel-free vehicles became available to book in downtown Austin, where Musk sometimes lives.

Opinions are divided on the taxi's extravagant gold paint job. Is the whole thing a flashy statement from the Tesla chief? Whatever the Tesla CEO had in mind, he does seem to have achieved his goal of maximum attention. Videos of the vehicles' launch went viral on Instagram, and during my test ride I repeatedly see pedestrians and other drivers pulling out their phones to film.

Visually, the model looks sleeker than previous Teslas — or certainly than the oversized Cybertruck, which had previously drawn "toy car" comparisons. The Cybercab's wheels are completely covered by a clunky gold panel, which I found irritating.

The car earns design points, however, for its doors, which swing automatically upward as a passenger approaches — a manuever usually associated with Italian luxury brands like Ferrari or Lamborghini. The "Cybercab" lettering, on the other hand, again brings to mind video games, or the Hot Wheels toy cars children love to play with.

The interior is kept simple. Instead of gold, designers opted for matte beige and black. On the screen — nearly the size of a television — passengers can log into Spotify, YouTube, or Netflix and watch movies and shows during the ride.

Tesla clearly scores points on driving style. The car navigates rush-hour traffic assertively and briskly. At one point, it merges back into the right lane just ahead of a construction site, cutting in front of another car — and that makes sense: an inexperienced driver would likely have changed lanes much earlier, slowing down the drivers behind them.

Still, there are concerns.

Austin's police and fire departments have been specially trained to extricate the steering-wheel-less cars in the event of accidents or fires. But Matthew McElearney, an Austin fire captain, is calling for higher standards. The car can only be controlled via app and screen — including, in an emergency, through support. But what happens if the screen shatters in a fire, or the entire electronics system fails, leaving the taxi movable only by crane? Tesla didn't respond to Business Insider's request for comment on on McElearney's concerns.

That's not the only potential weak spot in Tesla's "golden robot." So far, the concept is user-unfriendly. The fare is roughly comparable to what an Uber would cost for the same route. But reliable service can't yet be booked. When I confirm my ride, the app shows a wait time of 40 to 50 minutes. An hour and a half later, it still shows 30 to 40 minutes.

Then, suddenly, a message pops up: the taxi can be there in 12 minutes. Anyone hoping to enjoy steering-wheel-free driving needs to bring plenty of time and flexibility, at least until Tesla further scales the service. A ride in a Tesla Model Y robotaxi — part of Tesla's broader autonomous vehicle service, and WITH a steering wheel and pedals — is available in cities like Austin or Dallas with the usual wait times of just a few minutes, by contrast.

If Tesla's taxis are to become competitive with Uber, Lyft and the rest, the biggest weakness still needs fixing: the self-driving cars don't venture onto highways. That's a particular problem in cities like Dallas, which can feel like they're made almost entirely of highways. On a test ride with the Model Y robotaxi there, the car takes a whopping 34 minutes for a route Google Maps estimates at 12 — because avoiding the highways costs a lot of time. In the handful of cities where the robotaxis currently operate, the network is limited to the respective downtown core. A trip to the airport, for instance, which would require using highways, simply isn't possible.

To be fair, the operators argue this is only true in the early phase — that route coverage will expand significantly within a few years. For Tesla, the real trial by fire still lies ahead: at 30 mph, the Cybercab may navigate city traffic safely, backed by plenty of collected data. But how the car performs at highway speeds above 70 mph, on multi-lane roads, is something Tesla has yet to prove.

In American tech hubs like Austin or San Francisco, self-driving cars have become part of the cityscape. In Europe, by contrast, the technology is still in its infancy — which is likely one reason the debate over drivers' job security has so far remained a side issue. Should autonomous driving take hold on a broad scale, it would mean dramatic job losses.

That day, though, still seems far off. According to market leader Waymo, roughly 4,000 fully driverless robotaxis are currently on American roads. Uber and Lyft alone are estimated to have more than 1.7 million drivers. Add to that almost 450,000 taxi, shuttle, and chauffeur drivers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That puts the market share at less than 0.2 percent.

Even so, autonomous driving is a bet on the future — one reflected not least in Tesla's stock price, which climbed noticeably after the Cybercab's September launch. Tesla's market value currently stands at roughly $1.1 trillion. Wall Street analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities believes the company could capture around 80% of the robotaxi business — though rival Waymo already has a substantial head start, with 14 million rides in 2025 alone.

Back on the road to Austin. At the end of the ride, the doors swing open again. Because the Cyber-Cab can't park just anywhere, it's still a three-minute walk to my actual destination. That's another weakness: anyone with heavy luggage or limited mobility can't count on being picked up or dropped off at an exact spot, but has to make do with the general vicinity.

For the ride back to my hotel, I finally book a taxi driven by a human. Waiting for hours again is not an option.

Sylvain, a friendly man who came to the US from the Central African Republic nearly 20 years ago and is driving the car, says he isn't immediately worried about an AI soon taking his job. Still, he says, it's both fascinating and unsettling how many robotaxis are now on the streets of Austin.

"Who knows what will happen in the future," he says, stepping on the gas.

This story originally appeared in Germany's Welt, and is courtesy of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which harnesses the resources of the company's newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms.