Tesla is sending its driverless Cybercab on a tour of Australia between now and Christmas, and Perth is the last stop on the list.

The company announced the tour on Monday evening, Perth time, posting a short video and then a city-by-city schedule to its Australian account on X. Within twelve hours the announcement video had been viewed more than 150,000 times. A dedicated events page on Tesla's Australian website sets out the detail: seven cities, fourteen locations, running from September to December 2026.

Sydney is first, this month. Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Canberra follow in October. Melbourne and Adelaide get it in November. Perth is pencilled in for December 2026 — the final city on the run, roughly three months after the tour begins on the east coast.

"The future is on tour down under." — Tesla Australia & New Zealand

What is actually coming

The Cybercab is not a modified Model 3 or Model Y. It is a purpose-built two-seater that Tesla first showed publicly in California in October 2024, and it was designed from the ground up on the assumption that nobody would be driving it: there is no steering wheel and there are no pedals. The doors open upwards. Tesla's own description on the Australian events page calls it "our purpose-built fully autonomous vehicle".

What is coming to Perth, though, is a car on a stand. Tesla's page describes the vehicle as being "on display" at Tesla locations and invites people to see it for themselves. There is no mention anywhere in the announcement of passenger rides, demonstrations on public roads, or anything moving under its own power.

Why nobody will be riding in one

That is not simply Tesla being cautious. Australia does not yet have the law that would make a car with no steering wheel legal to operate on a public road without a person in control of it.

The National Transport Commission, which writes the model road rules that every state and territory copies into its own traffic law, is blunt about the gap.

"The current Australian Road Rules have been developed with vehicles categorised as SAE automation Levels 0–2 in mind." — National Transport Commission

Levels 0 to 2 cover everything from a completely manual car up to the driver-assistance systems already sold here — lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, the sort of thing that still assumes a human is watching the road. A vehicle built without a steering wheel sits several rungs above that.

The proposed fix is a national Automated Vehicle Safety Law, which would create safety duties, recognise new legal entities responsible for a vehicle that has no driver, and establish an in-service regulator. The NTC says that once it is introduced it will still need supporting legislation in each state and territory. In other words, WA would have its own step to take after Canberra takes its one.

What Perth actually knows

Very little, so far. Tesla has named the month and nothing else. There is no date, no venue beyond "Tesla locations", and no booking link. The company says it is still finalising event details and will send invitations with dates, times and venues as each city's session is confirmed. Its page also carries the standard warning that tour dates and locations are subject to change.

For anyone planning around it: December is a long way off in a tour that has not started yet, and Perth is the city with the most opportunity to slip.

Why it matters

There is an easy joke here about Perth going last, and it is not wrong — the tour reaches every mainland capital and the Gold Coast before it reaches us, which is a familiar shape for anything that starts in Sydney.

But the more interesting point is that Western Australia is an odd place to treat a driverless car as a novelty. The state's iron ore miners have run fully autonomous haul trucks across the Pilbara for well over a decade, directed by controllers sitting in operations centres near Perth Airport, hundreds of kilometres from the trucks themselves. WA has more practical experience of vehicles driving themselves than almost anywhere in the country.

The difference is the road. Those trucks run on private haul roads, under one company's rules, with no other traffic to worry about. Getting a two-seater with no steering wheel onto Albany Highway is a different problem, and it is a legal one before it is an engineering one.

Perth will get a look at the answer in December. Sitting still.

Photo: Dllu via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). This is a file photograph of a Cybercab on display in the United States, not the vehicle touring Australia.