What is a Cybercab depot?

Depots operating

None yet

First depot targeted

Greater Orlando, Q4 2026

Reservations open

Priority Owner round

Tesla affiliation

None

That first box matters, so it is at the top rather than in a footnote: no DockDuty depot is operating today, and no privately owned Cybercab is earning money on the Tesla network yet. What exists right now is a signed rate schedule, a reservation book, a working owner platform you can open without an account, and a target of Q4 2026 for the first Greater Orlando site. Everything below describes what a depot does and how ours is planned. Where something is not settled, this page says so.

What happens at a Cybercab depot

Nine jobs. A depot that skips any of them pushes that job back onto the owner, which is the thing an owner was paying to avoid.

Without a depot the owner does all nine. For one car that is a demanding side job. For five it is a full-time one. For ten it is a small logistics business, and most people buying a robotaxi were not trying to start a small logistics business.

Why a Cybercab needs a depot at all

A conventional taxi or rideshare vehicle solves the between-shifts problem invisibly, because the driver takes it home. The driver parks it, plugs it in, notices the smell, sweeps out the back seat, and is standing right there when something breaks. Remove the driver and every one of those tasks becomes unassigned work with no default owner.

That is the whole logistics problem an autonomous fleet creates. The car can drive itself to a passenger; it cannot decide it needs a wash, negotiate a lease on somewhere to sit, or lift a bumper off the kerb. It needs a fixed, addressable place to return to, with power, a schedule, and staff. That place is the depot, and it is the reason depot operations became their own category in 2026 rather than an afterthought bolted onto vehicle ownership.

We wrote the general version of this argument in our guide to what a robotaxi depot does, which covers the category across every autonomous fleet rather than just Tesla's.

Why a Cybercab depot is not just a robotaxi depot

Most robotaxi depots operating today serve retrofitted cars: a Model Y, a Bolt, a Pacifica, with a steering wheel, a driver's seat and an ordinary charge port. A staffer can climb in and move one. A staffer can plug one into any charger in the building. The Cybercab is a different physical object, and the differences land squarely on the depot rather than on the owner.

• No plug, by design. Tesla has said the production Cybercab charges inductively, over a pad, rather than through a cable, and in February 2026 the FCC was widely reported to have granted Tesla a waiver for the ultra-wideband radio the charging system uses to line a car up over the pad. We have not read the order itself, so treat the mechanism as reported rather than confirmed. A depot built around cable runs and pedestal chargers is not automatically a depot that can charge a Cybercab.
• No controls. There is no steering wheel and no driver's seat, so "somebody move that car three feet" is not a thing a person simply does. Tesla has built in a manual repositioning path for exactly this situation, which tells you the situation is expected.
• Two seats, not five. A smaller vehicle changes stall geometry, how many cars fit on a given lot, and how much power the site draws per parking space.
• Purpose-built for continuous duty. A car designed to run all day and never go home concentrates cleaning and readiness work into the depot instead of spreading it across a driver's evening.

Cybercab depot vs. fleet management software

These get lumped together under the same search and they are not the same product. One shows you the car. The other touches it.

DockDuty is a depot operator that also ships the software layer, because an owner who is not on site needs to see what happened to their car. The order is deliberate: the physical operation is the product, and the dashboard reports on it. A dashboard with no lot behind it is a reporting tool, not a depot, whatever it is named. If you are comparing operators, the ten checks in our vetting guide separate the two in about twenty minutes.

Who uses a Cybercab depot

• Single-vehicle owners. Usually people who bought one car as an income asset and have a job. The depot is the difference between an asset and a second job.
• Multi-car owners, two to six vehicles. The point where doing it yourself stops scaling: one person cannot charge and clean six cars across a metro and keep a day job.
• Fleet operators, seven and up. Buying operations as a line item with known unit costs rather than building a depot, which means land, a transformer and a payroll. We break the build-it economics down in what it costs to build a robotaxi depot, and the honest answer is that it rarely pencils under about fifty cars.
• Institutional and financed fleets. Owners who need documentation, insurance certificates and reconcilable monthly statements because somebody else is holding the paper.

The common thread is distance. If you can see the car from your kitchen window and you own one, you may not need a depot. Nearly everyone else does. See owning a robotaxi in another state for how that works in practice.

Cybercab depot charging

Charging is the single hardest part of a depot to build and the easiest to underestimate, because the constraint is almost never the charger. It is the electrical service, and behind that the utility.

A meaningful bank of fast-charge capacity needs a service upgrade, usually a new transformer, and transformer lead times have been running long enough that the paperwork, not the construction, sets the opening date. That is a large part of why depot #1 is a 2026 target and not a 2026 announcement: the power has a queue and the queue does not care how motivated anyone is.

On the vehicle side, as covered above, Tesla's stated design is inductive charging with no charge port. We are planning capacity, conduit and pad-ready stalls rather than committing to a connector that has not been finalised in public. How robotaxis charge goes deeper on the mechanics, and the cost stack is broken out line by line in the depot build-cost guide.

Cybercab parking and staging

A robotaxi's parking problem is not the same as a car's parking problem, because the car has to be findable, retrievable and insured while it sits, and it sits in a place nobody who owns it will ever visit.

Practical requirements: a fenced perimeter, a controlled gate, cameras with retained footage, an assigned stall per vehicle rather than a shared pool, and garage-keeper coverage so that damage occurring in the depot's care is the depot's problem. Location matters as much as the fence. A cheap lot forty minutes from where the rides are costs more in empty repositioning miles than it saves in rent, which is why where you park a Cybercab fleet is a demand question before it is a real-estate one.

Cleaning and vehicle readiness

In a driven vehicle, cleanliness is enforced by the person sitting in it. Remove them and the feedback loop breaks: the car will happily pick up the next twelve riders in whatever state the last one left it. Since riders rate the car, interior condition becomes an operational task with a direct revenue consequence.

Readiness is the wider version of the same idea. Before a car goes back into service, something has to confirm it is fit to carry a passenger: interior reset, no damage, sensors and cameras clean, charge level appropriate to the shift ahead. Doing that check before the car returns to service is a depot function. Doing it after a rider complains is a refund.

Cybercab fleet operations and owner visibility

Everything above is the physical half. The other half is that an owner two states away has to be able to see what happened, or the arrangement is just trust.

DockDuty's owner platform is live and you can open it without an account: app.dockduty.com/demo shows the vehicle view, trip history, earnings and statement layout that a stall reservation comes with. It is a demo populated with sample data, not a live fleet, because no fleet is operating yet. We would rather show you the real product with honest labels than a marketing screenshot of one.

The DockDuty depot network

The network is built in books of 50 stalls. A depot opens, fills, and the next one opens behind it, Florida first, then beyond the state as the autonomous service area expands. There is no cap on how many cars one owner or LLC can hold across the network.

The first 50 founding stalls closed on September 5, 2026, finished off by a single 13-car fleet order. Those owners locked founding rates that are written into their signed agreements and cannot be reduced by a later amendment. The round open now is the Priority Owner class: 50 Priority Owner spots network-wide, one per owner or LLC, with Orlando Depot #2 first and further 50-car books opening as each fills.

Reservation activity is published rather than described. The public order book shows the current state.

The Cybercab depot in Orlando

Greater Orlando is depot #1, targeted for Q4 2026. The reasoning is not sentimental:

• Florida preempts local AV rules at the state level. A single statewide framework beats negotiating with each municipality, which is a large part of why autonomous operators keep choosing Florida. The statute itself is at the Florida Legislature, and we walk through it in the Florida robotaxi law guide.
• Demand that does not commute. Tourism, convention traffic and airport runs produce ride demand spread across the day and week instead of piling into two rush hours.
• Land and power that are still obtainable. Industrial parcels with a plausible path to electrical service exist near the demand, which is not true in every large metro.
• No winter. Uptime is not interrupted by weather that takes a lot out of service for a week.

Miami breaks ground when Orlando is roughly 80% reserved and operating; Tampa follows on the same trigger. That sequencing is deliberate: one depot has to prove the model before the second one is worth building. More detail in the Orlando robotaxi guide, and the wider picture in Cybercabs in Florida.

What a Cybercab depot stall costs

Two numbers, both of which fall as a fleet grows: a monthly retainer per stall, and a per-ride service fee. Insurance and any financing sit with the owner under every model, ours included.

The current Priority Owner schedule runs from $550/month per stall and a 15% service fee at 1–2 cabs, down to $475/month and 13% at 7 cabs and up. A $450 reservation deposit holds a stall and is refundable under the reservation terms.

The full rate table lives on the homepage, which is the page the pricing generator writes to from the app's single source of truth, and the earnings calculator lets you run your own assumptions rather than ours. The founding class closed on September 5, 2026; its rates are shown on the homepage comparison and are not available to new owners.

How to reserve a Cybercab depot stall

1. Reserve. A $450 refundable deposit holds a stall in the Priority Owner round, one per owner or LLC.
2. Review the agreement. Rates, the refund window, the wind-down terms and what happens if we fail are all in the paper before you sign, not after.
3. Onboard when the depot opens. Your car arrives, gets its stall, and starts in the operating rotation.

You keep the title to your vehicle throughout. If you would rather talk to a person first, the founders answer in the DockDuty Discord and at support@dockduty.com.

Frequently asked questions about Cybercab depots

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