DockDuty: Cybercab fleet management company for private owners.

Owning a robotaxi is not passive. Somebody charges it, cleans it, stages it, and picks up the phone when it gets stuck. DockDuty is built to be that somebody, while you keep the title, the control, and a month-to-month exit. This page is what the service covers, what it does not, and what is actually running today.

Last reviewed October 16, 2026 · How we research and update this

The service in short

Next step, wherever you are: click around the owner dashboard demo (no login), turn your plans into an ordered checklist with the free Cybercab ownership planner (about two minutes, no email), or reserve a stall ($450, refundable until your vehicle is onboarded). Running a fleet or a company? The fleet inquiry goes to a founder.

What fleet management actually involves

Strip away the term and it is six recurring jobs, all of which used to belong to a driver:

• Energy. Keeping the battery topped up between shifts, at the right times, without the car sitting idle at a public charger during peak demand.
• Readiness. Resetting the interior so the next rider does not find the last rider’s mess, the single most common reason a robotaxi gets pulled off the road.
• Inspection. Checking for damage and lost property, and documenting it before it becomes a dispute.
• Staging. Putting the car where demand is about to be, rather than where it happened to finish its last trip.
• Maintenance. Getting it to service and back, on schedule, without the owner flying in.
• Incidents. Answering the phone at 2am when something goes wrong, because something eventually will.

On top of those sits the paperwork nobody advertises: insurance currency, registration, statements, and the records you will want at tax time.

Owners tend to search for this under different names: Cybercab owner services, robotaxi owner services, or simply “who will run my car”. They are the same list seen from the owner’s side; the glossary keeps the terms straight.

What DockDuty handles

Everything on that list that happens at or around the depot (the facility those six jobs happen in: what a Cybercab depot is):

• Charging on site between shifts. Electricity is included in the monthly retainer, no separate energy bill and no markup on energy, written into the agreement rather than promised in marketing.
• Cleaning and readiness between rides, plus the damage and lost-property check.
• An assigned stall in a fenced lot, so the car is not circling or parked on a street.
• Staging toward demand.
• Dispatch coordination. Worth being precise about: the ride network dispatches the car. DockDuty makes sure it is charged, clean and available when that happens.
• 24-hour incident response.
• Maintenance coordination with the service centre.
• Insurance-document tracking: we watch your policy’s expiry dates and warn you before they lapse. Note what that is: we track your policy. We do not provide it.
• Reporting: trips, charging sessions, statements, all in one place.

A day at the depot: the six jobs in sequence

The list above reads as six separate services. On the floor they are one loop, and the order matters more than any single job. Here is how the loop is planned to run for a privately owned Cybercab at a DockDuty depot, described as a sequence rather than a schedule, because no depot is operating yet and we are not going to invent minutes.

Intake. The loop starts once, when the car arrives. The vehicle is photographed inside and out, its documents (registration, the owner’s commercial AV policy) are checked and filed in the glovebox on the dashboard, it is assigned a stall in the fenced lot, and its telemetry is connected so the floor can see charge level, location and fault codes from that moment on. The intake balance of the onboarding fee is settled here. Nothing below happens until intake is signed off.

Charge window. Every day after that begins with energy. The car comes off the network at the end of its last earning window and is plugged into on-site DC charging, because the cars seen so far have no onboard AC charger. The charging window is chosen so that it does not overlap the hours the car earns most and, where tariffs vary, so that it lands on cheaper power. Electricity is inside the retainer, with no markup on energy, so the incentive is to charge in the cheap, quiet window rather than at a public charger during peak demand.

Cleaning cycle. While the car is on the charger it is cleaned. The floor is a daily quick reset of the interior (the single most common reason a robotaxi gets pulled off the road is the last rider’s mess) and a weekly thorough clean, with the exterior and sensor surfaces wiped as part of each pass. Lost property found during the reset is logged against the trip it came from.

Readiness check. Before the car goes back out, somebody confirms it is fit to carry a passenger: interior reset, no new damage against the intake photos, cameras and sensors clean, software current, charge level appropriate to the shift ahead. A car that fails any line stays on the stall and the owner sees why on the dashboard rather than in a surprise statement.

Redispatch. Then staging. The car is positioned so it starts its earning window near demand instead of driving twenty empty minutes to reach it; ride-hail demand piles into commute and night-out windows, and the midday lull is the rule, not the exception. To be precise about who does what: the ride network dispatches the car. DockDuty makes sure it is charged, clean, checked and in the right place when that happens, and takes it off when utilisation does not justify the miles.

Incident window. Running underneath all of it is the part that has no schedule. A mechanical fault, a rider complaint, a collision, a tow, a car that stops on a street at 2am: a human is on call, with a 24-hour response window as the floor, and every incident is documented with photos and timestamps because the owner’s insurer will ask. When the incident is closed the car re-enters the loop at the readiness check, not at redispatch.

The whole loop is why the site keeps saying a well-run car still loses four to six hours of every 24 to non-revenue activity. Those hours are not waste; they are the charge window, the cleaning cycle and the readiness check, and a depot exists to make them short, predictable and invisible to the owner.

What stays yours

A fleet-management service is a service, not a transfer. The split is written into the agreement:

• The title. Always. Section 4.3: the owner retains title to their vehicles at all times, and nothing in the agreement or any service agreement transfers any ownership interest in any vehicle to DockDuty.
• The purchase. DockDuty does not sell vehicles, allocate them, or promise you one. Purchase price, taxes, registration and financing are yours.
• The vehicle insurance. Commercial autonomous-vehicle insurance on the car is the owner’s responsibility, through the owner’s own broker. DockDuty’s own facility coverage (garage-keeper and general business liability) is intended to be bound before the depot takes in any vehicle. It is not bound today, because there is no depot yet.
• The enrollment decision. Whether the car is on a ride network at all is your call.
• The exit. Month-to-month, no minimum term, no early-termination penalty.

The dashboard, and why it exists

DockDuty ships an owner dashboard: a live map, trip history with routes, charging sessions, earnings statements, a document glovebox and remote vehicle commands. It is public and needs no login, go and click around before you believe anything on this page.

The reason it is good is unglamorous: we need it to run the floor. A depot with no visibility into which car is charged, which is dirty and which is stuck is a parking lot. The owner gets to look at the same data the operations team does, from anywhere, at any hour, which matters when the owner lives in another state, or another country, and the car does not. What an owner abroad can see, and what is not written down yet, is in running a Cybercab from another time zone.

How this differs from fleet-management software

Fleet management software monitors and reports on vehicles: location, charge, trips, earnings. It owns no land, chargers or staff, so it cannot park, charge or clean a car. A physical depot does that work at a fixed facility with people on site. A depot company can ship software as well; software alone cannot handle a vehicle.

That is the whole distinction. Fleet-management software schedules work and reports on it; somebody still has to physically plug the car in and clean it. A depot company does that part, and DockDuty is a depot company that also ships the software. The role itself is defined without our branding on it in the depot operator role, defined neutrally, with the companies doing it, and the decision it implies, who manages a privately owned Cybercab: manufacturer, owner or contracted depot, has its own page.

If you only need the software layer, you do not need a depot. If you need the car physically handled, software alone will not do it. The honest four-way comparison: do it yourself, flat-fee operator, SPV/equity structure, or revenue-share depot, is here: robotaxi fleet management, four models compared. That post is the neutral version; this page is ours. And if what you want is the depot side rather than the ongoing service, that is what a robotaxi depot company does.

Comparing fleet management offers

Several companies describe a service for privately owned Cybercabs, and they differ on the model, whether pricing is published, whether a deposit is taken and whether anything is operating yet. We keep that side-by-side in one place, with a source and a check date on every row and no ranking: Cybercab and robotaxi management companies, compared, with sources. Depot developers and charging companies that serve fleets in general are in the neutral robotaxi depot company directory. Whoever you talk to, us included, ten checks you can run in twenty minutes separate a plan from an operation.

What is live today, and what is not

What has to happen before service starts

Two lists: one for DockDuty, one for your car. Both come from the reservation agreement, not from marketing.

Before any depot can take a car. Section 5.5 of the agreement names these as conditions outside DockDuty’s control:

• A depot site selected, leased or bought, permitted and built. No depot lease has been signed yet.
• Tesla making Cybercabs available for third-party purchase and operation. Tesla has not opened ordering or published terms for owner-supplied vehicles.
• The regulatory approvals that apply in the depot’s state.
• Commercial autonomous-vehicle insurance being available for owners’ cars.

Separately, DockDuty’s own facility coverage (garage-keeper and general liability) is to be bound before the depot takes in any vehicle. It is not bound today.

Before your car is onboarded. Section 1.1 defines onboarding as all three of these:

1. You sign the Service Agreement for the stall. DockDuty has to present it at least 60 days before your scheduled onboarding, and it has to meet the floor in Section 5.2, which includes month-to-month terms, notice periods of 30 days or less, your rates changing only as Section 4.1 allows, and no extra mandatory fees. You are never obliged to sign it; declining gets you a full refund.
2. The car passes intake inspection at the depot.
3. The $550 balance of the onboarding fee is paid.

When DockDuty announces the next depot with room for your stall, you have 30 days to tell us whether to onboard there, keep waiting for a depot in your market, or take a refund; if you don’t reply, you are set to onboard there (Section 1.4). Nothing is billed monthly until a vehicle is onboarded at an operating depot, and the deposit is refundable on request until then.

What it costs

How much does it cost to run a Cybercab?

DockDuty can't quote a real-world running cost yet. No depot is open yet and no site lease is signed, so no Cybercab has run under our management. The owner carries the commercial autonomous-vehicle insurance. Nothing here is a projection of earnings. What we can do is price a whole month from published rates and labeled assumptions, including where doing it yourself is cheaper, in our whole-month comparison of a flat fee and a revenue share.

A monthly retainer per stall plus a percentage of ride revenue, both dropping as fleet size grows. Current published rates are on the rate card, generated from the same source the checkout uses so the two cannot drift apart. Running more than a handful of cars? See fleets of seven and up: volume tiers and the operator intake. Already running a taxi, livery or rideshare fleet? Start with what robotaxis change for taxi fleet owners.

Reserving costs a $450 refundable deposit per stall, credited in full against the one-time $1,000 onboarding fee, leaving a $550 balance at intake inspection. The agreement caps both (onboarding never above $1,000 per vehicle, intake balance never above $550) and states that other than those, the retainer and the ride percentage, no mandatory fees apply. Your ride percentage cannot be raised while a vehicle is enrolled; the retainer can move by CPI-U once a year, on sixty days’ notice, never before your first anniversary, and by an energy adjustment at cost, set each January and July, up or down, never in a depot’s first 12 months.

What none of that tells you is what a Cybercab will earn. Nobody knows. There is no fleet-scale earnings history anywhere, including ours. The calculator shows the full fee math against your own assumptions and labels every output a projection, because that is what it is.

Frequently asked questions

What does Cybercab fleet management actually involve?

Six recurring jobs, all of which used to belong to a driver. Keeping the battery topped up between shifts. Resetting the interior so the next rider does not find the last rider’s mess. Checking for damage and lost property. Putting the car where demand is about to be rather than where it happened to finish. Getting it to service and back. And answering the phone when something goes wrong at 2am. On top of that sits the paperwork: insurance currency, registration, statements and tax records.

What does DockDuty handle, and what stays my responsibility?

DockDuty handles the depot work: parking, charging, cleaning and readiness, staging, dispatch coordination, incident response, maintenance coordination and reporting. The owner buys the vehicle, holds the title, carries the commercial autonomous-vehicle insurance on it through their own broker, and decides whether the vehicle is enrolled at all. DockDuty does not sell vehicles, allocate them, or take any ownership interest in one.

Do I lose control of my car?

No. The owner retains title at all times and nothing in the agreement transfers any ownership interest to DockDuty. Service is month-to-month with no minimum term and no early-termination penalty, so an owner can withdraw a vehicle and stop. The owner also controls enrollment: whether the vehicle is on the network at all is the owner’s decision, not DockDuty’s.

How is this different from fleet-management software?

Fleet-management software schedules work and reports on it. It does not own land, chargers or staff, so somebody still has to physically plug the car in and clean it. DockDuty is a depot company that also ships the software: the dashboard exists because DockDuty needs it to run the floor, and the owner gets to look at the same data. If you only need the software layer, you do not need a depot; if you need the car physically handled, software alone will not do it.

Is DockDuty managing Cybercabs today?

No. No depot is operating, no client vehicle is being managed by DockDuty, and no client Cybercab is earning. Orlando is our lead market, with its depot targeted for Q4 2026, and no lease has been executed. The software platform, the reservation system, the published agreement and live payment processing are the parts that exist today. Customer-owned vehicles also cannot join Tesla’s Robotaxi network today; that program’s terms have not been published.

What does it cost to have DockDuty run my Cybercab?

A monthly retainer per stall plus a percentage of ride revenue, both of which drop as fleet size grows. Reserving costs a US $450 refundable deposit per stall, credited in full against a one-time US $1,000 onboarding fee with a $550 balance at intake. The agreement caps the onboarding fee at $1,000 per vehicle and the intake balance at $550, and states that no other mandatory fees apply. Charging electricity is included in the retainer with no markup on energy.

Is DockDuty affiliated with Tesla?

No. DockDuty is an independent company. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or partnered with Tesla, Inc.; “Tesla” and “Cybercab” are trademarks of Tesla, Inc., used here for descriptive reference only. DockDuty holds no Tesla vehicle allocation, no enrollment right and no commercial agreement of any kind with Tesla, and claims none.

Click around the dashboard first. It is public.

No login, no card, no form. Then, if you want a stall: $450, fully refundable at will until your vehicle is onboarded, credited in full against the $1,000 onboarding fee. You keep the title. Month-to-month.

Open the live demo Reserve a stall: $450, refundable

When the depot opens, owners drop off the car and get monthly statements.