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Tesla Model 3 receives Top Safety Pick+ award from the IIHS
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has released the results of its crash tests for the Tesla Model 3, and just like other safety agencies in the US and abroad, the organization has granted the all-electric sedan its highest rating available. In a recent announcement, the IIHS has revealed that the Tesla Model 3 qualifies for its Top Safety Pick+ award.
The IIHS notes that to earn the Top Safety Pick+ award, a vehicle must get good ratings in the driver-side small overlap front, moderate overlap front, side, roof strength, and head restraint tests. Good ratings are also required in the passenger-side small overlap test and the headlight evaluation, the latter proving to be a tricky metric that is rarely aced by carmakers.
The Model 3 earned good ratings across the board for crashworthiness, with the vehicle’s front crash prevention system getting a superior rating after successfully avoiding collisions in both the 12 mph and 25 mph track tests. The Model 3’s strong frame also allowed the vehicle to perform well in challenging tests such as the driver-side small overlap front test. Additionally, the Model 3’s headlights received a good rating for being bright enough without causing glare to other drivers.
With its results, the Tesla Model 3 joins the all-electric Audi e-tron and the hydrogen-powered Hyundai Nexo as the IIHS’ Top Safety Pick+ vehicles for 2019. Speaking about these results, IIHS Chief Research Officer David Zuby remarked that the stellar safety performance of these vehicles proves that cars with alternative powertrains do not compromise in terms of safety. “Vehicles with alternative powertrains have come into their own. There’s no need to trade away safety for a lower carbon footprint when choosing a vehicle,” he said.
In a blog post, Tesla explained that the Model 3’s Top Safety Pick+ rating from the IIHS is due to the vehicle’s all-electric structural and powertrain design, which gives the car a low center of gravity that reduces rollover risk while protecting occupants in the event of a crash. Of course, the absence of an engine results in a generous crumple zone in front of the Model 3, which absorbs energy more effectively during a collision. The Model 3’s glass roof also proved very strong, resisting more than 20,000 pounds of force.
Apart from receiving the IIHS’ Top Safety Pick+ rating, the Tesla Model 3 has also earned a 5-Star Safety Rating from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The all-electric sedan also set new benchmarks in safety at its tests with the European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP), as well as the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP).
Watch the IIHS’s featurette on the Tesla Model 3’s stellar safety results in the video below.
Read Tesla’s blog post about the IIHS’ Top Safety Pick+ award for the Model 3 below.
Model 3 Earns the 2019 IIHS TOP SAFETY PICK+ Award
We engineer our cars to be the best in the world – in every category. Model 3, our most affordable car yet, is no exception. From the start, we designed it to be among the safest cars ever built, with the goal of getting as many Model 3s on the road as possible to further our mission.
Model 3 has already earned a 5-star safety rating in every category and sub-category from safety authorities on three continents (North America, Europe and Australia), and it has received top marks around the world for its advanced safety assistance features like Automatic Emergency Braking.
Now, in new tests from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), Model 3 has been named a 2019 IIHS TOP SAFETY PICK+ vehicle, the highest achievement awarded by the Institute. To evaluate whether Model 3 met the criteria for this top rating, IIHS tested the car’s crashworthiness, occupant protection, crash avoidance, and headlight systems. Model 3 earned top marks in all eight tests, including a superior rating in front crash prevention, which evaluates a car’s Automatic Emergency Braking system, and the highest possible rating in IIHS’ headlight assessment.
Here’s a look at some of the ways we made this happen:
Part of what makes Model 3 so safe is its all-electric powertrain design, which gives the car a low center of gravity that reduces roll-over risk, as well as its rigid aluminum and steel passenger cabin that provides exceptional strength to equally protect drivers and passengers. Additionally, Model 3’s lack of an engine is replaced by a large crumple zone that helps it absorb energy more effectively than a gas car would, dissipating force away from the passenger cabin. This crumple zone contributed to Model 3’s top rating in IIHS’ frontal crash protection tests.
The Institute’s results also demonstrate the exceptional strength of Model 3’s all-glass roof, which is supported by a very strong metal body structure and helps protect occupants in roll-over crashes. During testing, the car’s roof was able to successfully resist more than 20,000 pounds of force – that’s more than if we placed five Model 3s on top of the car’s roof at once. And, the roof earned a higher strength-to-weight ratio score than any other fully electric vehicle that IIHS has ever tested.
In addition, Model 3’s safety restraint system also earned high marks in IIHS’ evaluation. This was due in part to Model 3’s seats, which are designed and manufactured in-house at our dedicated seat factory in Fremont, as well as our thick curtain airbag and uniquely shaped front passenger airbag, which help protect a passenger’s head from the car’s A-pillar and center screen.
In terms of crash mitigation, good headlights can help prevent nighttime crashes, which is why Model 3 comes standard with automatic high and low beam headlights that earned top marks in IIHS testing. And, when it comes to crash prevention, Model 3 earned a superior rating thanks to our Automatic Emergency Braking system, which successfully avoided collisions at both 12 miles per hour and 25 miles per hour.
The safety of our customers is what matters most, which is why our active safety features and passive safety equipment come standard on all of our cars. We’re also committed to making our cars even safer over time via over-the-air updates, helping us ensure that all Tesla drivers have access to the best safety features available for their cars.
Elon Musk
SpaceX makes history, catching Starship from orbit for the first time
SpaceX caught Starship’s upper stage with its launch tower for the first time on Saturday.
SpaceX caught a Starship upper stage with its launch tower for the first time on Saturday, bringing Ship 42 back to Starbase after roughly 22 and a half hours in orbit on Flight 15. No company has ever returned the upper stage of an orbital rocket to its launch site and caught it.
Ship 42 lifted off Friday evening on top of Booster 22, reached orbit and deployed all 26 of its Starlink V3 satellites. Three of those satellites carried cameras to photograph the ship’s heat shield, and SpaceX said the imagery showed it was in good shape for reentry, allowing controllers to pass on a backup splashdown option overnight. By Saturday morning, SpaceX posted on X that “Pad and tower systems are go for catch.” After about 14 orbits, the ship fired its engines to leave orbit, came back through the atmosphere and was caught by the tower’s chopstick arms.
IT HAPPENED https://t.co/KHITqHUWOf — TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 14, 2026
The catch salvages a flight that started with a setback. Super Heavy did not make it back to the tower on Friday. “We were initially go for a catch, but in the later stages of the coast, the booster aborted itself for a GNC issue that it detected and that put it into its landing offshore,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot said. The booster hovered over the Gulf of Mexico before its flight termination system triggered and it came down in the water.
Elon Musk said Saturday that the booster ran short on propellant because its engines slightly underperformed. The fix, he wrote, is better engine consistency with Raptor V3.2 and a flight software change to cut the engines “about one second earlier” so enough fuel is left for the return. “This booster loss does not change our timeline to reach high volume, fully reusable Starship flights,” Musk added.
The ship is the harder half of that goal, and the one SpaceX had never recovered. Super Heavy has now been caught three times, most recently in March 2025, while every previous ship ended in the ocean or was lost. Falcon 9 lands its boosters routinely but throws its upper stage away on every launch. Musk described a full Starship recovery on SpaceX’s third quarter earnings call as a “profound technology milestone,” and Saturday’s catch shows the hardest piece of it can work.
That piece matters for nearly everything SpaceX is planning. Reusable ships are what make the economics of launching Starlink V3 satellites at scale work, along with the Starmind orbital compute constellation. NASA’s Artemis lunar lander also depends on refilling Starships in orbit with repeated tanker flights, which requires vehicles that can fly again quickly. Musk has said he expects Starship to reach a weekly launch cadence in the first half of 2027.
Flight 15 also improved on the last Starship mission in September, which reached orbit but ended after about three hours with a Pacific splashdown when some engines shut down. Before this flight, SpaceX had shown an animation of the ship catch during its earnings webcast, and Musk put the odds of pulling it off on the first try at “more likely than not,” as Teslarati reported.
Tesla’s long-promised Cybercab is finally available for personal purchase, at least for a select few in the Austin area. But it’s far from a straightforward ownership experience.
The $29,990 price tag comes with a stack of restrictions that redefine what “owning” the vehicle actually means. The two-seat, steering-wheel-free Robotaxi, previously limited to Tesla’s own fleet, now carries contractual terms that limit where it can go, how it can be used, and whether it can even move without an active paid subscription.
Opening Night of Orders
Late on November 13, Tesla announced that select customers were being invited to order a Cybercab for personal use.
Tesla Cybercab goes on sale for $29,990, slated for December deliveries
The estimated purchase price is $29,990 before taxes, paired with a non-refundable $1,000 deposit and an estimated December 2026 delivery in Austin, Texas. The first month of the required :Autonomy Subscription,” priced at $299 per month is included.
After that, the vehicle needs an active subscription to operate at all. The announcement confirmed that customer sales had begun, albeit on an invite-only basis rather than a public order page.
The Fine Print for Buyers
BREAKING: Tesla’s Cybercab Autonomy Subscription terms are now live. A paid monthly subscription is required.
1/12 Tesla: “Your Cybercab will not operate without an active Autonomy Subscription. 🧵 https://t.co/umVk6DJE2x— Spencer (@scotsrule08) November 13, 2026
For those invited to order, the agreements (Cybercab Order Agreement, Terms of Use, and Autonomy Subscription Agreement) impose significant constraints. Major points include:
- A mandatory Autonomy Subscription (currently listed at $299 per month on the order screen, first month included) is required; without it, the Cybercab will not operate.
- Personal, non-commercial use only; ride-hailing, Robotaxi network participation, delivery, or rental requires separate written authorization or product enablement from Tesla.
- Operation restricted to Tesla-enabled Robotaxi geofences and supported service areas, which the company can expand, shrink, or alter; the vehicle may be technologically prevented from operating outside them.
- No unauthorized modifications (including wraps, window tint, or wheel changes) without Tesla or an authorized provider.
- Restricted resale and transfer: written permission required, with contractual damages of at least $50,000 (or full transaction value if higher) for unauthorized sales; Tesla also reserves repurchase rights at a company-determined fair market value, with the owner covering return costs.
- Safety or improper-use “strikeouts” (three or more) can trigger a one-week suspension of autonomous features without prorated refund.
- Owners remain responsible for insurance, registration, charging, parking, and general cleaning; the subscription covers certain maintenance items such as tires, windshields, filters, and camera cleaning, plus limited towing.
- Manual controls on the touchscreen allow only short-distance movement up to about 2 mph and require a valid driver’s license; they are not for public-road driving.
Why These Terms Might Exist
Tesla’s approach prioritizes control over a vehicle designed without traditional human controls and intended primarily as transport-as-a-service, something that Musk has hinted toward for some time now. Restricting commercial use and modifications could be as much of a software integrity, safety, and data collection effort as it is a safety effort.
Fleet consistency could also be in regulatory scrutiny early on in the Cybercab’s days of public operation.
The subscription model generates ongoing revenue beyond the low vehicle price and ensures the car remains connected and updatable, something that will keep the Cybercab as safe as possible as new updates roll out.
Buyback and resale limits reduce the risk of vehicles circulating outside Tesla’s operational and service ecosystem.
It apperas that personal ownership is secondary to the broader Robotaxi network strategy, as Musk has previously stated that the vast majority of Cybercabs would remain Tesla-owned.
Pickup Locations and Musk’s Pricing View
Initial deliveries are estimated for Austin, but personal vehicles are able to operate in any of Tesla’s Robotaxi geofences:
It’ll work unsupervised inside all the same geo locations as @robotaxi, just serving the owners’ needs.
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) November 14, 2026
Those who have been invited to order can also have their personal Cybercab delivered to numerous locations in Texas, including:
- Austin
- Dallas
- Houston
- San Antonio
- Fort Worth
Interesting that you can choose a delivery city https://t.co/SknDz9rFzo
— Whole Mars Catalog (@wholemars) November 14, 2026
As far as the monthly “Autonomy Subscription,” it appears Musk already wants it to be low. He acknowledged last night on X that the subscription price is too high. Along with detailing that the Cybercab will be available nationwide as regulatory approval is received, Musk said the monthly fee should match the cost of FSD and Premium Connectivity, which is about $115 per month.
The launch marks a milestone for unsupervised personal autonomous vehicles, but the fine print makes clear that buyers are purchasing a highly constrained asset whose usefulness is tightly bound to Tesla’s software, service network, and geographic approvals.
Tesla has officially put the Cybercab up for sale, revealing a bargain price and a $299 per month “Autonomy Subscription” that could hit customer hands as soon as December.
The offer requires a $299 monthly Autonomy Subscription, with the first month included in the purchase price, along with a $1,000 non-refundable order deposit. Tesla’s ordering interface shows deliveries targeted for Austin, Texas.
Tesla says that the Cybercab is making transportation more efficient, affordable and accessible than ever before, and that buyers can order their own Cybercab for personal use.
🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING: Tesla Cybercab is officially on sale for $29,990 with a $299/mo “Autonomy Subscription”
Delivery slotted for December! HUGE!
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 13, 2026
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated robotaxi, a gold-finished, two-passenger vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals, designed from the outset for unsupervised autonomous operation. It has been in limited Robotaxi service in Austin since September 2026, operating alongside Tesla’s larger fleet of Model Y vehicles.
Production takes place at Gigafactory Texas, which launched earlier this year. Tesla has stated for some time that it planned to put Cybercabs on sale by the end of the year, and it looks like they will come through on that promise if everything goes according to plan.
The Autonomy Subscription is mandatory for the vehicle to operate because it is void of a steering wheel and pedals. Tesla notes that the subscription and regular vehicle maintenance are required, indicating that personal owners will depend on the company’s software and service infrastructure rather than traditional ownership models.
One month of the subscription is included with purchase and subsequent months are billed separately until canceled.
This limited personal-sales opening marks a shift from Tesla’s earlier emphasis on fleet and transport-as-a-service operations. During the Q3 2026 Earnings Call, executives indicated that the vast majority of Cybercabs would remain Tesla-owned and used for rideshare service, while still aiming to place some vehicles with customers by year-end.
Elon Musk has previously targeted a price below $30,000, which was a huge point of emphasis for the Cybercab being the central point of Tesla’s “transportation-as-a-service” model.
Availability remains restricted to invited customers rather than a public order page, and the initial deliveries are expected only in the Austin area where unsupervised Robotaxi operations are already active. Buyers will need to accept the geographic and operational constraints of current autonomous deployment, as the vehicle cannot be driven manually outside supported zones.
The move gives a small number of early buyers the chance to own Tesla’s dedicated autonomous vehicle at the long-discussed sub-$30,000 price point, while the bulk of production continues to support the company’s expanding Robotaxi network.
SpaceX makes history, catching Starship from orbit for the first time
Tesla Cybercab ownership will come with plenty of strings attached
