Tesla Robotaxi

Tesla announced today that its “Robotaxi” service is now rolling out in Dallas and Houston, marking the company’s first expansion beyond Austin and San Francisco. The company shared maps of the two new service areas, which appear to cover small slices of each city.

The Houston geofence covers approximately 25 square miles, according to early user analysis of the maps, while the Dallas zone appears to center around the Highland Park area. For context, Tesla’s Austin geofence has grown to roughly 245 square miles after months of gradual expansion — but that took nearly a year to reach from an initial 20-square-mile footprint.

On today’s surprisingly affordable episode of Quick Charge we respond to America’s new, $770/mo. average car payment buy rounding up some affordable EV lease deals at less than HALF the new normal.

Tesla has abruptly decided to give up plans to build an autonomous charging station for future driverless taxis in downtown San Francisco, ahead of a public hearing on the matter. The plan had received pushback from the Teamsters union, though whether that influenced Tesla’s decision is not clear.

On Tesla’s Q4/FY2025 earnings call yesterday, Musk mused about the growth rate of its paid robotaxi service, which it launched in Austin this year.

But there’s little evidence that the network is working at the level he claims it is today, and it seems extremely unlikely that it will scale at the rate he claimed either.

Tesla has started offering Robotaxi rides without a safety monitor in Austin, Texas. After yet another set of missed timelines and a full decade of broken promises, Elon Musk is finally getting a version of the “win” he has been desperately seeking. But considering the alarming crash data we have and the evidence of heavy remote monitoring, should we be excited or terrified?

Update: New video evidence shows that Tesla’s supposedly “unsupervised” Robotaxis in Austin are being closely followed by black Tesla trailing cars with safety monitors inside. Tesla didn’t remove the safety monitors – it just moved them to a different vehicle.

Waymo began autonomous ride-hailing operations in Miami, Florida today, covering a 60-square-mile service area stretching from the design district to South Miami.

It’s the sixth city covered by Waymo’s level 4 driverless taxis, while its main competitor, Tesla, has just started its first driverless taxi operation today (in very limited form).

Tesla has reported yet another crash involving its Robotaxi fleet in Austin to the NHTSA. The new data keeps the program’s accident rate alarmingly high compared to human drivers, even as the company prepares to remove human safety supervisors from the vehicles.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will remove “safety monitors” from the passenger seats of Tesla’s Robotaxi vehicles in “about three weeks,” which would mean we’d see completely driverless Teslas in the Austin area potentially by the end of the year – if that timeline sticks.

Elon Musk announced last night that Tesla is planning to “roughly double” its Robotaxi fleet in Austin next month. While an expansion of the pilot sounds positive on the surface, a look at the actual numbers reveals that Tesla is missing its own “end of year” target by a massive margin.

Just last month, Musk explicitly stated that Tesla aimed to have 500 Robotaxis in Austin by the end of the year. Now, “doubling” the current estimated fleet suggests the actual number will be closer to 60.

Tesla and Waymo are currently on opposite sides of a back-and-forth regarding how to proceed with California’s autonomous ride-hailing rules, and Tesla’s filings paint a different picture of its “Robotaxi” system’s capabilities than its CEO Elon Musk has in his public statements.

Tesla has been granted a Transportation Network Company (TNC) permit by the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT), enabling the company to operate a paid ride-hailing service in the state officially.

This will allow Tesla to launch its ‘Robotaxi’ similarly to how it does in California – meaning with Uber drivers using Full Self-Driving Supervised (FSD).

A Tesla Robotaxi ‘safety driver’ in San Francisco was caught on video sleeping in the middle of a drive with a customer.

The good news is that the system did wake him up, but certainly a bit late.

Tesla claimed in today’s Tesla’s Q3 shareholder letter that it started a ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area “with Robotaxi technology,” but this is impossible given that the company has no license to operate an autonomous taxi in California.

An awkward Tesla Robotaxi incident, where the “safety monitor” had to exit the vehicle in the middle of traffic to take the driver’s seat, suggests that Elon Musk’s company is prioritizing optics over safety.

The time is finally here: there are actual driverless Tesla Robotaxis on the road, at least in a portion of Austin, Texas, as of this weekend. And thanks to their ridership of exclusively Tesla influencers, almost all of the miles they’ve put under their belt has been filmed or livestreamed, which gives us plenty of footage to discover what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong.

After plenty of delays (even as recently as this very morning), the first videos of Tesla’s Robotaxi rides are coming in and the Tesla fans that have been invited as early access users seem to have positive reviews already.

Tesla spent years selling its Full Self-Driving software, for as much as $15,000, with the promise that owners would be able to use that software to send their cars out as robotaxis to earn money when they’re not being used otherwise.

Just today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla will be charging a flat fee of $4.20 for rides in its highly-supervised “robotaxi”. But that brings up the question: if Tesla spent so many years promising that you could use your car to earn money, and it’s using its cars to earn money, then why can’t you?

A Tesla Cybercab, or Robotaxi, Tesla has been using the names alternatively, has been spotted with a steering wheel – raising questions.

On today’s slightly confusing episode of Quick Charge, we’ve got a 675 hp AUDI concept that isn’t really an Audi, a self-driving Tesla hitting the roads around Giga Texas while the company pulls all the demand levers in Europe, electric garbage trucks from Mack arriving in Wisconsin, and more!

Tesla’s pricing numbers for its future vehicles are all over the place and changing by the minute. Just today, CEO Elon Musk revealed that the promised $30k price for Robotaxi would be “post-incentive” – before saying the car would cost $25k just minutes later.

Tesla’s Robotaxi event came and went last night, and we finally learned (very few) new details about the much-hyped car that CEO Elon Musk thinks will add $5 trillion to Tesla’s market capitalization.

But the main thing it left me (still) thinking is: why does this car even exist?