Tesla expands unsupervised ‘Robotaxi’ area in Austin with only a handful of cars

Tesla has expanded the geofence for its unsupervised “Robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas, growing the area where vehicles can operate without a safety monitor inside the car.

But social media sightings indicate that only a handful of vehicles — somewhere between 4 and 8 Model Ys — are actually running without a human safety monitor. And even those still operate under remote supervision from Tesla.

Expanding the map, not the fleet

The service area expansion is part of a pattern Tesla has followed since launching its robotaxi pilot in Austin in June 2025. The overall robotaxi geofence in Austin has grown to roughly 245 square miles — about 12 times its original 20-square-mile footprint — through a series of expansions over the past several months.

But there’s a massive disconnect between the size of the map and the number of vehicles actually operating without supervision. According to tracking data and social media sightings, the unsupervised fleet consists of fewer than a dozen vehicles, with only a few operating at the same time.

The total Austin fleet sits at roughly 37-42 vehicles, with the vast majority still carrying safety monitors.

But now the “unsupervised” Tesla robotaxies can operate in a slightly larger area of the overall service area in Austin:

It’s also worth emphasizing what “unsupervised” means in Tesla’s context. There’s no human safety monitor inside the car, but Tesla still remotely supervises these vehicles. Earlier in the program, that supervision involved physical chase cars trailing the robotaxis; now it appears to involve remote monitoring. Either way, these are not vehicles operating fully independently.

Years behind schedule

The expansion is real progress, but it needs to be placed in the context of what Tesla actually promised. CEO Elon Musk has a long, well-documented history of missing his own autonomous driving deadlines.

At Tesla’s “Autonomy Day” in 2019, Musk predicted one million robotaxis on the road by 2020. That deadline passed without a single vehicle in commercial autonomous service. In 2022, he said Tesla would mass-produce robotaxis by 2024. That didn’t happen either.

For 2025, the promises were more specific and equally unmet. Musk told investors Tesla would have 500 vehicles operating in Austin and over 1,000 in the Bay Area by year-end. The actual numbers: roughly 42 in Austin and around 130 in San Francisco, almost all with safety monitors. He also promised 8-10 metro areas by the end of 2025 and said robotaxis would reach “half the U.S. population.” The service never expanded beyond Austin and San Francisco, with the latter being limited to Tesla’s level 2 system.

Now, Tesla has set new targets for 2026: expansion to Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas in the first half of the year, with Musk claiming at Davos in January that robotaxis will be “widespread” across the U.S. by year-end. Given the track record, skepticism is warranted.

Waymo’s 500,000 rides vs. Tesla’s handful

The competitive gap makes Tesla’s current situation even more stark. Waymo is now delivering 500,000 paid robotaxi rides per week across 10 U.S. cities — fully driverless, no chase cars, no safety monitors, 24 hours a day. The company is targeting 1 million weekly rides by year-end.

Waymo operates in Austin too, where it runs over 100 vehicles covering 90 square miles with a 4.9-star rider rating. It has expanded into Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando — cities that Tesla has only announced plans for. And Waymo is laying groundwork for over 20 additional cities in 2026, including international expansion to Tokyo and London.

As former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick recently noted, Waymo is “obviously” ahead of Tesla. He argued that Tesla needs a “ChatGPT moment” for its vision-based autonomous driving to catch up — and that moment hasn’t arrived.

Today’s news is an incremental progress rather than a breakthrough.

The numbers tell the story. Waymo delivered 15 million rides in 2025, has a safety record showing 90% fewer serious injury crashes than human drivers, and just raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation. Tesla has reported 15 crash incidents to NHTSA since its Austin launch, with a crash rate roughly 9 times worse than human drivers based on available data.

Electrek’s Take

We’ve been covering Tesla’s autonomous driving claims for nearly a decade now, and the pattern is always the same: grand promises followed by quiet goal-post moves.

Expanding the unsupervised service area is progress — we won’t deny that. Getting any vehicle to drive itself on public roads without a human inside is a genuine technical achievement. But 4-8 remotely supervised cars in a single city is not a robotaxi business. It’s a technology demonstration.

The problem is that Tesla continues to sell the stock on the promise of a massive robotaxi network that generates trillions in revenue, while the reality on the ground is a handful of closely monitored vehicles in one city. Meanwhile, Waymo is completing 500,000 rides per week across 10 cities and scaling fast. That’s the gap Tesla needs to close, and expanding a geofence on a map doesn’t close it — deploying thousands of truly unsupervised vehicles does.

We’ll give credit where it’s due when Tesla actually scales this to something meaningful. But after years of broken timelines, the company needs to show results, not just bigger maps.