Elon Musk, in trademark fashion, has made grand promises about Tesla’s Robotaxi efforts. Before he launched the service last summer, he proclaimed that over 1,000 of the self-driving cabs would be roaming the city streets “within a few months.” He also said that one million self-driving Teslas using the Robotaxi software would be roaming the country by the end of 2026.
In an earnings call after the launch, Musk upped the ante even further.
“We’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in about half the population of the US by the end of the year,” he predicted.
Needless to say, Musk’s service is drastically short of living up to any of these ambitions. There are just 59 Robotaxis on the road, Bloomberg reports, with at least some of them still requiring physical human supervision. Its efforts to expand past its home base in Austin, Texas are floundering, with the company forced to admit to California state regulators that its self-driving cabs don’t actually drive themselves, according to the reporting.
This incremental progress would be permissible at a smaller company. But Musk has persistently wooed investors with his sci-fi vision of the company’s future, keeping its stock buoyant and driving its market cap well past the $1 trillion mark. (Even this is a let down: when he announced a Robotaxi pivot in 2024, Musk projected it would help push Tesla’s valuation to $30 trillion. That is not a typo.)
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The picture on the ground painted by Bloomberg echoes the complaints raised by customers ever since the Robotaxi service was opened up to the public, after it was initially limited to a cadre of uncritical Tesla influencers. Wait times frequently stretch up to 30 minutes, even in Austin, where most of the Robotaxis are deployed, with the app often barring users from booking rides during periods of “high service demand.”
And the cars behave erratically, picking up and dropping off customers at bizarre and inconvenient locations, such as in an alley. Around one in three of the rides have a human monitor sitting in the car, whose presence seems mostly perfunctory; one rider complained that his Robotaxi dropped him a quarter mile from his actual destination, despite a monitor being in the car.
See here for some background. I dunno, I just love seeing Elmo look like an idiot. Not that he cares or that his fanboys notice, but whatever. I still get a little cheap thrill.
The lack of Tesla robotaxis on the road also has an effect on their crash data.
Tesla didn’t report a single at-fault “Robotaxi” crash in the latest NHTSA autonomous-vehicle data — its only fresh incident was a Model Y getting rear-ended while stopped, clearly the other driver’s fault.
That sounds like good news for Tesla’s safety record. But live fleet data points to the real reason the crashes have dried up: Tesla’s robotaxis are barely running, and the active fleet is shrinking a year into the program.
Under NHTSA’s Standing General Order, every company operating an automated driving system has to report crashes. Tesla’s total now sits at just 18 ADS incidents since its Austin launch, compared to roughly 697 for Waymo.
Tesla supporters frame that gap as a safety win. It isn’t. It’s an exposure gap. Waymo operates approximately 3,000 robotaxis and completes more than 500,000 paid trips per week. A higher raw crash count is what you get when you actually run a fleet at scale.
And when Tesla finally unredacted its 17 crash narratives last month, the data confirmed what we suspected: most of its crashes weren’t the autonomous system’s fault. A large share were rear-endings and sideswipes from inattentive human drivers — the exact pattern Waymo reports across the majority of its incidents. The latest report continues that trend with another stopped-and-rear-ended event.
So the headline result, Tesla “avoids” at-fault crashes, isn’t a measure of how good the system is. It’s a measure of how little it’s being used.
The clearest evidence is now a matter of public record. When a new Texas law took effect on May 28, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles published a database of every company authorized for driverless operation. Tesla self-certified its Model Y robotaxis as SAE Level 4 and obtained authorization for exactly 42 vehicles.
For context, Waymo holds 577 authorizations in Texas, and Avride has 317. Tesla’s permitted fleet is less than one-tenth the size of Waymo’s in the same state.
But the permit count is the ceiling, not the reality. According to the latest Robotaxi Tracker data, Tesla’s total active fleet across all markets is just 31 vehicles seen on the road in the past seven days — and only 14 of those are operating unsupervised. The rest still run with a human safety monitor on board.
Break it down by city and the picture gets worse: 16 active in Austin, 7 in Dallas, 3 in Houston, and 5 supervised human-driver vehicles in the Bay Area. That’s roughly 26 active vehicles in Texas against 42 permits — and just 14 of them are the genuinely driverless robotaxis the entire program is supposed to be about.
In other words, Tesla isn’t even using a third of its Texas permits for unsupervised operation at any given time. The permits exist. The robotaxis to fill them don’t.
AVRide is the Uber service now running in Dallas, in case you’d forgotten. This is all really wild when you think about it. And the only place in Houston where you can get a Tesla robotaxi is up around Jersey Village, so no downtown, no Medical Center, no Galleria, no obvious reason for that selection. Maybe they do have an appropriate number of vehicles available for this area. And as noted, they’re not getting involved in crashes, at least not yet.
Thank god.
Death, taxes, and… more lies exit Musk’s mouth than truths.