Tesla is expanding its robot taxi service to another city in Texas in order to compete with Waymo and position itself as more than just a car manufacturer. The company announced on X that it will provide robot taxi services in San Antonio starting at 5 a.m. local time on Monday.
Tesla has not provided more details about the services, such as operating hours, whether the fleet will also include golden two-seater Cybercab vehicles and modified versions of the Model Y vehicles, nor has it stated whether these vehicles will be equipped with human safety monitors. However, if the company continues with its previous practices during previous launches, it will initially deploy a small number of vehicles and limit the service areas, before gradually expanding them.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promising for a decade that the company would launch autonomous vehicles, and finally in June 2025, they launched a robot taxi service in Austin. Although the service was limited at that time and there were human safety operators in the cars, it was still an important milestone for the company, as it tested whether autonomous vehicles could be safely deployed relying solely on cameras and end-to-end AI.
Thereafter, Tesla expanded slowly. In January of this year, the company removed safety monitors from its robot taxis in Austin, officially launching true autonomous driving services. Over the past 11 months, it has continued to expand coverage in Austin and has also entered new cities in Florida and Texas. Currently, its robot taxis are operating in limited areas of Miami and Orlando, as well as in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston.
Its competitor, Waymo, also provides robotic taxi services in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. They use a fleet composed of driverless Jaguar I - Pace and Zeekr RT vehicles, under the brand name Ojai. As a subsidiary of Alphabet, Waymo recently resumed services in San Antonio after its vehicles encountered difficulties on flooded roads, resulting in a five-month service interruption.
According to Texas vehicle registration data and the Robotaxi Tracker website, Tesla has registered over 400 autonomous vehicles in its fleet in Austin, but the fleet size in other cities typically ranges from just a few to several dozen vehicles. For example, Tracker data shows that Tesla has only 24 vehicles in Fort Worth and 5 vehicles in Miami.
Tesla also holds transportation permits in the San Francisco Bay Area and operates a car-hailing service. Although these vehicles are often referred to as robot taxis, they are actually driven by humans sitting behind the wheel. Tesla currently does not have the necessary permits in California to operate an autonomous car-hailing service.
Despite the company's continuous expansion, data released this summer showed that its robot taxi network covered fewer paid passenger miles in the second quarter than in the first quarter, TechCrunch reported in July.
