Elon Musk Promised 1,000 Texas Robotaxis Last Year. It’s Nowhere Near That
The official count was revealed for the first time in registration information submitted by Tesla to the Texas DMV.
- Tesla’s Robotaxi service in Texas has fewer than 50 self-driving cabs, one year after its debut.
- In 2025, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed the service would start slowly, but that it would have 1,000 cars within a month.
- By comparison, Waymo, the largest robotaxi operator in the U.S., has over 550 vehicles offering rides in Texas.
Tesla has 42 self-driving cars offering rides in the state of Texas, according to registration information submitted by the American automaker to the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles under new rules that went into effect yesterday.
This is the first time an official count for Tesla’s Texas Robotaxi fleet has been revealed, as reported by Bloomberg. The third-party Robotaxi Tracker shows the Model Y maker currently has 39 unsupervised self-driving vehicles in Texas.
A Tesla Model Y Robotaxi in Austin, Texas
The number pales in comparison to its largest competitor, Waymo, which has 577 autonomous taxis offering rides in Texas. It’s also a far cry from the predictions Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, made last year before the service’s debut.
“We'll start with probably 10 for a week, then increase it to 20, 30, 40, and I think we’ll probably be at 1,000 within a few months,” Musk said during an interview with CNBC in May. A month later, Tesla’s Robotaxi service went live in a small geofenced area in Austin, Texas, with safety monitors in the front passenger seat and chase vehicles.
Fast-forward to January 2026, when Tesla ditched the safety monitors for its Austin fleet. On January 22, when the first unsupervised rides happened, Tesla had a single vehicle doing all the heavy lifting, according to Robotaxi Tracker. A month later, the fleet had increased to eight vehicles. Now, roughly 30 Tesla robotaxis are operating without a safety monitor in Austin, with the remaining 12 equally distributed between Dallas and Houston, per the third-party tracking service. The Texas DMV does not offer detailed information on the cities where the cars are operating.
Through Elon Musk’s voice, Tesla has made some wild claims in the past. The outspoken CEO said that the company would have “hundreds of thousands, if not a million Teslas doing self-driving” by the end of 2026.
This presumably includes private vehicles, but owners of older cars running previous-generation hardware got some bad news when Musk said they would not be capable of unsupervised self-driving without a comprehensive hardware upgrade. Whether or not the update would be possible at all is unclear, with Musk claiming that Tesla would have to build “micro factories” to retrofit old cars for FSD, but there’s no timeline for that.
What’s more, the only version of the so-called Full Self-Driving feature is currently tagged as “Unsupervised,” even on brand-new cars.
Separately, Tesla has roughly 580 cars offering rides in San Francisco, but all of them have a driver behind the steering wheel.
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