Unsupervised Tesla Robotaxis numbers in Texas spike ahead of the Cybercab launch

Tesla is getting ready to launch its Cybercab driverless taxi service in Austin, Texas, by the end of this month, according to a report from earlier this week. But at the time, the number of unsupervised autonomous Tesla vehicles doing rounds in Texas was pretty low and even shrinking from spring until now.

However, crowd-sourced data on Robotaxitracker.com shows that unsupervised Tesla vehicles in the region have spiked in the last week or so, and now we have more than 150 such vehicles. Notably, the website's creator Ethan McKanna says the sudden spike is due to how the website collects and analyzes data, so there might have been more than twenty-something vehicles this summer to begin with. But that's not the whole story.

In a recent earnings call, Elon Musk said that the Robotaxi program will scale very rapidly as the launch date approaches. He didn't give any specific numbers, though.

Other people familiar with the matter say that Tesla is intentionally holding off the deployment of driverless Model Y vehicles in Austin as it expects the steering-wheel-less Cybercab cars to scale fast and be ready for the roads in the next quarter.

Despite the sudden spike in driverless and unsupervised Robotaxis in the last few weeks, Tesla is still far behind competitors such as Waymo, which operates more than 300 driverless vehicles in the region and over 4,000 in 10 different cities. We are also not yet convinced that Tesla is ready to embark on this endeavor given the limited collective miles these vehicles have on the road compared to rivals like Waymo, which boasts about 220 million miles since 2020.

Source