The number of officially registered Tesla Cybercabs in Texas has risen from 7 to 45 in just a few days, while the existing Robotaxi service using Model Y vehicles is already operating in Austin, Dallas, and Houston without a safety operator. According to Tesla's head of autonomous driving, Ashok Elluswamy, the fleet has covered more than 380,000 miles without any serious incidents.
Foreign publication Teslarati, citing data from the crowdsourced Robotaxi Tracker platform, reported a significant expansion of Tesla's Robotaxi fleet ahead of the Cybercab presentation. The number of Tesla vehicles operating without a safety operator in Austin, Dallas, and Houston is approaching 200. Over three weeks, that figure has increased roughly sevenfold.
Over the past year, Tesla has acted cautiously, gradually expanding the service area, increasing operating hours, and adding more vehicles. Tesla's head of autonomous driving, Ashok Elluswamy, previously said during the company's second-quarter earnings call that the Robotaxi project had collectively covered more than 380,000 miles without a safety operator, with no significant incidents. Tesla has repeatedly cited these figures as evidence that it is developing autonomous driving carefully and without rushing.
However, outside analysts have had other reasons to question the company's actual progress. For a long time, the size of the fleet remained at just over 20 vehicles, leading many critics to believe that Tesla's actual ability to deploy the Robotaxi service was significantly behind its stated ambitions.
If reports of a fleet approaching 200 vehicles are confirmed ahead of the Cybercab presentation, many of those criticisms will lose their force, and the company won't even need to defend itself separately during the presentation. By then, Tesla will be able to visibly demonstrate a sufficiently large Model Y fleet operating without safety operators while also emphasizing that the Cybercab uses the same basic FSD software platform as the Robotaxi vehicles already in service. This would allow the new model to be presented not as a separate experiment but as a logical continuation of the ongoing commercialization of autonomous driving.
At the same time as it expands the fleet, Tesla is accelerating the registration process for the two-seat Cybercab with Texas regulators. In just a few days, the number of registered vehicles increased from 7 to 45.
The company is therefore developing two directions at once:
Notably, the two processes are moving almost in parallel rather than sequentially. Tesla has not waited to expand the existing fleet as much as possible before moving on to the Cybercab. It appears the company expects this week's upcoming event to be more than a presentation of a new model. It will also demonstrate that the Robotaxi business has already reached a certain scale and that Tesla is ready to move from the production Model Y to a dedicated autonomous vehicle.
By the way, if you often find yourself under close scrutiny from traffic police, it's useful to know in advance how an apparently harmless question from an officer about your route can result in a ticket. And for those who are still shopping for a car, there's also a roundup in which an auto mechanic named five reliable cars for around $7,000.