If Elon Musk is to be believed, millions of driverless Tesla Robotaxis are set to conquer the streets of America by next year.
Right now, however, his tiny fleet would be stretched thin covering a couple city blocks.
With Tesla remaining tight-lipped about how many self-driving cabs it has in operation, Texas A&M engineering student Ethan McKanna tells Electrek that he’s created an online tracker that keeps tabs on the automaker’s service in Austin, Texas by reverse-engineering its ride-hailing app. It shows that just 32 different Tesla Model Ys are currently operating as part of the Robotaxi network — and worse yet, most of the cars don’t even operate concurrently: the data suggests that fewer than ten robotaxis are giving rides at the same time.
Taken together, it’s an embarrassing reality check to Musk’s grand promises about scaling up the program at an impossible pace.
“This is speculative on my part, but it’s my best guess based on the little data we have and can collect,” McKanna told Electrek. “One person I talked to who scoped out the depot and recorded videos told me he believes there are 1-5 out at a time.”
“The highly sporadic wait time shifts and my experience of consistently getting the same vehicle multiple times when I use the service in the data all corroborate that,” he added.
McKanna’s data lines up with Tesla fans’ rough estimates of the size of the service, which launched in late June with around a dozen cars. It would also mean that Musk’s boast that it had “doubled” its fleet was technically true.
To gather the data, McKanna explained that he found that the Robotaxi app’s API is able to fetch ETA estimates from Tesla prior to booking a ride.
“I have a server where every 5 minutes I ping Tesla at ~10 points in both service areas, pull the wait time, and store it,” he explained. “If a wait time is offered, I count it as available, if ‘high service demand’ or any other type of error is shown, it is marked as unavailable.”
The tracker pings 11 different services locations within the city. A map created using the data shows that the Robotaxis are unavailable in most locations, suggesting that the “high service demand” error is actually covering up the fact that there’s little to no supply available.
Musk has staked Tesla’s future on Robotaxis — part of his broader pivot to AI, robotics, and automation — and to support it, he’s made a number of incredible claims that are yet to be borne out, if ever. He promised that over a thousand Robotaxis would be patrolling Austin “within a few months” of launching, and that over a million autonomous Teslas would be hitting the streets in 2026 after releasing the Robotaxi software to Tesla owners. In July, he also predicted that Robotaxi operations would cover “half the population of the US by the end of the year.”
The actual performance of the cabs would suggest they are far from being ready for primetime. For one, they still rely on the supervision of an in-car human “safety monitor,” who have already had to make several interventions. The cars have been caught violating traffic laws and have gotten into a number of accidents, the details of which Tesla has censored heavily. (Musk recently revealed that Tesla is testing letting its Robotaxis go fully driverless without any human supervision in the car.)
In sum, it’s not a great look for the Robotaxi fleet. But Musk should know by now that size isn’t everything, right?
More on self-driving cabs: Waymos Cause Traffic Jams Across City During Power Outage
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