Tesla wants its gold, steering-wheel-free Cybercab in far more places, and fast. On its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday 21 October, the company said Cybercab expansion will begin in Dallas next month and spread to other US cities by the end of the year. It also said it will start selling Cybercabs to fleet operators before 2026 is out.
The ambition was not small. "We're starting with getting people from one place to the other, but we want to basically own transportation of any kind on Earth," chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja told analysts, according to TechCrunch. But look past the big words and the numbers that would show how the robotaxi business is actually doing have become harder to find.
Where Tesla's robotaxis run today
The Cybercab launched formally in Austin, Texas, in September. Tesla also runs robotaxi versions of its Model Y in small fleets in Dallas, Houston and the Florida cities of Miami, Orlando and Tampa. Dallas will be the first city outside Austin to get the purpose-built Cybercab, a two-seater with no steering wheel or pedals.
Tesla's pitch is that the Cybercab is cheap and simple to build. Taneja said the manufacturing team thinks it is "one of the easiest products for them to scale", so scaling "would not be that much of a challenge". If that holds, Tesla could undercut rivals on price. It still has to prove it at scale, outside one Texan city.
The chart that changed
The most telling detail was in Tesla's letter to shareholders. In the second quarter, the letter included a chart of "Cumulative Paid Robotaxi Miles". A close reading of that chart by TechCrunch at the time suggested a 36% fall from the first quarter. In the new third-quarter letter, that chart has been replaced with "Cumulative Unsupervised Robotaxi Miles", which counts how far the cars drive whether or not anyone is paying to ride.
Asked about paid miles on the call, Taneja said Tesla is "seeing utilization improving" but gave no figures. Elon Musk said robotaxi revenue will not be noticeable in Tesla's overall results until the second quarter of 2027, "and probably a big deal by Q3 or Q4 of next year".
That matters because miles driven with no one in the car say a lot about testing and very little about whether people are actually using, and paying for, the service.
Regulation or technology?
Taneja said the main challenge is getting "all the regulatory approvals" so Tesla can deploy Cybercabs "as fast as we can produce them". Musk has long blamed regulators, rather than the technology, for holding back his robotaxi plans.
There is a real regulatory issue. Hours after the Austin launch in September, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into whether the Cybercab complies with federal motor vehicle safety standards. Car makers certify their own vehicles, and Tesla says the Cybercab complies, but it lacks features the current rules require, such as a brake pedal and side mirrors. NHTSA has proposed removing some of those requirements, but that change is likely still months away.
Not everyone at Tesla framed it the same way. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla's autonomy work, said the bottlenecks are "not purely regulatory". "It's technology-driven," he said, explaining that robotaxi hours have been extended step by step, from 6am to 9pm, then to 10pm and 11pm, and soon to 2am, as the AI software improves. Tesla's service still does not run on motorways. Elluswamy said the company wants to handle more difficult driving situations by the end of the year before scaling further, adding: "We just want to make sure that there's not a single safety incident."
Tesla vs Waymo: who is really ahead?
On the evidence so far, Waymo. It is the US market leader, with more than 4,000 robotaxis across more than a dozen cities, and it publishes far more about its paid service. Tesla's advantages are on paper: a cheaper car built for the job, a huge factory base and a fleet of customer cars collecting driving data. Its weakness is that it has not yet shown paid rides at scale, and it has just made that harder to judge.
The next few months will be the real test. If the Cybercab arrives in Dallas on time, Tesla starts delivering to fleet operators, and the NHTSA investigation does not slow things down, the gap could narrow quickly. If not, the gold two-seater will stay a promise with a very small footprint. We have looked at the wider race in our story on Waymo's move to Toronto.
What it means for the UK
Do not expect to hail a Cybercab in Britain soon. A car with no steering wheel or pedals would need approval under the new UK self-driving rules, and Tesla has not announced any UK robotaxi plans. The services closest to launch here are robotaxi pilots in London, led by British firm Wayve with Uber. Our explainer on when you can ride in a self-driving car in the UK sets out the timetable, and our report on the London robotaxi protest shows why the arrival will be contested.