Robotaxi customers are having to wait a bit longer for their rides (Andrej Sokolow/Getty Images)

Waitlist

Tesla Robotaxi demand outpacing supply in Austin and San Francisco

The service finally became available to the public this week.

11/21/25 10:24AM

Would-be Tesla Robotaxi riders in Austin and the Bay Area are having trouble actually accessing the service, which just became open to the public, instead of invite-only, earlier this week. A number of users are receiving notifications that say, “High service demand. Please come back later,” according to screenshots they’ve sent to us or posted on social media.

When service is available, many are reporting wait times of 40 minutes or more to catch a ride in the autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. (They have a safety monitor in the passenger seat in Austin and a driver using supervised Full Self-Driving in the Bay Area.)

Tesla completely nuked the user experience in Austin by making the service public without scaling the fleet proportionally. Not sure what the game plan was here pic.twitter.com/ooHDoLHMjo
— Ethan McKanna (@ethanmckanna) November 20, 2025

It seems demand for the service, whose app briefly neared the top of the App Store rankings when the waitlist became available in September, is outpacing supply.

When Tesla launched its service in Austin this summer, it started out with about 20 vehicles. It has since expanded to the Bay Area, where it operates a service with an unknown number of vehicles that’s more akin to Uber since a person is driving the car. Tesla hasn’t disclosed the current number of vehicles on the road in each market, but CEO Elon Musk recently said he expects there to be 500 in Austin and 1,000 in the Bay Area by the end of the year. For comparison, Google’s Waymo currently has more than 1,000 vehicles in the Bay Area and more than 100 in Austin.

Separately, Musk said on the company’s last earnings call that its Robotaxi service would expand into 8 to 10 markets this year, up from the two it’s currently in. Waymo is operational in five markets and has plans to expand to more than 20 markets.

Read More: Who has the wheel

Tesla’s Robotaxi service area in Austin is about 245 square miles, and in northern California, its coverage spans San Francisco down to San Jose and includes parts of East Bay. For now, however many vehicles it has in service isn’t cutting it.

Of course, scaling up is supposed to be easy for Tesla, whose CEO has repeatedly said much of the company’s existing consumer fleet, which numbers in the millions, could potentially convert to robotaxis at a moment’s notice.

“There are millions of cars out there that, with a software update, become Full Self-Driving cars,” Musk said on Tesla’s recent earnings call.

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AI leaderboard maker LMArena hits $1.7 billion valuation

If you want to know who’s up and who’s down in the AI model world, look no further than LMArena’s leaderboard. The startup has just raised a $150 million series A fundraising round, with a valuation of $1.7 billion.

In seven months, LMArena has raised $250 million, according to TechCrunch.

The leaderboard started as a research project by cofounders Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley.

The public leaderboard — formerly known as “Chatbot Arena” — shows the results of human evaluations of AI models for various tasks. Users can rate which model did a better job on one task in a sort of blind taste test.

The leaderboard is a hotly contested proving grounds for new models, and the company occupies a powerful position in an industry that lacks independent, industry-standard evaluations.

LMArena lands $1.7B valuation four months after launching its product | TechCrunch

The leaderboard started as a research project by cofounders Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley.

The leaderboard is a hotly contested proving grounds for new models, and the company occupies a powerful position in an industry that lacks independent, industry-standard evaluations.

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Uber jumps after unveiling Lucid robotaxi at CES

Uber shares jumped more than 5% after the company unveiled a production-intent robotaxi developed in partnership with Lucid and Nuro at the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday. The autonomous vehicle runs on Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor computer. Nvidia itself announced a slate of autonomous hardware and software announcements at CES.

The companies said this fall that the San Francisco Bay Area will be the first market for the joint effort. The robotaxi is already being tested on public roads, with a commercial launch planned for later this year.

Uber + Lucid + Nvidia is just another example of the tangled web of partnerships in the autonomous driving space, where Nvidia is now becoming more and more prominent.

This is Uber's new robotaxi from Lucid and Nuro | TechCrunch

Uber + Lucid + Nvidia is just another example of the tangled web of partnerships in the autonomous driving space, where Nvidia is now becoming more and more prominent.

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Meta delays international Ray-Ban Display expansion thanks to “unprecedented demand” and “extremely limited inventory”

Meta said today that it’s delaying the early 2026 international expansion of its Ray-Ban Display glasses because of “extremely limited inventory” and “unprecedented demand.” The company didn’t specify whether the issue was more supply or demand, but has previously insisted its smart glasses are a hit.

Waitlists for the smart glasses, which are controlled with a band you wear on your wrist, extend “well into 2026.”

“We’ll continue to focus on fulfilling orders in the US while we re-evaluate our approach to international availability,” the company wrote. Expansion had been planned for the UK, France, Italy, and Canada.

In order to buy the smart glasses, consumers must do an in-person product demo to ensure the tech is “properly fitted to you,” according to Meta. Demos in New York City are unavailable for the next few weeks, the company’s scheduling website shows. It also notes that “that due to high demand, the product may be sold out and unavailable for purchase after your demo.”