Tesla’s Robotaxi is way cheaper than Uber, Lyft, or Waymo — but you’ll have to wait a lot longer for one

The average price of a Tesla Robotaxi ride in the San Francisco Bay Area late last year was $8.17 — about half the cost of comparable routes with Lyft, Uber, or Google’s driverless Waymo, according to new data from ride-share comparison app Obi.

However, wait times for Tesla’s Robotaxis, which operate in the Bay Area with a driver, are roughly 3x to 5x longer than those of competing services. Tesla customers wait an average of nearly 16 minutes for their cheaper ride, compared to about three to six minutes for other services.

For this study, Obi analyzed more than 94,000 simulated ride requests from November and December across the four companies, using technical tools including APIs. The data came from a local database and includes hourly information on ride requests, prices, and estimated arrival times.

As was the case with Uber and Lyft in their early days, Tesla’s low prices appear aimed more at attracting customers than turning a profit. Robotaxi prices initially launched at an intentionally provocative $4.20 and rose to the equally tongue-in-cheek $6.90 before transitioning to industry-standard dynamic pricing. CEO Elon Musk has said Robotaxi rides would eventually cost about as much as a bus ticket.

 “It’s a way to gather more data, and get more individuals in the cars and familiar with the brand,” Obi CEO Ashwini Anburajan told Sherwood News. “They’re positioning themselves as a low-cost option in the market.”

Pricing is also central to Tesla’s broader narrative. By relying solely on cameras instead of costly lidar sensors used by competitors like Waymo, Tesla can afford to charge less.

While it remains unclear what Tesla Robotaxi rides will ultimately cost once the business matures, low prices are a powerful way to attract customers. Obi also surveyed consumers in markets where autonomous vehicles are available and found that pricing was their top pain point, with 45% calling it a major ride-share issue in 2026. That said, the next biggest problem was wait times, cited by 34% of respondents and an area where Tesla lags its rivals.

Tesla’s long wait times stem largely from its small fleet, which has ramped up far more slowly than the company promised. During the study period, just over 100 Tesla Robotaxis were in service in the Bay Area; today that number is closer to 170 — well short of Musk’s most recent promise to deploy 1,000 vehicles in the region by the end of 2025.

“It’s not something that they can sustain if they want to be in the market competitively,” Anburajan said. “Ride-share is an impatient industry with consumers — wait times matter significantly.”

Waymo’s wait times outside peak demand have fallen since Obi first conducted its ride-share pricing and ETA study last spring, and are now often comparable to Uber and Lyft.

At the same time, the 30% to 40% price premium Waymo once commanded over traditional ride-hailers has narrowed significantly, nearly disappearing for longer trips. That shift reflects both Waymo lowering prices and Uber and Lyft raising theirs, per the report.

Competition in the Bay Area has also grown in that time.

Tesla expanded its service there in July, and Amazon’s Zoox entered the market in November, offering a free, limited-destination service to the public. Uber and Lucid have also begun testing their own robotaxi service, which is expected to become publicly available later this year.

The data points to a familiar trade-off in ride-hailing: riders care deeply about price, but only up to a point. Cheaper fares can lure customers in, but long wait times quickly erode that advantage. As competition intensifies across both autonomous and traditional services, success may hinge less on undercutting rivals and more on delivering a ride that’s both affordable and timely.