The number of Tesla Robotaxis on the road has been going down
That’s the wrong direction for a business trying to scale its autonomous vehicles.
Tesla’s future as an AI and autonomous powerhouse relies on scaling its Robotaxi business, but the company’s driverless fleet is quietly shrinking.
Data from Robotaxi Tracker shows that the number of active unsupervised Robotaxis on the road in Texas has declined from a peak of around 40 down to about 30 in the last month. In the Bay Area, where safety monitors sit in the driver’s seat and where Tesla’s fleet is substantially larger, the site has also reported a big drop in available Robotaxis, from a peak of around 200 active vehicles a couple months ago to approximately 50 now. The results are even lower if you look for vehicles active in the last week.
Ride-sharing comparison app Obi corroborated the data for Sherwood News.
“We’re seeing lower availability of Tesla Robotaxis, too,” Obi CEO Ashwini Anburajan told Sherwood. “Tesla is appearing in far fewer searches in the Obi app, indicating fewer cars on the road.”
She added that interest in Tesla’s Robotaxis and its relatively low prices compared with Waymo, Uber, and Lyft remains high.
“In the months since Tesla Robotaxi launched in Austin, use of the Obi app there has tripled, which indicates to me that riders are curious about a new option and want to compare it to what’s already available,” Anburajan said.
Why would an in-demand business in growth mode be lowering its available inventory?
Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment, but it might have to do with recent reports of poor technical performance for the camera-only autonomous vehicles.
“While the motivation for scaling down the Robotaxi business is unclear, we suspect the move could indicate greater-than-expected technical/regulatory barriers,” Jefferies researchers said in a recent report, where they also noted fewer Robotaxis and subsequent longer wait times for riders.
On the company’s last earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said the “limiting factor for expansion is really rigorous validation, making sure things are completely safe.”
It’s also possible the decline is a controlled transition ahead of launching the company’s purpose-built Cybercabs. While Cybercab production officially kicked off in April, on the earnings call Musk warned that the vehicle is on a “stretched-out S-curve,” meaning initial volume will remain highly restricted as it slowly ramps up through the end of the year.
But the slow ramp suggests a much larger hardware wall. While the current Robotaxi fleet consists of newer Model Ys equipped with capable hardware, Tesla’s broader scaling strategy has hit a block. Musk recently admitted that older Hardware 3 vehicles, which make up the vast majority of customer cars on the road today, cannot achieve unsupervised driving without physical retrofits. This effectively kills the promise of a rapidly scaling, crowdsourced Airbnb-style network, forcing Tesla into a slow, capital-intensive rollout of its own corporate-owned vehicles.
