Tesla doubled the service area in Austin and might have tripled the number of vehicles from 11-15 to 35 in July, 2025. This means that Tesla has one third of the fleet compared to the 100 Waymo in Austin. Tesla will also add 10-15 this weekend in San Francisco. If Gene Munster is incorrect or early on the expansion of Austin, the San Francisco expansion should ensure Tesla gets to 30+ robotaxi this weekend. There will be a substantial expansion in 2 weeks as the service area is expanded to the entire city.
This is reported by financial analyst Gene Munster.
Handful or 35 in Austin?
Ashok Elluswamy (on the July 23, 2025 earnings call) did say we have more than 7,000 miles operating in Austin area. It’s just because service is new we have a handful of vehicles right now, but then we are trying to expand the service in terms of both the area and also the number of vehicles within Austin and other locations. So far, there’s no notable safety critical incidents. Sometimes we have our own restrictions as to, for example, we are limiting our speed to 40 miles per hour and when the vehicle wants to go on higher speed or we can stop the vehicle, but there was a lot of convenience opposed to safety critical nature. So for the service has been really well received, and we continue to expand on it.
Tesla will expand a supervised San Franciso service this weekend. This will mean Tesla will have about 30-50 Robotaxi at the end of this weekend.
Tesla is planning to expand the Austin service area from about 42 square miles to 300-450 square miles. This would cover the entire Austin city area. The city of Austin, Texas, has a land area of 319.9 square miles. The Austin metropolitan area, also known as Greater Austin, covers 4,279 square miles.
There will need to be an expansion of the Austin fleet to 300+ vehicles in order for Tesla to open service to people in Austin without invitation or approved applications.
Tesla has a better safety record in Austin than Waymo does. Tesla has had one safety incident in 7000+ miles over 30 days for 15-35 vehicles and for 50+ expansion testing vehicles. Tesla had 500+ vehicle days (vehicles times days) and 3000 vehicle days of testing. The expansion test vehicles have another 30,000+ miles.
Waymo has had 6 incidents (1 collision, 1 near miss, 4 safety incidents) in July for up to 2300 vehicle days. Waymo had 14 incidents in May and 11 in June for up to 6000 vehicle days. Waymo has an incident for 200-300 vehicle days. Tesla has had one incident for every 500-3500 vehicle days.
Waymo reports 250,000 miles per week for its entire fleet of 1000-1500 vehicles. Austin should be about 7-10% of those miles. This would 25,000 miles per week for 3 weeks in July. One incident every 12,000 miles in July. 8 weeks for June and July for 17 incidents. One incident every 12000 miles. Tesla has had one incident in 7000+ miles of commercial service driving and one in 37000+ for commercial and testing driving. NOTE: waymo had 20 incidents including two collisions during its pre-service testing phase.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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