Tesla expands robotaxi service to San Antonio, where Waymo already operates

Tesla is taking its robotaxi service to San Antonio, extending a driverless footprint that now stretches across Texas and Florida. According to TechCrunch, the company announced in a post on X that rides in San Antonio will begin at 5 a.m. local time on Monday.

The announcement left several operational questions unanswered. Tesla did not disclose the service hours, whether the fleet will include its gold two-seater Cybercab alongside modified Model Y vehicles, or whether human safety monitors will ride along during the initial phase.

A familiar launch pattern

As TechCrunch points out, Tesla's previous city launches offer a template: begin with a small number of vehicles covering a tightly defined service area, then expand from there. The company's first robotaxi deployment arrived in Austin in June 2025, after more than a decade of promises from CEO Elon Musk about delivering autonomous vehicles. That debut, though restricted in scope and reliant on onboard safety operators, was a significant milestone for the company and a test of whether self-driving cars could be deployed safely using only cameras and end-to-end AI.

Growth has been incremental since. In January, TechCrunch reports, Tesla removed safety monitors from its Austin robotaxis, turning it into a genuinely driverless service. Over the following eleven months the company broadened its coverage within Austin and pushed into new cities, and it now operates robotaxis in limited areas of Miami and Orlando as well as Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston.

Direct competition with Waymo

San Antonio matters because Waymo is already there. The Alphabet subsidiary runs a robotaxi service in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio using a mix of driverless Jaguar I-Pace and Zeekr RT vehicles, branded Ojai. Waymo only recently resumed its San Antonio operations after a five-month pause that followed incidents in which its vehicles became stuck after driving onto flooded roadways, according to TechCrunch.

Tesla's arrival sets up another head-to-head contest between the two companies' very different approaches to autonomy: Waymo's sensor-heavy stack against Tesla's camera-only, neural-network-driven system.

Small fleets outside Austin

Tesla's presence looks far larger in Austin than anywhere else. Citing Texas vehicle registration data and the Robotaxi Tracker website, TechCrunch reports that Tesla has more than 400 autonomous vehicles registered in its Austin fleet, while its fleets elsewhere range from a handful to a few dozen. Fort Worth has 24 vehicles and Miami just five, according to the tracker.

California remains off-limits for driverless operation. Tesla runs a ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area under a transportation charter permit, but those vehicles have a human behind the wheel, and the company does not currently hold the permits required to run a driverless ride-hailing service in the state.

There are also open questions about ridership. TechCrunch reported in July that data Tesla released over the summer showed its robotaxi network drove fewer miles with paying customers in the second quarter than in the first, even as the company pressed ahead with its expansion.

Why it matters

Tesla's robotaxi program is central to the company's effort to be seen as more than a carmaker, and San Antonio puts it in direct competition with Waymo in yet another market. But the numbers behind the expansion tell a more cautious story: modest fleet sizes outside Austin, unanswered questions about how each launch is staffed and bounded, and paid mileage that declined between quarters even as the service area grew. Whether Tesla can scale from a handful of vehicles per city into an operation that genuinely rivals Waymo's coverage — and sustain ridership growth along the way — is the question this latest launch will help answer.