According to robotaxitracker.com, which could be viewed as a sampler of unsupervised Tesla robotaxis, 28 unsupervised vehicle license plates have been observed by over 1500 riders (about 400 were unsupervised rides).
Over the last 90 days there have been 342 unsupervised rides. If there were 50 taxis all providing unsupervised fares, we would expect to see each unique plate about 342/50 = 7 times over the last 90 days, so we should have seen near 50 unique plates, or at least approaching 50.
Instead, the Robotaxi tracker shows about 28 unique plates in Austin, over all time.
Also, we would expect the number of unique plates observed over time to steadily increase to at least 50 vehicles.
Instead, the number of unique plates plateaus at 28.
Tesla doesn’t report much detail on their taxi demonstration projects, but many indications are that there are few vehicles doing small mileage in limited geographies and that the rides with no employees in the vehicle are remotely supervised.
I’m going to conclude that Tesla does not have a robotaxi fleet of 50 vehicles providing unsupervised rides most of the day covering a meaningful part of the Austin and doing real mileage like a real ride-hailing service.
After one year of very intense effort, and a decade of promises and work, Tesla does not yet have a commercial, unsupervised robotaxi fleet of even 50 vehicles in Austin, its most developed robotaxi market.
I look forward to the upcoming earnings call to learn about the latest milestones from the AI and robotics company.
2025 “Guidance”
”We’re going to be launching unsupervised Full Self-Driving as a paid service in Austin in June."
”The acid test is, can you go to sleep in your car and wake up in your destination and I’m confident that will be available in many cities in the US by the end of this year."
”I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year. That’s at least our goal subject to regulatory approvals."
”I think [FSD] will be available for unsupervised personal use by the end of this year in certain geographies."