Tesla announced today that its “Robotaxi” service is now rolling out in Dallas and Houston, marking the company’s first expansion beyond Austin and San Francisco. The company shared maps of the two new service areas, which appear to cover small slices of each city.
The Houston geofence covers approximately 25 square miles, according to early user analysis of the maps, while the Dallas zone appears to center around the Highland Park area. For context, Tesla’s Austin geofence has grown to roughly 245 square miles after months of gradual expansion — but that took nearly a year to reach from an initial 20-square-mile footprint.
Tesla’s official @robotaxi account on X posted the announcement with two map images showing the service boundaries, but provided no details on fleet size, whether rides will be supervised or unsupervised, or pricing. The post simply read: “Robotaxi now rolling out in Dallas & Houston.”
The announcement is notably thin on specifics. Tesla did not disclose how many vehicles will operate in each city, whether those vehicles will have safety monitors inside (as the vast majority of its Austin fleet still does), or when the geofences might expand.
As we reported in March, Tesla’s Austin operation still relies on only a handful of unsupervised vehicles — somewhere between 4 and 12 Model Ys operating without a human safety monitor — out of a total fleet of roughly 80 vehicles, though most of those are not operating at the same time. The remaining cars still carry safety monitors in the driver’s seat, and all vehicles are remotely supervised by Tesla staff.
The company’s track record on “Robotaxi” promises provides reason for skepticism. Elon Musk predicted 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020. He promised 500 vehicles in Austin and over 1,000 in the Bay Area by the end of 2025 — the actual numbers were roughly 42 and 130, almost all with safety monitors. He claimed the service would cover half the U.S. population by year-end 2025. None of it materialized.
Expanding to new cities while safety concerns remain unresolved is a bold choice. Tesla has reported 15 crash incidents to NHTSA since its Austin launch, with crash rates approximately 4 to 9 times worse than human drivers depending on the benchmark used. One July 2025 crash was quietly upgraded months later to include a hospitalization — a detail Tesla never publicly disclosed.
Tesla also redacts all crash narratives as “confidential business information” in its NHTSA filings, unlike Waymo, Zoox, Aurora, and Nuro, which provide full incident descriptions. The service still shuts down during rain, a significant limitation given that Houston averages over 100 rainy days per year.
The company’s own data confirms crash rates 3x worse than humans even when a safety monitor is present — and that’s using Tesla’s own favorable benchmarks.
This is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Tesla’s “Robotaxi” program: announce the expansion, share a map, provide zero operational details, and let the stock-pumping hype machine do the rest.
The fundamental problem hasn’t changed. Tesla is expanding geographically while its existing Austin operation remains tiny and troubled. It has fewer than 10 truly unsupervised vehicles on the road operating simultaneously after nearly a year of operation, a crash rate several times worse than human drivers, and a transparency record that would embarrass any legitimate autonomous vehicle operator.