Tesla put its driverless Cybercabs out in force across Austin on Sunday ahead of the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix, with images shared on social media showing long lines of robotaxis heading toward the Circuit of the Americas.
“Robotaxis as far as the eye can see!” wrote Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s Vice President of AI Software, quote-posting a photo by Ben Steindl. It shows a line of gold Cybercabs and Model Ys stretching down a road near the circuit.
Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla shareholder and content creator with over 1.1 million followers on X, said earlier on Sunday that more than 50 Cybercabs were dropping off passengers at the race by midday.
Tesla has not disclosed how many rides it gave to or from the circuit on Saturday and Sunday.
The Grand Prix, the 18th round of the season, started at 3 p.m. Central time on Sunday, October 25, after practice on Friday and qualifying on Saturday. Circuit of the Americas founder Bobby Epstein said in July the event was “on pace for a record year,” after official attendance for the 2025 race weekend was estimated at more than 400,000.
The circuit sits roughly 15 miles southeast of downtown Austin. Epstein said in July that road improvements and additional access lanes could let the venue handle 15,000 to 30,000 more people a day.
The Record
Community tracking data points to unusually heavy Cybercab activity over the weekend.
Cybercab Spotter, an account that compiles crowd-sourced sightings, reported 1,250 Cybercab sightings in Austin on Saturday, the day of qualifying. Of those, 1,159 showed nobody in the driver’s seat, a driverless share of 93%.
Robotaxi Radar, which charts the same data, said both were records. The previous total high was 1,072 on October 16, and the previous driverless high was 921.
Service Area Expanded
The race-day push follows changes Tesla made to its Austin service days earlier. The service area expanded to include the circuit late on October 22.
The app’s map shows a small new zone at the southeastern edge of the existing area, around the track, toward Elroy and FM 812.
Tesla also extended ride requests to 1 a.m., from a midnight cutoff introduced on October 17. Until then, Austin rides had ended at 11 p.m. A banner in the app read “Last call is 1am · Limited to nearby dropoffs.”
Before the change, the Austin service area covered 264 square miles, after an expansion just before the Cybercab launch in early September. Tesla has not said how much the new boundary adds, and it did not announce either change on its own accounts.
Some users reported early on that the app still showed locations near the track as blocked. A search for “cota” returned COTALAND Theme Park and COTA Karting, both labeled “Service blocked.”
Waymo’s Area
X user Nic Cruz Patane shared a map comparing the both Tesla and Waymo services’ Austin areas.
Waymo runs in Austin only through the Uber app, and it widened its area in January to about 140 square miles, reaching south to the Manchaca area and north to the Domain. The circuit sits about 15 miles southeast of downtown, outside those limits.
Waymo began fully driverless freeway rides in Austin on September 24, its first in Texas. Its rider announcements do not list Austin-Bergstrom International Airport among the airports it serves.
The comparison covers service boundaries only. Neither company publishes how many vehicles it runs in each zone at a given time, and Waymo has not announced any race-day service.
The Cybercab fleet
Tesla began paid Cybercab rides in Austin on September 3. Its Robotaxi account said on October 10 that the fleet had scaled to more than 300 Cybercabs, and the vehicle is so far offered only in Austin.
The Texas registry showed 970 Tesla Robotaxi vehicles at midday on Sunday, including 463 Cybercabs. That would be more than half again the 300-plus Tesla cited on October 10.
Model Y Robotaxis also run in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa. Tesla says Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Phoenix and San Antonio will be served “soon,” without giving dates. An executive said this month the Cybercab is coming to Dallas “soon”.
Elluswamy said on Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call on October 21 that 2 a.m. service would come “pretty soon” and that Tesla plans to run around the clock before the end of the year.
Driverless miles
Tesla’s Robotaxi safety report says its vehicles drove about 3.1 million miles with no safety employee on board between January 22 and October 18. Austin accounted for 2,118,015 of those miles, far ahead of Dallas at 608,130.
Tesla reports zero injuries caused by its robotaxis over that distance. The report counts only collisions in which the robotaxi made first contact, and it includes those where a remote operator assisted or took control. Most of the driverless miles came since August.
Regulatory backdrop
The event comes days before Tesla’s October 30 deadline to answer US safety regulators about how it certified the Cybercab, which has no steering wheel or pedals.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened the review on September 3, the day paid rides began, and issued a Special Order with 21 requests on September 10.
Tesla aims to deliver its first Cybercabs to customers by the end of 2026, though executives said most will stay Tesla-owned and serve its ride-hailing network.
