Tesla opened its Robotaxi service to riders in San Antonio, Texas, on Monday and expanded its service area in Austin on the same morning, a week after it launched in Fort Worth.
San Antonio is the eighth city in Tesla’s Robotaxi network and its fifth in Texas, after Austin, Dallas, Houston and Fort Worth. The company also operates in Miami, Orlando and Tampa in Florida.
Tesla announced the start of service in a post on its @robotaxi account on X, sharing a map of what it called the “Launch geofence.”
The zone covers about 275 square miles, making it Tesla’s largest Robotaxi service area at launch, according to Tesla shareholder and content creator Sawyer Merritt. The company did not give a size.
A Zone Centered on Downtown
The map Tesla shared shows a single zone around downtown San Antonio, reaching north to Loop 1604.
By Merritt’s count, the San Antonio zone at launch was slightly larger than Austin’s 272 square miles, Tesla’s largest area until Monday, and Houston’s 254. He put Fort Worth at 143 square miles, Dallas at 81, Miami at 31, Orlando at 26 and Tampa at 24.
He said Tesla’s driverless geofences now cover a combined 4.2 million people, or 1.2% of the U.S. population, up from 1.0% the previous week.
Austin Grows
As San Antonio service began, Tesla also posted “Bigger Austin service area now live,” with a map comparing its old and new Austin geofences.
The expansion added 171 square miles, or 63%, taking Austin’s coverage to 443 square miles from 272, according to Merritt. That makes Austin again Tesla’s largest service area, while San Antonio remains its largest at launch.
The map shows the new Austin zone extending well beyond the previous boundary on several sides of the city.
Waymo’s Austin Area
The expansion leaves Tesla’s Austin zone at about 442 square miles, nearly three times the 151 square miles Waymo serves in the city, according to the Robotaxi Tracker site, which maps both services. Merritt’s figure for Tesla is 443.
Tesla’s Austin area has grown from about 20 square miles at its launch on June 22, 2025, while Waymo’s has expanded from 36 square miles to 152 over the period the tracker has recorded, it shows.
On the tracker’s map, Waymo’s zone sits largely inside Tesla’s, which now stretches farther east, west and south of the city. Together the two services cover about 594 square miles of the Austin area and about 989,000 residents, the tracker estimates.
Tesla began its Austin service in June 2025 with safety monitors on board and removed them in January, starting driverless rides. Its earlier launches started with a limited number of vehicles in a confined area.
The company has not said how many vehicles it assigned to San Antonio. Tesla has more than 400 autonomous vehicles registered in Austin, while its other cities have between a handful and a few dozen, with 24 in Fort Worth and five in Miami, according to the ‘Robotaxi Tracker’ platform.
Across Texas, Tesla’s registered Robotaxi fleet passed 1,000 vehicles in late October, with 544 Cybercabs and 507 Model Ys on the state’s autonomous vehicle registry. Registrations run ahead of the cars riders actually see in service.
First of the ‘Coming Soon’ Cities
San Antonio is the first of four cities Tesla listed as “coming soon” on its Robotaxi safety page on October 21 to receive service, along with Las Vegas, Phoenix and Jacksonville. Tesla gave no dates for any of them.
Fort Worth, which launched on November 2, was not on that list.
Asked on the company’s October 21 earnings call how the Cybercab fleet would scale beyond Austin, Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s Vice President of AI Software, said Tesla had launched the two-seater there because “we want to swarm Austin with Cybercabs everywhere.”
“But there’s no fundamental reason that we are limited to Austin,” he said.
“In fact, next month we’ll be launching in Dallas, and then the same software just scaled to lots of other cities along with the Model Y Robotaxis,” he said. Tesla’s Model Y Robotaxi already serves Dallas. The Cybercab has carried paying riders only in Austin since September 3, and Tesla said on October 10 that more than 300 Cybercabs were serving the city.
CEO Elon Musk said on the same call that the Austin Cybercab fleet had “grown by a factor of 10 since launch about a month ago.” Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said Tesla planned to bring the Cybercab to “some other cities before the end of this year,” and Tesla has said it expects to offer Cybercabs to customers by year-end.
Longer Hours, Same Caution
The 5 a.m. start in San Antonio is an hour earlier than the network-wide window the Robotaxi account last announced. It said on October 30 that “operating hours are now 6am – 2am,” after posting on October 12 that they were 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.
On the earnings call, Elluswamy said Tesla had initially run the service from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. and was expanding hours as “driven by the capability of the AI software.” He said that “over the rest of this year we’ll unlock 24/7 operation” and move to higher-speed roads.
Musk has said the main limit on night hours is that the vehicles struggle to see pets in the dark.
Waymo Already in San Antonio
Tesla enters a city where Waymo already runs paid driverless rides. Waymo resumed its San Antonio service in September, five months after one of its unoccupied vehicles drove into a flooded road and was swept into Salado Creek.
Waymo’s San Antonio area covers about 60 square miles, including downtown and San Antonio International Airport, with flood-risk zones carved out of the map.
Waymo also operates in Austin, Dallas and Houston. On Monday, U.S. safety regulators opened a recall query into 2,895 Waymo vehicles to examine whether a December 2025 software fix stopped them from passing stopped school buses.
Tesla’s Robotaxi safety report put its fleet’s driving at 3.1 million miles with no safety monitor on board between January 22 and October 18. Tesla’s own driverless rides remain limited to Texas and Florida. In the San Francisco Bay Area, it runs a ride-hailing service with human drivers behind the wheel, as it lacks California permits for driverless ride-hailing.
