Tesla‘s Robotaxi service now operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in every city where it is available, the company said on Wednesday, removing the overnight pause that had limited rides since the service began.
“Robotaxi now runs 24/7,” Tesla wrote on its Robotaxi account on X. “Every city we’re available in.” The post carried a short video of a Cybercab, the two-seat robotaxi without a steering wheel or pedals that Tesla builds in Texas.
CEO Elon Musk quoted the post. “Robotaxi works 168 hours a week,” he wrote.
The service covers eight cities with a fleet of Model Y and Cybercab vehicles. Five cities are in Texas: Austin, Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and San Antonio. The other three are Miami, Orlando and Tampa in Florida.
Tesla added Fort Worth on November 2 and San Antonio on November 9, when it also expanded its Austin service area. It has listed Las Vegas, Phoenix and Jacksonville as coming soon, without dates.
Austin is by far the largest operation. Tesla has more than 400 autonomous vehicles registered there, while its other cities have between a handful and a few dozen, according to the Robotaxi Tracker platform.
Tesla began its Austin service in June 2025 with safety monitors on board and removed them in January, starting driverless rides. Its driverless service areas now cover about 4.2 million people, or 1.2% of the U.S. population, according to Tesla shareholder Sawyer Merritt.
Tesla began offering rides in Cybercabs in Austin on September 3. “One month after launch, we’ve scaled to 300+ Cybercabs serving Austin,” the Robotaxi account said on October 10. As of late October, it had 544 Cybercabs and 507 Model Ys on the Texas autonomous vehicle registry, although registrations run ahead of the cars riders see in service.
On Thursday, Tesla had 1,303 vehicles on the registry, 573 Cybercabs and 730 Model Ys, against 1,305 for Waymo, according to the Robotaxi Tracker site, which reads the state’s records.
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s Vice President of AI Software, said on the October 21 earnings call that Tesla had launched the Cybercab in Austin because “we want to swarm Austin with Cybercabs everywhere.” He added that “next month we’ll be launching in Dallas,” a city where Tesla had said the Cybercab was coming.
Around the Clock
The 24/7 schedule comes after a series of step-by-step extensions. It adds four hours to the daily window Tesla set at the end of October.
“Robotaxi now runs 6am to 10pm, 7 days/week,” the account said on August 26, adding that the “unsupervised fleet is a lot bigger.”
Elluswamy said on the earnings call that 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, go to higher-speed roads.” “We just want to make sure that there’s not a single safety incident. That is our operating principle,” he said.
Elluswamy had pointed to a fix in early September, when the X account Whole Mars Catalog wrote that it wished Robotaxi “was available 24/7.” “Next month or so. The next tech to merge on the v15 plan will enable it,” he replied.
In early October, Musk said Austin’s hours had moved to 11 p.m. from 10 p.m. “The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night,” he wrote. “Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.”
The Robotaxi account said on October 12 that operating hours were now 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., and that wait times had fallen thanks to increased supply.
Tesla’s third-quarter update, published on October 21, said hours in Austin had reached 6 a.m. to midnight. At the end of October, it said hours had been extended to 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., alongside app changes that let riders view the rear camera feed and share trip details with a friend. Riders in San Antonio could book from 5 a.m. when the service launched there.
The move to round-the-clock service came less than two weeks after the 2 a.m. cutoff was announced.
Catching Up With Waymo
Overnight service brings Tesla in line with Waymo, the Alphabet unit that operates the largest U.S. driverless ride-hailing fleet. “We’re on the road 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” Waymo says on its help pages.
The two compete directly in several cities. Waymo lists Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, San Antonio and Tampa among its markets, and serves Austin through Uber.
Tesla’s Austin service area covered about 443 square miles after this week’s expansion, nearly three times the area Waymo serves in the city, according to Merritt and the Robotaxi Tracker site.
Cybercab Sales Ahead
The change comes as Tesla prepares to sell the Cybercab. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Engineering, said on the October earnings call that the company aimed to deliver its first Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year.
“Obviously, we’re producing them in our line in Texas, but all of those are currently going to our own internal Robotaxi fleet,” Moravy said. “Right now, we’re building at the rate that the Robotaxi service needs the vehicles.”
Tesla is also clearing space for the robotaxi at Gigafactory Texas. Musk said on Wednesday that Cybertruck production would be extended through the end of summer 2027 to fill more of the pickup’s order backlog, before its line is dismantled to expand Cybercab output.
Tesla’s third-quarter update listed installed Cybercab capacity in Texas of more than 125,000 vehicles a year. Musk said on November 7 that efficiency gains would allow a smaller 40 kWh battery pack for the Cybercab, which currently uses a 47.6 kWh battery.
Regulators and Miles
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an inquiry in early September into how Tesla self-certified the Cybercab, which has no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors, as compliant with federal safety standards.
It gave Tesla until October 30 to answer a Special Order under oath. The agency has not announced any finding.
Tesla said in its third-quarter update that cumulative unsupervised Robotaxi miles reached nearly two million by the end of September, eight times the level at the end of June. A counter on its Robotaxi website showed 5,037,427 miles driven autonomously on Thursday.
Tesla shares closed up 2.9% at $390.84 on Wednesday, before the announcement.
