Tesla has officially expanded its unsupervised Robotaxi service to two new cities over the weekend, Dallas and Houston.
The rollout expands beyond Austin, where the service first launched nine months ago with safety monitors inside the vehicles, and the Bay Area, where rides are still provided with a safety driver behind the wheel.
The company began unsupervised rides in Austin late last year.
An unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi ride in Dallas on Sunday cost 56% less than what Waymo quoted for the same route, according to a fare comparison shared by Tesla shareholder Sawyer Merritt on X.
The 2.25-mile, seven-minute trip was priced at $6.15 on Tesla‘s service, compared to $13.93 on Waymo.
The rider, who asked to remain anonymous, sent the breakdown to Merritt shortly after the company started offering the first rides.
Tesla‘s entry into both Texas cities comes two months after Waymolaunched in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando in late February as part of a four-city expansion to ten US metropolitan areas.
“Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando are critical to our plans, as we lay groundwork for service in 20+ cities,” co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said at the time.
Waymo has since launched in Nashville this month, through a fleet-management partnership with Lyft — making it the Alphabet subsidiary’s 11th US city — and in Orlando and Miami.
The comparison, while based on a single trip, marks the first direct pricing data point from a market where both companies now offer driverless ride-hailing.
Robotaxi Pricing
Tesla‘s Dallas fare is consistent with the dynamic pricing model it has been refining in Austin since the service launched in June 2025 with a flat $4.20 fare.
The current formula, in place since mid-March, is $3.00 base plus $1.40 per mile. There is no tipping on Tesla‘s Robotaxi.
Waymo does not publicly disclose per-city fare formulas, but third-party analyses have placed its per-mile charges between $1.66 in San Francisco and $2.50 in Los Angeles, with base fares ranging from roughly $5.37 to $9.52.
Costs
CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly highlighted Tesla‘s cost advantage. During the Q1 2025 earnings call, he joked about Waymo’s spending:
“The issue with Waymo‘s cars is it costs Way-mo money.”
He added that the vehicles are “very expensive, made in low volume,” while “Teslas are probably cost 25% or 20% of what a Waymo costs and made in very high volume.”
Musk also argued that Waymo “decided that an expensive sensor suite is the way to go, even though Google is very good at AI,” adding, “I don’t see anyone being able to compete with Tesla at present.”
In December, he wrote on X that “Waymo never really had a chance against Tesla, which “will be obvious in hindsight.”
The CEO has endorsed ARK Invest’s projection that the upcoming Cybercab could operate at less than $0.20 per mile by 2030, saying it was “probably true.”
ARK’s same report estimated Waymo‘s cost at roughly $0.40 per mile by the same date.
During the latest earnings call, Musk confirmed that Tesla has “cars operating with no one in them and no safety monitor and no follow car or anything like that in Austin right now,” calling FSD “100% unsupervised.”
VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy added that the company’s goals are to “learn as much as possible with the safety monitors” and “be laser-focused with the engineering team to solve the unsupervised FSD problem.”
Different Approaches
The two companies take very different approaches to autonomous driving: Waymo relies on a sensor suite that includes LiDAR, while Tesla focuses on a camera-only system.
On Waymo‘s side, co-CEO Mawakana has called for federal regulators to establish national safety standards for autonomous vehicle developers.
She previously argued that LiDAR has been proving “the safest path to doing this,” and questioned whether some developers are doing what is necessary to “earn the right to make the roads safer” — comments widely seen as aimed at Tesla.
In a March interview on the Cheeky Pint podcast, co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said Waymo has “about 3,000 cars on the roads” completing roughly half a million rides per week, translating to “over four million fully autonomous miles” weekly.
He described the company’s sixth-generation hardware as “simpler, more capable, and much lower cost” than its predecessor, and reaffirmed preparation for right-hand-drive markets, including London and Tokyo.
Separately, Waymo executives said at a media briefing in Tokyo that a launch in the Japanese capital “could be ready in a few months.”
Scale and Fleet Size
Waymo targets one million paid rides per week by year end and is also preparing to enter Ontario, Canada.
The company disclosed at a US Senate Commerce Committee hearing in February that about 35 remote operators based in the Philippines assist its fleet, with Chief Safety Officer Mauricio Peña stating that operators “provide guidance” but “do not remotely drive the vehicles.”
Tesla reported nearly 700,000 total paid Robotaxi rides as of late January 2026. Crowdsourced data from the Robotaxi Tracker website registered just one active vehicle in each new city at launch.
The company still has five cities to go — Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas — to meet the seven-city target it set for the first half of 2026 in its Q4 2025 shareholder deck.
Wolfe Research has projected Tesla’s Robotaxi service could reach $250 billion by 2035, estimating a cost per mile of $1.00 with 50% market share.
Morgan Stanley estimates Tesla‘s current robotaxi cost at roughly $0.81 per mile, compared to $1.36 to $1.43 for Waymo — a gap the bank expects to narrow once Waymo‘s sixth-generation hardware scales.
Tesla is preparing to begin volume production of its Cybercab — a purpose-built, two-seat autonomous vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals.
