35 Tesla cars in Austin. (triple the cars of the minimum launch). Reportedly 60 cars seen driving around in test mode before launch. Can double or more by the end of the week. 112 rides in the first hour or so. $4.20 per ride in the starting phase. It is non-trivial distances. The geofenced area is about 6-7 miles wide by 2-3 miles. 100 rides per hour. likely 1000 rides in the first day (over about 10 hours). up to 6-7 mile rides and average 4-5 miles. Should have 10,000 to 20,000 rides over 9 days but with 18 hours per day. They are shutting down for 6 hours at night. Safety monitor will come out. A market should be made about when the safety monitor comes out. 700 cars with half of the rides per car and 24 hour operation would be about 200,000 rides per day.
Jo Bhakdi had an analysis of what a fast rollout for Tesla impacting financials and the share price. He had a threshold of 5% of Tesla revenues.
1000 rides per day with 35 cars is $4200 per day in revenue. This first day was a half day but it was also extra activity from the invitation only enthusiasts.
They can double the fleet to 60-70 cars by adding in existing cars with approved stickers driving in the area. This can happen by next weekend.
2000-4000 rides per day with longer operating hours from 70 cars would be $8000-16K per day. This would be for double the current service area. This would be about $250k-$500k per month in revenue. This would be the July fast case from Jo.
The city of Austin is 320 square miles. The current service area is about 15-20 square miles. This would need about 700 cars to service the main city.
The 700 cars Austin City for would be 600k to 1.2M rides per month and doubling ride length and have $1 per mile. This would be about $5-10 M per month in revenue.
The Greater Austin area is about 4300 square miles. This would need about 2000-8000 vehicles to properly service with low wait times.
Domination of Austin ridesharing would be close to sufficient to prove out the 1500-1800 inflection point case for Jo and this should happen in the August to October timeframe.
Tesla is approved for all of Texas and has California approvals. Tesla could fill up 10 cities with 10,000 cars in Q4 of 2025. This would reach about $1 billion per year runrate.
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“The 700 cars Austin City for would be 600k to 1.2M rides per month” Is that feasible while keepìng a human safety monitor in each car? You would need at least 1500 humans to support that number each with a salary. Sounds like a money pit.
Waymo and all other robotaxi companies (a dozen in China and Asia ) and a dozen in north america have had $1-3 billion per year development programs. The revenue from robotaxi has been at most $30-50 million per year. 8 million miles paid for Waymo in 2024 and maybe 18 million miles for 2025.
Tesla has also been paying a billion per year. but Tesla has made a billion dollars by selling Autopilot (1 million) and FSD (500K).
the safety monitor will only be in there for 1-4 weeks. It is being extra cautious. Tesla already has 300+ test drivers and staff working vehicles in the field. They did not hire people specifically to be safety monitors. It is like when amazon had amazon Go where they had no cashier stores. They had 12 extra people at each 7-11 like store for the purpose of checking equipment and software. It is people checking customer service and technical issues for a specific rollout. It is a question of where do they deploy 300 people already on staff who were already testing the FSD software. That spend and those staff already existed and have existed for years for FSD and autopilot. I would say the FSD/robotaxi development and testing staff will always be there except maybe 5 years out after teslabot is at scale and perfected. But then the $1-2 billion per year development and testing staff will be meaningless because there will $500+ billion per year in revenue from 10 million cars and trucks as robotaxi and robotrucks.
Bad news if your are an Austin taxi driver