Tesla doubled the service area in Austin and might have tripled the number of vehicles from 11-15 to 35 in July, 2025. This means that Tesla has one third of the fleet compared to the 100 Waymo in Austin. Tesla will also add 10-15 this weekend in San Francisco. If Gene Munster is incorrect or early on the expansion of Austin, the San Francisco expansion should ensure Tesla gets to 30+ robotaxi this weekend. There will be a substantial expansion in 2 weeks as the service area is expanded to the entire city.
This is reported by financial analyst Gene Munster.
Handful or 35 in Austin?
Ashok Elluswamy (on the July 23, 2025 earnings call) did say we have more than 7,000 miles operating in Austin area. It’s just because service is new we have a handful of vehicles right now, but then we are trying to expand the service in terms of both the area and also the number of vehicles within Austin and other locations. So far, there’s no notable safety critical incidents. Sometimes we have our own restrictions as to, for example, we are limiting our speed to 40 miles per hour and when the vehicle wants to go on higher speed or we can stop the vehicle, but there was a lot of convenience opposed to safety critical nature. So for the service has been really well received, and we continue to expand on it.
Tesla will expand a supervised San Franciso service this weekend. This will mean Tesla will have about 30-50 Robotaxi at the end of this weekend.
Tesla is planning to expand the Austin service area from about 42 square miles to 300-450 square miles. This would cover the entire Austin city area. The city of Austin, Texas, has a land area of 319.9 square miles. The Austin metropolitan area, also known as Greater Austin, covers 4,279 square miles.
There will need to be an expansion of the Austin fleet to 300+ vehicles in order for Tesla to open service to people in Austin without invitation or approved applications.
Tesla has a better safety record in Austin than Waymo does. Tesla has had one safety incident in 7000+ miles over 30 days for 15-35 vehicles and for 50+ expansion testing vehicles. Tesla had 500+ vehicle days (vehicles times days) and 3000 vehicle days of testing. The expansion test vehicles have another 30,000+ miles.
Waymo has had 6 incidents (1 collision, 1 near miss, 4 safety incidents) in July for up to 2300 vehicle days. Waymo had 14 incidents in May and 11 in June for up to 6000 vehicle days. Waymo has an incident for 200-300 vehicle days. Tesla has had one incident for every 500-3500 vehicle days.
Waymo reports 250,000 miles per week for its entire fleet of 1000-1500 vehicles. Austin should be about 7-10% of those miles. This would 25,000 miles per week for 3 weeks in July. One incident every 12,000 miles in July. 8 weeks for June and July for 17 incidents. One incident every 12000 miles. Tesla has had one incident in 7000+ miles of commercial service driving and one in 37000+ for commercial and testing driving. NOTE: waymo had 20 incidents including two collisions during its pre-service testing phase.
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The Book Hubris Maximus has some interesting stories about accidents and Teslas responses. Worth a read.
Somebody’s not telling the truth. Why do people like Dan O’Dowd keep trying to get Tesla FSD banned, saying it’s far more dangerous than Waymo and will cause fatalities if scaled up? https://x.com/RealDanODowd:
“This is an outrageous lie designed to deceive safety conscious consumers into purchasing a defective product in order to pump $TSLA stock and ensure that @ElonMusk remains the richest man on Earth.
The “10x safer” quote is completely untrue and has been completely debunked by @NHTSAgov who excoriated Tesla for misleading consumers with these falsified safety stats.
According to NHTSA, Tesla is vastly undercounting Autopilot crashes.
Tesla is only counting Autopilot crashes involving airbag deployments, but counts all police reported accidents for the US average that it compares Autopilot crashes to.
On top of this, NHTSA also found that “Tesla is not aware of every crash involving Autopilot even for severe crashes because of gaps in telematic reporting”.
Tesla provides no raw data, and refuses to allow any third parties to peer review it.
It’s completely unreliable data and it’s disgraceful to use it to promote the “safety” of Autopilot/FSD.”
This is the kind of testing an independent government sponsored body would do normally, but in Trump’s radical deregulating America, who knows who’s telling the truth? How many crashes do we need to find out?
The regulatory body is allowing it, the rest is drama and speculation. I don’t think the regulatory body would allow cars on the road without some decent data, it’s not that Elon has politically a lot of favors atm, so if anything they’ll be more critical and slow to allow. I think if the data was bad somebody would have leaked it. So why not share good data? Well you can always make it look bad over time, especially if you’re starting with small numbers, f there is 1 accident you can say the accident rate has detiorated or the service is getting worse. So that’s why Tesla has an interest to keep all out of the public eye and their only obligation is towards the regulators not some noisy hater.
Interesting. Could you provide a link that support your claims?
See Dan O’Dowd’s X page: https://x.com/RealDanODowd (so far Elon Musk or X hasn’t censored him). He has lots of posts. There’s a ton of stuff on Youtube under search: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tesla+FSD+failures
But the problem there is a lot of it is not recent so it doesn’t capture improvements over time, assuming there are some, which is ALSO disputed. The fault of that lies both with independent testers and with Musk, who keeps resetting the counter every time there’s a minor upgrade, so the old crashes don’t get counted in the totals.
State and local government regulators have to get involved. Ideally, federal regulators too, but I don’t trust anything coming out of the Trump administration now, even though they’re as like to extend Trump’s vengeance upon Musk/Tesla as to support his AI vision, which Trump is also allowing with few if any safeguards.
You are not providing a fair crash comparison as Robotaxis are remotely supervised by Tesla employees, and include a human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat who can correct a driving error before an accident happens whereas Waymo rides are fully autonomous.
This is perfectly normal safety precaution when your launching a completely new service. Even if there is a very small chance, if you’ve been following Tesla for some time, any problem in the first 2 months would be blown up and be national news. Even if you’re confident in the driving, they don’t have tons of experience picking up and dropping of costumers. They already said their looking to get rid of the safety monitor.