Tesla’s robotaxi service, the app that sends a car with nobody in the driver’s seat to pick you up, keeps hinting that more cities are on the way. As of Monday, October 5, 2026, the confirmed list has not changed: driverless rides run in six cities in Texas and Florida, plus a supervised service around San Francisco. The newest news is longer evening hours and a fast-growing fleet in Austin. Las Vegas and Phoenix are the next cities Tesla has named, but neither has a launch date.
What a robotaxi actually is
Think of a ride-hail app like Uber or Lyft, minus the driver. You open Tesla’s Robotaxi app, ask for a ride, and a car drives itself to you and then to your stop. Each city has a fenced-in map area, which the industry calls a geofence, and the cars only take trips that start and end inside it.
Two words come up a lot in the coverage. “Unsupervised” means no Tesla employee rides along to take over. A “safety monitor” is an employee who sits in the car, sometimes in the driver’s seat, ready to step in. Most of Tesla’s cities are now unsupervised. One big one is not.
Where you can ride today
Tesla’s own Robotaxi page lists driverless rides in six U.S. cities. Not a Tesla App, a site that tracks the company closely, measured each service area at the end of September.
- Austin, Texas. The first city, launched in June 2025 with about 20 square miles. It now covers about 246 square miles, most of the city. It is also the only place you can ride in a Cybercab.
- Dallas, Texas. About 31 square miles around downtown, running north toward Highland Park and next to Dallas Love Field airport.
- Houston, Texas. About 25 square miles in the northwest part of the city, along Highway 290.
- Miami, Florida. About 31 square miles wrapped around Miami International Airport and reaching into Coral Gables. It opened in July 2026.
- Orlando and Tampa, Florida. About 26 and 24 square miles, both near their airports. Tesla announced them together on July 21, 2026.
The odd one out is the San Francisco Bay Area. Its map is by far the biggest, at roughly 1,100 square miles from Berkeley down to San Jose, and it serves both the San Francisco and San Jose airports. But every ride there still has a safety monitor on board. California has given Tesla only a testing permit that requires a driver, so Tesla does not count it among its driverless cities.
So what was the news on X?
Tesla makes most of its robotaxi announcements on X, through its official Robotaxi account and Elon Musk’s own posts, and fan accounts pick up every small change within hours. That makes it easy for a post to sound bigger than it is.
The latest confirmed changes are about time, not territory. On Friday night, October 2, the Robotaxi account said rides in Austin now run until 11 p.m., an hour later than the 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. schedule Tesla set in August. Musk said the main thing holding back later hours is spotting animals in the dark, which he described as trying to avoid gray kittens on gray pavement at night. On Sunday, riders in Dallas shared app alerts showing the same 11 p.m. cutoff there. As of that report, Tesla had not posted its own Dallas notice.
The other real change is fleet size. Texas motor vehicle records show 169 Cybercabs authorized for paid rides as of October 2, up from 45 when public rides began on September 3, CNBC reported. Tesla’s Texas fleet also includes about 420 Model Y robotaxis.
What has not happened is a new city. As of October 5, Tesla has not announced or switched on a seventh driverless city, and Cybercab rides have not spread beyond Austin. Talk of “more cities” right now is a forecast.
The cities Tesla has actually named
In its shareholder update for the second quarter, released in July, Tesla named two metro areas as next in line, with testing, permits, and training for local firefighters and police already under way.
Las Vegas is the furthest along on paper. On August 20, Nevada’s Transportation Authority voted unanimously to let Tesla run paid, fully driverless rides in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, with up to 5,000 vehicles in the first year. Tesla’s own Cybercab engineer told the board that number is a ceiling, not a plan, and that about 2,500 in a year would make the company very happy. Rides to and from the airport need a separate approval from the county.
Nevada’s rules also give a permit holder 120 days to start operating unless the state grants more time. Counting from Tesla’s summer permits, trackers put the deadline somewhere between late November and mid-December. That is a deadline estimate, not a launch date, and Tesla has not announced one.
Phoenix is a step behind. Tesla has posted robotaxi fleet support and operations manager jobs there, but it has not shared a permit milestone or a date.
Beyond those two, the signs are thinner. Tesla has applied to build a private charging lot for robotaxis in San Antonio, and CNBC reports that more Texas cities, including San Antonio, are the company’s next step there. Tesla cars have also been spotted testing in New Orleans. Neither city has an announced service.
What would speed things up
Tesla has tied its next wave of cities to a big software update for the self-driving system, called FSD v15. FSD stands for Full Self-Driving, the name of Tesla’s driving software. The company wants to put v15 on its robotaxi fleet this month. In September, Tesla’s head of self-driving software, Ashok Elluswamy, replied on X that round-the-clock service would come “next month or so.” Tesla’s software dates often slip, so treat October as a goal, not a promise.
There are also outside checks. After the Cybercab launch, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal car-safety regulator, sent Tesla a long list of questions about whether the steering-wheel-free car meets federal standards. Tesla got an extension on its September 30 deadline to answer. An Austin fire captain told CNBC he wants rules that give first responders a standard way to move or shut down a driverless car in an emergency.
Safety numbers are part of the pitch too. Tesla said in July that its unsupervised robotaxis had driven more than 380,000 miles with no notable incidents. If you want the bigger picture on how driverless cars compare with human drivers, our look at what autonomous vehicle crash rates actually show walks through the data.
How it stacks up against Waymo
Waymo, the self-driving company owned by Google’s parent Alphabet, is still well ahead on size. CNBC reports that it runs in 15 U.S. markets with 15 more planned, has more than 4,000 driverless cars in service, and gives more than 500,000 paid rides a week. Back in January, Musk said Tesla’s robotaxis would be “very, very widespread” in the U.S. by the end of 2026. With less than three months left, Tesla has six driverless cities and two named next.
Critics have pointed out that Tesla’s map has often grown faster than its fleet. When Orlando and Tampa opened in July, Electrek counted only about 17 active unsupervised cars in Austin. The jump to 169 Cybercabs in Texas is the strongest sign yet that the fleet is starting to catch up.
What to watch
The clearest signal of a real new city is simple: a new service area shows up in the Robotaxi app, and Tesla’s Robotaxi account posts a map. Until that happens, a post saying robotaxis are “coming soon” to a city is a promise, not a ride. For now, the cities to watch are Las Vegas, before Nevada’s deadline at the end of the year, and Phoenix, along with whether Cybercabs leave Austin for Dallas, Houston, or Miami.