Tesla expands robotaxi service to San Antonio

Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to another Texas city as it seeks to compete with Waymo and position itself as more than just an automaker. The company said in a post on X that it will make its robotaxis available in San Antonio starting at 5 a.m. local time on Monday. Tesla didn’t provide any additional details about the service, such as the hours of operation, whether the fleet will offer customers its gold, two-seater Cybercab as well as its modified Model Y vehicles, or if these vehicles will have human safety monitors on board. But if the company follows its playbook of previous launches, it will start with a limited number of vehicles and a confined service area, and expand slowly from there. Tesla CEO Elon Musk for a decade promised his company would deliver autonomous vehicles, and it eventually launched a robotaxi service in Austin in June 2025. The launch, though limited and supported by human safety operators on board, was an important milestone for the company and a test of whether self-driving cars could be safely deployed using just cameras and end-to-end AI. Since then, Tesla has slowly expanded. In January, the company removed safety monitors from its robotaxis in Austin, officially kicking off a true driverless service, and has spent the last 11 months expanding within the city, and to new cities in Florida and Texas. It now operates robotaxis in limited areas of Miami and Orlando as well as Dallas , Fort Worth, and Houston. Its rival Waymo also operates a robotaxi service using a mix of driverless Jaguar I-Pace and Zeekr RT vehicles, branded Ojai, in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. The company, a subsidiary of Alphabet, recently restarted services in San Antonio after a five-month pause following incidents in which its vehicles got stuck after entering flooded roadways. While Tesla has more than 400 autonomous vehicles registered in its Austin fleet, its fleets in other cities have numbered between a handful and a few dozen, according to Texas vehicle registration data and the Robotaxi Tracker website . For example, Tesla has just 24 vehicles in Fort Worth and five in Miami, according to the tracker. Tesla also has a ride-hailing service, under a transportation charter permit, that it operates in the San Francisco Bay Area. While the vehicles are often described as robotaxis, they are operated by a human behind the wheel. Tesla currently doesn’t have the required permits to operate a driverless ride-hailing service in California. In spite of this expansion push, the company released data this summer that showed its robotaxi network drove fewer miles with paying customers in the second quarter than it did in the first, TechCrunch reported in July. Topics autonomous vehicles , robotaxi , Tesla , Transportation When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission . This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Kirsten Korosec Transportation Editor Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive. You can contact or verify outreach from Kirsten by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at kkorosec.07 on Signal. View Bio November 4 Boston Buy One Pass, Get a Second Free Cover more ground at TechCrunch’s ultimate founder bootcamp of the year by bringing your co-founder or partner for free Book before the BOGO deal expires Register Now Most Popular Tesla will stop making the Cybertruck in 2027 Sean O'Kane Claude can now analyze your spending with its new Personal Finance tool Aisha Malik Harbinger raises $240M after expanding into defense Sean O'Kane Almost no one uses AI agents to book their Uber, company says Sarah Perez Data centers are turning to old jet engines as the wait for power grows Aditya Mehta New York City’s Mamdani criticizes Madison Square Garden owner over surveillance tech Zack Whittaker Anthropic warns that it’s very close to RSI capability, aka self-building AI Julie Bort