Tesla Opens Robotaxis in San Antonio, Its Largest Launch Zone Yet

The roughly 275-square-mile zone runs from downtown north to Loop 1604, in a city where Waymo's driverless cars already operate.

Tesla's robotaxis went live in San Antonio at 5 a.m. Monday, on a map that runs from downtown all the way north to Loop 1604.

Tesla announced the launch in a post on X, TechCrunch reported Monday. It's the latest step out from Austin, where Tesla started rides in June 2025 and took the safety monitors out of the cars in January. By Not a Tesla App's count, the new San Antonio map covers about 275 square miles. That's a hair bigger than Austin's 272, and the largest area Tesla has ever opened a city with.

That's the size of the map. How many cars are on it is the open question. Tesla didn't say how many vehicles it's sending, what hours they'll run or whether a safety monitor will ride along, according to TechCrunch. Not a Tesla App, which called the rides unsupervised, said the city opened with Model Y SUVs rather than Tesla's two-seat Cybercab.

Tesla's past launches suggest the answer is small. TechCrunch, citing Texas registration data and the Robotaxi Tracker site, reported that Tesla has more than 400 autonomous cars registered in Austin but only a handful to a few dozen everywhere else: 24 in Fort Worth, five in Miami. A recent analysis by a Tesla enthusiast also found that the actual pickup and drop-off zones in Texas are 22% to 41% smaller than the advertised maps, Not a Tesla App reported.

Tesla will have company. Waymo, Alphabet's robotaxi company, already gives driverless rides in San Antonio. TechCrunch reported that Waymo only recently started up there again after a five-month pause, which followed incidents where its cars drove into flooded roads and got stuck.

And Tesla is speeding up. San Antonio came a week after Fort Worth's Nov. 2 launch, and it was one of four cities, along with Las Vegas, Phoenix and Jacksonville, that Tesla named as its next markets on its third-quarter earnings call, Not a Tesla App reported. By that site's count, San Antonio is the eighth city with unsupervised Tesla rides. Last week, Elon Musk said Tesla would stop making the Cybertruck next year, Tesla Oracle reported.

The demand numbers haven't kept up. Data Tesla released this summer showed its robotaxis logged fewer paid miles from April through June than in the first three months of the year, TechCrunch reported in July.

None of this has reached California. Tesla's Bay Area ride service, often called a robotaxi, runs under a charter permit with a human behind the wheel. TechCrunch reported that Tesla doesn't hold the permits it would need to run driverless rides anywhere in the state.

Source: TechCrunch, retrieved November 9, 2026. Other sources: notateslaapp.com, teslaoracle.com.