During Tesla's latest earnings call, CEO Elon Musk struck an unusually cautious tone about the company's robotaxi ambitions. While highlighting new cities, increased mileage, and growing rider participation, Musk seemed to step back from his characteristic bold predictions, choosing instead to manage expectations about the program's trajectory.
"We're going as fast as humanly possible in scaling Robotaxi," Musk said, "while trying to ensure that we do not harm anyone at all and ideally do not even run over a pet."
The tempered messaging comes as Tesla's robotaxi promises increasingly collide with operational realities. Mileage figures remain essentially flat, the number of active vehicles appears to be contracting, and the safety of the company's autonomous technology continues to be scrutinized.
Numbers Tell a Different Story
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's head of AI, reported that the company's unsupervised robotaxis have covered 380,000 miles across six cities spanning two states. Musk claimed that mileage is growing at a rate of 10 percent per week.
Elluswamy used the occasion to defend Tesla's camera-only approach against competitors who rely on lidar sensors and other technologies. "Historically, the so-called experts have always claimed that you need lidars, radars, HD maps, and the entire kitchen sink to drive safely," he said. "Here we show that such is not true. You can have safe, comfortable, and affordable autonomy with just cameras. This record should be a huge validation of Tesla's entire AI approach."
However, the figures Tesla presented raise questions about scalability. Waymo, which uses lidar and radar alongside cameras, regularly logs approximately four million miles weekly. Tesla's cumulative mileage after a full year of operation amounts to less than 10 percent of what Waymo achieves in a single week. The disparity has unsettled investors, with BNP Paribas Equity Research senior analyst James Picariello describing the situation as "an alarming decline" in a client note.
Fleet Size and Expansion Strategy Under Scrutiny
Tesla operates a combination of supervised and unsupervised vehicles, but the balance between the two remains in flux. According to the crowdsourced Robotaxi Tracker, the company currently fields only 16 unsupervised vehicles in Austin, four in Dallas, and one in Houston.
When asked why Tesla was not concentrating more vehicles in Austin—where it launched robotaxis a year ago—rather than spreading a small number across new markets, Elluswamy emphasized the importance of building a generalized system. "The reason we have been expanding across different cities, instead of just doubling down on a single city, is that we want to make sure that our stack is a very general one," he explained. "We just want to like, you know, both prove to ourselves and to other folks that it is working across a lot of different cities without too much effort per city."