Tesla nears 1,000 robotaxis registered in Texas
A fleet photo and a new company safety page, both sourced from Tesla and its own staff.
Sawyer Merritt posted footage of a line of Cybercabs and Model Y robotaxis heading back to base and said it is the largest number of Tesla robotaxis ever seen together on public roads. In the same post he said Tesla is nearing 1,000 robotaxis registered in Texas to date.
This is the largest number of Tesla robotaxis ever seen together on public roads.
Tesla's VP of AI software Ashok Elluswamy amplified the moment with his own posts, one captioned "A Storm of Cybercabs" and another saying "Robotaxis as far as the eye can see!". Separately, Ben Steindl posted that Tesla's robotaxi service was busy for the Austin F1 weekend.
The safety numbers
Earlier in the week Elluswamy announced a Tesla Robotaxi safety report. His summary says the service has driven 3.3 million miles autonomously to date with zero injuries and zero airbag deployments. He then offers a comparison point. If the same number of miles were driven manually, he says, you should expect roughly 9 injuries to occupants or other pedestrians and 4 airbag deployments on average.
He framed the page as an ongoing commitment, writing that Tesla will keep sharing its progress with the public there.
Shown versus claimed
What was shown is a video of a lot of robotaxis on a road. Everything else is a number from Tesla or from a Tesla executive. The 1,000 registered vehicles figure comes from Merritt's post, not from a regulator filing cited anywhere in the posts. The mileage, injury and airbag figures come from Tesla's own safety page, and the manual driving baseline Elluswamy compares against is also his own. None of the posts cite an outside audit or an independent review of the data.
That matters because the comparison is doing a lot of work. A claim of zero injuries across 3.3 million miles only means something next to a baseline, and here the company supplying the numerator also supplies the denominator. Nobody outside Tesla has checked either yet, at least not in anything these posts point to.
It is still a real number of real vehicles. A fleet approaching four figures in one state, visible in a single shot heading back to base, is a different scale of deployment from the small supervised pilots the service started with. The open question is how much of that mileage is driven with a safety monitor on board, which none of the posts address.
Robotaxi has driven a total of 3.3 million miles autonomously, and has had zero injuries nor airbag deployments
Sound like you were at the demo
One email a day. Under three minutes. The demos, the deployments and the part the press release left out.