Less than a month after we reported that Tesla’s unsupervised “Robotaxi” fleet was finally showing some signs of growth, new data from the Robotaxi Tracker tells a different story. The fleet is actually shrinking.
The number of active unsupervised Tesla “Robotaxis” has dropped to just 20 vehicles — down from the 25 cumulative vehicles we reported in late April — and the total active fleet across all Tesla ride-hailing operations has collapsed to just 34 vehicles.
The numbers are going in the wrong direction
When we last checked in on Tesla’s “Robotaxi” program at the end of April, we noted that the unsupervised fleet had grown to 25 cumulative vehicles across Austin, Dallas, and Houston. About 17 of those were active in the previous seven days. We called it “the first real signs of growth” after months of stagnation.
We were too quick to call it.
The latest data from Robotaxi Tracker shows the unsupervised fleet now has only 20 active vehicles (seen in the last seven days): 14 in Austin, 3 in Dallas, and 3 in Houston. The chart paints an even clearer picture — the unsupervised fleet peaked in late March/early April and has been declining since.
Austin, which has been the flagship deployment city, dropped from 19 unsupervised vehicles to 14 active in the last seven days. Dallas and Houston remain stuck at 3 each — the same tiny numbers they launched with back in April.
The total fleet picture is even worse
Zooming out to the full Tesla ride-hailing fleet, which includes the supervised Full Self-Driving vehicles in the Bay Area, the collapse is dramatic. Tesla now has just 34 total active vehicles across all locations, with only 20 of those being unsupervised.
The Bay Area fleet, which accounted for 107 of the 165 total active vehicles we reported in April, has cratered to just 9. That’s a staggering decline for what was once the bulk of Tesla’s ride-hailing operation, even though those Bay Area vehicles were never truly “Robotaxis” — they operated with safety drivers behind the wheel under California’s Transportation Charter-Party permit.
Even when normalizing over 30 days of active vehicles, the chart still looks terrible:
The Robotaxi Tracker chart for the total fleet tells the story clearly: Tesla’s ride-hailing vehicle count peaked around December 2025/January 2026 and has been in steady decline ever since. The brief bump in unsupervised vehicles that we reported in April now looks like a blip, not a trend.
Why the fleet is shrinking
Tesla hasn’t explained why active vehicle counts are declining, but the likely culprit is what we’ve been reporting for months: safety is the bottleneck.
As we reported in May, the “convenience issues” plaguing Tesla’s “Robotaxi” service, long wait times, surface-street-only routing, and tiny geofences, are really safety constraints in disguise. Elon Musk himself told investors that safety validation is the limiting factor, and Tesla’s crash rate with unsupervised vehicles has been reported at roughly four times worse than human drivers.
More vehicles mean more miles, and more miles mean more crashes. Tesla appears to be pulling vehicles back rather than adding them — a rational decision from a safety standpoint, but one that puts Musk’s ambitious scaling predictions in a different perspective.
Musk has said Tesla is waiting for improvements from a rewrite that will reach consumers in FSD v15 before scaling the Robotaxi fleet aggressively, pushing the timeline to late 2026 or early 2027. In the meantime, the fleet is getting smaller, not bigger.
Waymo continues to pull further ahead
While Tesla’s fleet shrinks, Waymo keeps expanding. The Alphabet-backed company now operates approximately 3,000 robotaxis across multiple US cities, completing hundreds of thousands of paid trips per week. Waymo is building a new manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona with Magna to produce over 2,000 additional vehicles, and it’s preparing to launch in Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C. later this year.
Tesla’s 20 active unsupervised vehicles versus Waymo’s thousands — operating in more cities, with broader geofences, and at higher utilization rates — illustrates the gulf between the two programs. Tesla isn’t just behind; the gap is widening.
However, Waymo is not without setbacks itself. It recently had to pause service on highways and in a few markets due to issues with its vehicles not always detecting flooded streets.
Electrek’s Take
I’ll own this one. When we reported on the fleet growth at the end of April, I noted that we should “see where things go from here” and that it was “still very early.” Turns out, things went backward.
The data now shows that what looked like the beginning of a ramp was actually a temporary peak. Tesla’s unsupervised fleet has shrunk from 25 cumulative to 20 active, Austin has lost vehicles, and Dallas and Houston haven’t grown at all since launch. The total fleet, including the Bay Area supervised vehicles, has collapsed from 165 to 34 active.
This is now a full year into the “Robotaxi” program, and Tesla can’t sustain even 25 vehicles on the road. The safety bottleneck that we’ve been covering is clearly constraining the operation. Tesla is in a position where adding more vehicles would likely mean more crashes, and the company appears to have chosen to shrink rather than accept that risk — which is the right call for safety, but it’s devastating for the business case that has propped up Tesla’s valuation.
Musk’s bet on FSD v15 solving the problem remains exactly that — a bet. Until the software is dramatically better, the fleet will stay small, and the gap with Waymo will only grow.
We would love to believe that the improvements associated with the FSD rewrite coming in v15 are the solutions. And I have to admit that I’ve been extremely impressed with v14.3. But that doesn’t mean it’s ready for robotaxi at scale. We have been burned too many times before.
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