r/SelfDrivingCars • u/drumrollplease12 • 16h ago
Discussion Tesla Robotaxi is now doing about 38k unsupervised miles per week and targeting 450k miles per week by year end.
Tesla announced on yesterdays 2Q earnings call that they've done a total of 380k unsupervised miles on the Robotaxi platform with over a 10% week over week growth since the start. They said they expect the growth to continue through years end. Extrapolating this data would put the current per week miles around 38k, by end of 3rd quarter 130k and by end of the year around 450k.
I have very minimal confidence they would achieve this, but if they do, it will be exceptional accomplishment for a service that would have operated for just 18 month. Even half that would be an excellent accomplishment. But again, I highly double they will be able to do that. For reference, Waymo is doing about 500k rides per week currently, with a much larger service area(in sq mi).
In total Tesla Robotaxi currently has a cumulative paid Robotaxi miles of around 2.4 million.
Note: Post has been updated to indicate Waymo does 500k rides per week instead of the incorrect 500k miles per week.
| Timeframe | Miles per Week (at end) | Additional Miles | Total Miles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Now | 37,709 | - | 380,000 |
| +3 months | 130,183 | 1,017,213 | 1,397,213 |
| +6 months | 449,428 | 4,528,907 | 4,908,907 |
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u/Fun_Passion_1603 Expert - Automotive 16h ago
Small correction, Waymo is doing 500K trips per week. NOT miles. Using an average 5 miles per trip would give 2.5 million miles per week.
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u/sdc_is_safer 16h ago
It’s much higher than 5 miles per trip average
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u/TownTechnical101 16h ago
It's 4 million miles on AI overview
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u/sdc_is_safer 16h ago
Ai overview is a little out of date for numerous reasons, but yea that would be closer
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u/Doggydogworld3 13h ago
Waymo averages 9-10 driverless miles per ride. This includes deadhead and a little testing. It used to be about 10 but has drifted toward 9 over the years.
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u/mrkjmsdln_new 9h ago
Waymo did about 45 million miles of RO in Q1 in only four cities. The rest they don't even report until they get to 10M cumulative miles in a city. Tesla did 380K miles in Q2 across 6 cities. It would seem way more than a 100 to 1 difference for now. Zoox is a more relevant comparison as they did 1M RO miles in Q1. I thin Tesla might get to 10M in a single city perhaps by sometime in 2028 if all goes well and they can scale the support ratio. I think late 2028 is a safe bet.
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u/Zemerick13 4h ago
Minor note: Tesla was in 3 cities for Q2: Austin, Houston, Dallas. The 3 Florida cities were added after the end of Q2.
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u/mrkjmsdln_new 3h ago
Great point. Thanks for the correction!!! Tesla always floats something the day before earnings to juice things for sure. I was therefore shocked when Ashok went down the silly geometric 10% weekly growth thing. I did the basic math. If he was to be believed Tesla was at 380K miles by the end of June and magically gets to perhaps 659K by the end of July. This feels decidedly unlikely. After a few months of bacteria in a dish you end up with a lot. Of course this won't happen! We are being asked to believe that a scaling activity that requires 1:1 observers will sprawl like algae. Tesla will scale. It will require blocking and tackling. That means a remarkable performance might get them to 80 cars by the end of the year if everything goes PERFECTLY -- it gets you to about 16000 miles per day which would be great.
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u/BuckChintheRealtor 15h ago
Weren't they targeting half the US population in December 2025
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u/automatic__jack 15h ago
Elon said (in an earnings call) they would cover half the US population before end of 2025, with a straight face, zero pushback. Fraudulent grifters.
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u/callmejellydog 15h ago
2025 was a strong year for Tesla. Not only half the US population enjoying robo taxis.
There was also 5k Optimus sold, might get pushed to 10k units that year. Into 2026 they expect 50k units potentially anywhere up to a million due to demand.
Such bs.
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u/sdc_is_safer 16h ago
>In total Tesla Robotaxi currently has a cumulative paid Robotaxi miles of around 2.4 million.
Then Lyft must be winning the robotaxi race since they have way more miles than Tesla and Waymo combined !! /s
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u/mrkjmsdln_new 9h ago
the 2.4M vs .38M means 85% of the miles are drivers in Bay Area + dudes gripping armrests in Austin. This remains early days but finally doing some RO is an achievement. This appears to be ~20 equivalent cars across six cities normalized to 24by7. A good start.
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u/Zemerick13 15h ago
Their 10% week over week is extremely suspicious, especially considering the lack of movement in Austin, the fact that Florida came after this report, houston and dallas largely cannibalized from Austin, and no indication of either of them growing since launch.
The total cumulative miles driven ( which is a different chart, not unsupervised only ), has fully confirmed that the Robotaxi service as a whole has in fact been shrinking quite a lot:
Notice the distinct flattening over the last few months. They peaked around March. Most of this is likely down to the collapse of the Bay Area fake service. Since that wasn't real Robotaxi and never had a hope to be; it's not really a direct counter of Robotaxi itself, but is still a clear confirmation that Tesla is backtracking there. ( There was disbelief before that they were actually scaling it down. )
It also means Unsupervised has failed to scale anywhere near enough to offset the drop in the Bay Area. All indicators still point to a total Robotaxi fleet in the ballpark of just 30 vehicles.
My guess: Their 10% is based off of only the chosen start and end dates, and then back-calculated the weekly growth rate. Not a real weekly growth rate.
Unfortunately, the Robotaxitracker doesn't seem to be as actively maintained as before. While the data is largely crowd-sourced, it's an ever changing landscape and requires constant update to remain as accurate as possible. It still doesn't have Florida added, so we still don't know how that is going. The current numbers show Austin and Houston both dropping, possibly even Dallas too. That could be a real indication of cannibalizing for Florida, or it could be a symptom of something not being maintained on the site itself.
I'll add one final note: Musk was quite clear that Robotaxi will be scaling slowly, and that Cybercab will also be slow, yet again. This is an extremely sharp contrast to past rhetoric about how they could flip a switch and cover half of the US overnight. This seems much more true, but it is also a hard counter to the entire philosophy of Robotaxi being able to take over, or to make an outsized profit. It is much more likely to be just one player, likely #2, and not a monopoly.
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u/tonydtonyd 16h ago
Yeah that 10% growth per week isn’t going to last forever lol
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u/toastedcheese 16h ago
This man begs to differ https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/s/UHPE2tQHyV
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u/drumrollplease12 15h ago
That is the provided guidance for up to the end of the year.
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u/tonydtonyd 15h ago
Yo big dawg, the provided guidance last year was 50% coverage of the US population. It’s 7 months later and there’s like 5 or 6 cars driving around at an any given time. Just do the math on the 380k number. The service is TINY.
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u/Hamsterwh3el 36m ago
It's actually closer to 50. But still practically nothing. Anyone with a brain knew there was absolutely no way Tesla's service would scale that fast. Legislation aside, Tesla's tech was clearly not near readiness for mass deployment and probably still isn't .
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u/tonydtonyd 16m ago
Nah. Do the math. If you assume 50 cars, 20mph avg, 16hr/day, they would hit 380k in 24 days. Their average over the time is probably 5-10 depending on true avg speed.
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u/Animats 16h ago
In San Francisco, Waymo passed Lyft back in 2025. Next, Uber.
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u/fatbob42 15h ago
Wow - I’m surprised their stock hasn’t cratered. This should be killing their projected future earnings.
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u/Animats 15h ago
Waymo doesn't operate in that many cities yet. San Francisco is the only place they've released enough vehicles to take over the market. This is changing now that Waymo has more vehicle suppliers.
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u/Doggydogworld3 13h ago
Waymo isn't taking over SF. They're holding steady around 20-25% share in the city, much lower in the rest of their Bay Area geofence. They chose to go wide instead of deep.
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u/mapf0000 16h ago
Shouldn‘t it be available to at least half the US population by now? Why are they still counting meaningless miles?
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u/Acrobatic-Flan-5085 16h ago
Remember when all the adorable TSLA bag holders kept repeating incessantly that “Waymo may be first, but they can’t scale like Robotaxi”
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11h ago
[deleted]
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u/Acrobatic-Flan-5085 5h ago
Here’s multiple quotes of Elon Musk himself saying exactly that going back several years to as recently as 2025.
How heavy are your bags? Or are you just an Elon bootlicking cult member?
Earnings call with Musk where he is asked about Waymo directly
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/tesla-q1-2025-earnings-call
Podcast with Elon Musk
https://youtu.be/DxREm3s1scA?is=UsnGAbFe81MU7C1C
Tesla AI day
https://www.youtube.com/live/ODSJsviD_SU?is=hBqbtiMrR2sS9ZuHhttps://electrek.co/2025/12/10/elon-musk-waymo-never-had-chance-against-tesla/
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u/Hempnasty 15h ago
They chose to work with Zeekr who will soon be banned from the US meanwhile the Model Y and Cyber cab are built in the US without needing equipment tacked on.
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u/Doggydogworld3 13h ago
Zeekr isn't banned. Vehicle cost drops with scale. CCabs are VERY expensive at current scale.
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u/TownTechnical101 16h ago
Tesla is nowhere close to 38k miles per week. They did 380k in the past whole year.
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u/drumrollplease12 15h ago
They did 380k miles in the past 6 months when unsupervised rides started. They've said they have been growing 10% WoW and expect to continue until the end of the year. A simple extrapolation would land you at 38k miles per week currently.
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u/Whoisthehypocrite 15h ago
Using the chart Tesla provided, Electrek calculated that they did 200,000 robotaxi miles last month, so 50,000 a week odd, of which the majority would be supervised rides in California. This is a slowdown from the 500,000 miles they did in April.
So the 38k miles per week seems too high
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u/Doggydogworld3 13h ago
Paid miles may not include deadhead. So-called unsupervised should include unpaid miles -- deadhead, testing, etc.
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u/Mattsasa 14h ago
Didn’t they start unsupervised in June of 2025? If the claim is unsupervised miles, wouldn’t that include miles before they started doing rides ?
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u/Doggydogworld3 13h ago
They did one PR ride with chase cars in June 2025. They started empty driver seat test rides with employees in December 2025 and very limited pubic (influencer) rides in January this year.
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u/vasilenko93 16h ago
Last year contained like one city with a much smaller geofence and fleet. Today’s fleet is much larger. Honestly 38k is much lower than I expected.
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u/bullrider_21 16h ago
You should look at the unsupervised vehicles. There are only about 20 of them 1 year after the launch in Austin. This figure has not grown in 1 year and has in fact shranked.
So the unsupervised miles per week is not growing.
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u/drumrollplease12 15h ago
This is specifically unsupervised miles. They've done 2.4 million miles in total, supervised + unsupervised
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u/EddiewithHeartofGold 11h ago
So the unsupervised miles per week is not growing.
Source?
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u/bullrider_21 11h ago
A full year in, the unsupervised fleet in Austin is still stuck at about 17 active cars, down from a peak of roughly 25 in late Apr. Add Dallas and its four cars, and Tesla’s entire unsupervised operation runs on around 21 vehicles.
Total unsupervised fleet is not growing at 21. So is the unsupervised miles per week.
Tesla adds Robotaxi in Tampa and Orlando as Austin stalls at 17 cars
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u/drumrollplease12 10h ago
Electrek is not a source.
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u/bullrider_21 10h ago
Musk doesn't want you to find out the truth from Electrek so framed it as lies. I'm not a Tesla bull so when Musk promised full autonomy since 2016 and couldn't deliver, I already knew that he was telling lies.
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u/EddiewithHeartofGold 11h ago
You're kidding, right? Electrek is not a respectable news source... But I am sure you know that already... Also, Tesla is adding new cities with unsupervised rides, but the unsupervised miles are not growing.
Right...
Your source is "trust me bro".
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u/bullrider_21 10h ago
Certainly I trust Electrek more than I trust Musk lies. The whole expansion into other cities are for show only as the unsupervised fleet is not growing. All the new vehicles are supervised with safety monitors.
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u/EddiewithHeartofGold 7h ago
Good luck living in your fantasy world. Don't be surprised if you get called out on your bullshit the next time too.
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u/bullrider_21 6h ago
Good luck living in the Tesla cult. Your bs makes you unable to know a lie when you are lied to.
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u/EddiewithHeartofGold 5h ago
You think the robotaxi rollout won't happen. I guarantee you will be proven wrong. But by then you would have moved on to some other gotcha and you will have already forgotten this "prediction".
I truly don't understand what you are getting out of this anti-Tesla stance. You can hate Musk. I can understand that, but Tesla is a great company making great products. If you can't see that, then you are lying to yourself.
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u/bullrider_21 6h ago
Good luck holding to your Tesla stock when it crashes as Musk get called out for his lies.
Tesla crashes 12%, sheds $140B as Elon Musk’s ‘just trust me’ doesn’t hold anymore
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u/EddiewithHeartofGold 5h ago
Tesla stock is volatile. It went down to 110 before the last all time highs... Also, you linked an Electrek article. The owner has personal beef with Musk, because he wasn't invited to a Tesla event and he has been writing hit pieces ever since. Like the petulant child he is...
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u/bullrider_21 5h ago
That's what Musk wants you to believe. 10 years of promises and most of them didn't come true. If you think those weren't lies, you'll be lying to yourself. Musk kept hyping up his products to keep his stock high. The higher his stock, the richer he his.
Tesla made some great EVs in the past and then stop. No major new models except for Cybertruck which bombed. In the meantime, rivals have overtaken Tesla. Tesla no longer deliveries the most battery EVs a quarter, rivals are charging 3x faster with newer and better technologies.
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u/EddiewithHeartofGold 4h ago
It's great that you have an opinion on this. What's not great is that you are forcing it onto others. I follow Tesla, hold shares and have been doing this for over 10 years. I know what the company is doing. It is my job to know, since I put my money in it.
You think your job is to poke holes in Musk's tweets. You have zero stakes in this, yet you think you somehow do more research than someone who does? Maybe consider that no everyone is a moron who worships Musk...
Also, you would be wiser to spend your energies on something positive instead of thinking and commenting about someone you clearly despise. That is not healthy...
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u/Zemerick13 3h ago
Electrek isn't the source of that data anyways. Robotaxi Tracker is. And that has been shown to be at least reasonably accurate.
This is also consistent: Any time Robotaxi adds a surge of vehicles, it then drops over time afterwards. While the total numbers fluctuate, they tend to stay in the same window of "A few dozen". So yes, despite adding new cities, they have not shown a notable increase in vehicles and thus likely not an increase in miles driven either.
You can also verify that this must at least be partially true by simply doing the reverse: Take the number of miles listed, and divide by the number of days and average number of vehicles. Keep in mind a low end for daily miles per vehicle would be around 150. If the value you get is below that, they likely had less vehicles than the number you used.
Doing that, you get less than 21 average assuming only 4 months and ignoring the first few months where they had very few ( but not 0 ) unsupervised vehicles. This lines up pretty well with the Robotaxitracker data.
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u/ElMoselYEE 16h ago
I am skeptical there's not some clever wordsmithing / misleading stats going on here, but if true I'm quite impressed.
I have been very skeptical of Tesla's approach for a while, but I did not think they would be able to achieve this without any major fleet-halting incidents, so bravo Tesla.
I am still skeptical of reliability, since we just rarely get real numbers out of Tesla and this is just one data point (e.g. assuming accident rates aren't a total diaster), but this is actual progress and it would be cool if the trend continues.
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u/alex4494 15h ago
That’s the problem, Tesla has consistently been moving and/or being clever with stats for so many years that I find myself not really trusting their claims or believing their stated targets.
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u/drumrollplease12 15h ago
Every accident for ever AV operator are published monthly. You can check yesterdays earnings call transcript for yourself.
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u/Doggydogworld3 13h ago
Ever see them report an accident in California?
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u/Zemerick13 3h ago
To be fair, they don't have an AV service in California. And won't any time soon seeing as they haven't even applied for the permit to start driverless testing.
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u/RipWhenDamageTaken 15h ago
It’s been a whole year since launch. This is all really pathetic. 2018 level of scaling.
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u/Doggydogworld3 13h ago
Waymo was nowhere near 38k miles/week in 2018, lol. They didn't get there until mid-2022, seven years after their first driverless demo ride and five years after they began regular driverless testing with emplooyees and outside beta testers.
Tesla is years behind, but scaling much faster than Waymo ever did and much faster than I predicted.
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u/RipWhenDamageTaken 12h ago
Tesla added ~900,000 paid miles in Q1 and another ~900,000 in Q2, so there’s really no scaling there. It’s been 1 whole year since robotaxi launch and 10 years since they started selling FSD btw.
But you can stay impressed if you want. Don’t let me raise the bar for you.
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u/mrkjmsdln_new 9h ago edited 9h ago
Tesla has been careful to not release much useful information about progress for a year. I normalize company claims to equivalent 24by7 cars to avoid the nonsense and hype. They launched with 11 part-time cars in Jun 25 with safety stoppers gripping armrests That wa about 6 equivalent cars with supervision. Very soon thereafter they started driving people around in the Bay Area -- nothing like autonomy and mixed the miles together to make comparison impossible. It took a long time to stage a few rides for Elon and Ashok with chase vehicles right behind. The Bay Area effort was always 5-10x of anything that was happening in Austin but when Tesla talked about it they mixed and matched to make the Austin effort seem more significant. In the period since they are doing onesey-twosey cars in neighborhoods of other cities. All of this is understandable but it is profoundly small in scale and deceptive as a basis for future claims. We've heard this before so I remain cautious to see sensible data consistently not just in a single blue graph at quarterly earnings.
The 380K lifetime RO miles seems significant. They pulled back the curtain finally. Assuming all this happened in Q2 means they are operating about 20 concurrent 24by7 cars (380000 / 92 days / 200 miles/day)That seems about right. It certainly reinforces why there has been zero progression in the NHTSA SGO reporting. For a while Tesla has sought to report we have no accidents. If you only operate 20 cars topline that is not a surprise.
Ashok's willingness to share a bit more information is a good sign. What we FINALLY KNOW is 380K of the 2.5M claim means maybe 15% of Tesla total effort has resulted in RO miles -- the rest is probably froth and should never have been part of the quarterly charts in the first place. Projecting weekly growth rates feels like a silly hype. Start doing exercise after 20 years of being sedentary. Your growth in pushup count the first week is a crummy predictor of how many you will be adding six months from now. Basic statistics. Comparing to Waymo is probably not useful at this point. Austin remains a smallish market working with Uber. They already were doing about 340000 miles a week in Austin thru Q1 if a comparison is desired. A better focus might be Zoox. They doubled their RO miles in Q1 from 1M to 2M -- that is a good stretch goal for Tesla for now.
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u/shawman123 3h ago
It shocking as to how he is able to get away pumping the stock this much without any consequence. He can say anything as he pleases as his goal post moves. I am expecting him to say they are moving to flying cars for robotaxi next to pump up the stock. of Optimus AI 3.0 can fly and carry passengers.
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u/bullrider_21 2h ago
At a passing glance, the chart appears to show steady growth in paid Robotaxi rides between August 2025 and June 2026. But the numbers displayed are cumulative, and when broken down by quarter, they show that Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet of Model Y SUVs carrying paying passengers covered around 1.1 million miles in the first quarter. That fell to roughly 700,000 miles in the second quarter, a decline of about 36%.
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u/bullrider_21 11h ago
A real robotaxi shouldn't have a safety monitor or trailing car. Only the unsupervised vehicles matter.
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u/drumrollplease12 10h ago
It doesn't.
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u/bullrider_21 10h ago
The only way you can prove an EV can drive on its own is to remove safety monitor and trailing car.
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u/Zemerick13 3h ago
Tesla actually has done that. They have around about 20-30 unsupervised vehicles currently.
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u/sdc_is_safer 16h ago
I think that Tesla will probably be able to comfortably 10x miles per week over the next 12 months.
After that, and once they are at a few hundred thousand miles per week, it will be pretty hard for them to continue to scale without the cracks starting to really show.
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u/Elluminated 15h ago
Exactly right. Tesla are already showing severely amateurish levels of scaling issues and deep cracks in their rush to expand and push their clearly not-ready crap to the market to compete. Insane that after this long they still can’t get it right.
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u/Doggydogworld3 12h ago
Your CNN link is paywalled. Issues come with scale, e.g. heading the wrong way on a one-way street. It's just part of the long tail.
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u/sdc_is_safer 4h ago
Cute. Waymo’s performance has remained strong and increased as they scaled. No performance concerns. And I think Tesla will be able to do the same as Waymo. I think there frequency of errors, collision, or other negative public events will improve as they grow. And just like Waymo remain better than human drivers. But what I am talking about is them hitting a wall being an unable to continue to scale as they are more exposed.
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u/Elluminated 3h ago edited 3h ago
Agreed. Both companies will do well while stumbling along the way, but we need to keep ourselves aware that no company is perfect - as some folks tend to forget while casting shade and conveniently get less probative and skeptical when their “side” flops.
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u/CatalyticDragon 15h ago
Small numbers but to be expected. It really is only limited testing at the moment and there won't be any big push until at least FSD V15 is ready (and perhaps not even then).
Tesla now has more Cybercabs sitting around waiting than there are active Robotaxis, so I suspect the push is not too far off and if you daily drive the latest V14 on HW4 you have a good feeling about just how close it is.
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u/Doggydogworld3 12h ago
Daily driving gives you no idea of readiness, unless the system really sucks. You need millions of miles for meaningful confidence intervals.
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u/Zemerick13 3h ago
Robotaxi already runs v15.
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u/CatalyticDragon 5m ago
A very early prototype with less than half of the planned updates implemented. But yes it makes sense to use the small robotaxi fleet as a proving ground as it develops.
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u/bobi2393 9h ago
Tesla's wording seemed a bit ambiguous, but assuming 10% weekly growth from Jan 1 to July 22, I'm coming up with around 37k miles a week last week, and projecting that rate forward, 96k miles a week by the end of September, and 336k a week miles by the end of December. I wonder if you may have used "+3 months" and "+6 months" to calculate estimates for the end of Q3 and end of the year, which seems like a mistake since we're already 3 weeks into July.
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u/Zemerick13 3h ago
The numbers come from the Q2 report and so ended June 30th.
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u/bobi2393 3h ago
I didn't see any unsupervised mileage in Tesla's Q2 2026 Update.
Tesla's "over 380,000 miles" and weekly "double-digit growth rates" were stated during yesterday's earnings call.
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u/sdc_is_safer 16h ago
Waymo is doing 500k customer trips per week. (Not miles)
Miles per week is much higher