Tesla will begin offering robotaxi rides in San Antonio on Monday, the company announced in a post on X, extending its self-driving ride service to another Texas market as it competes with Waymo and works to show it is more than an automaker. The service is set to start at 5 a.m. local time. Tesla did not say how many vehicles it will deploy there or how large an area customers will be able to hail rides in.
The company also left open whether San Antonio riders will be served by its gold, two-seater Cybercab or by its modified Model Y vehicles, and it did not say whether the cars will carry human safety monitors. Tesla has not disclosed operating hours for the new market. Past launches suggest the company tends to begin with a small number of vehicles in a confined service area and widen coverage gradually.
The San Antonio launch builds on a rollout that began in Austin in June 2025, when Tesla first offered robotaxi rides with human safety operators aboard. The company removed those monitors from its Austin vehicles in January, marking the start of a fully driverless service, and has spent the last 11 months widening its footprint inside that city and adding markets in Florida and Texas. Tesla now runs robotaxis in limited parts of Miami and Orlando, as well as in Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston.
Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary, already operates in San Antonio, along with Austin, Dallas and Houston, using a mix of driverless Jaguar I-Pace and Zeekr RT vehicles branded Ojai. Waymo recently resumed service in San Antonio after a five-month pause that followed incidents in which its vehicles became stuck after entering flooded roadways.
Fleet sizes outside Austin remain small. Texas vehicle registration data and the Robotaxi Tracker website show Tesla has more than 400 autonomous vehicles registered in its Austin fleet, while its fleets in other cities range from a handful to a few dozen. The tracker counts 24 Tesla vehicles in Fort Worth and five in Miami.
Tesla also runs a ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area under a transportation charter permit. Those vehicles are often described as robotaxis, but a human sits behind the wheel, and Tesla does not hold the permits California requires to operate a driverless ride-hailing service there. Despite the expansion, data Tesla released this summer showed its robotaxi network drove fewer miles with paying customers in the second quarter than in the first, TechCrunch reported in July.
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