Overview
- Tesla announced Wednesday that its unsupervised Robotaxi geofence now covers the entire Austin metropolitan area, marking the program's fifth expansion since its June 2025 launch.
- Independent trackers show the number of active unsupervised vehicles in Austin remains very small, roughly 13 to 20 cars, while Texas DMV records list 42 Tesla vehicles registered in the state.
- Tesla shifted parts of the Austin program from supervised rides with in-car human monitors to unsupervised operation beginning around January 22, 2026, and has removed monitors from more vehicles since then.
- Observers note that expanding a geofence only changes the mapped service area and does not add cars, which can produce long wait times and little usable service when fleet size is limited.
- Tesla uses production Model Y vehicles running camera-based Full Self-Driving software without lidar, and the company faces larger, better-staffed rivals such as Waymo as it waits for FSD v15 before scaling.