Elon Musk stepped into a user complaint on X about the difficulty of booking a Robotaxi ride in Austin and tried to calm things down. He replied that the Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 1.71% ) Robotaxi fleet in the city should “roughly double next month.”
The reassurance landed awkwardly because Austin reportedly has only 29 Robotaxis operating right now. And just last month, Musk said Tesla was aiming for “probably 500 or more in the greater Austin area” by the end of the year, a target that now looks far out of reach.
Google’s Waymo $GOOGL ( ▼ 1.08% ) is moving much faster. It already has more than 100 autonomous taxis running in Austin and another 1,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area, putting Tesla well behind in the race to scale autonomous ride services.