Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 6.83% ) finally opened its Robotaxi service to the public this week, and riders in Austin and the Bay Area are learning what happens when hype outruns hardware. Instead of hopping into a futuristic autonomous ride, many users are getting hit with a simple message: “High service demand. Please come back later.”
Even when the system is not overloaded, wait times of 40 minutes or more are not uncommon. In Austin, the vehicles run autonomously with a safety monitor in the passenger seat. In the Bay Area the setup looks closer to Uber, with a driver using supervised Full Self-Driving.
The demand burst is not surprising. The app surged up the App Store charts when the waitlist opened in September, and Tesla’s public launch this week appears to have outpaced its fleet size. Tesla started the summer with about 20 cars in Austin before expanding to the Bay Area, though it has not disclosed how many vehicles are operating in each region now. Elon Musk recently said he expects 500 cars in Austin and 1,000 in the Bay Area by year-end. For context, Google’s Waymo $GOOGL ( ▲ 6.31% ) already runs more than 1,000 vehicles in the Bay Area and over 100 in Austin.
Musk has also claimed Tesla will expand Robotaxi service to 8 to 10 markets by the end of the year, well beyond the two it currently has active. Waymo operates in five markets today and plans to grow to more than 20.
Tesla’s service area is massive, roughly 245 square miles in Austin and a wide stretch of Northern California that spans from San Francisco to San Jose and includes parts of the East Bay. The fleet simply is not large enough yet to match the footprint.
Tesla insists scaling will not be an issue. Musk has repeatedly argued that millions of existing Teslas could transform into robotaxis overnight with a software update. As he put it on the recent earnings call, “There are millions of cars out there that, with a software update, become Full Self-Driving cars.”