Tesla’s active Cybercab fleet in Austin has dwindled again to just eight vehicles in the past seven days, according to data from Robotaxi Tracker , a community tracker. That’s about the same number Tesla had on the road when it launched the service in June 2025. Fifteen months of promises and no net growth. A surge that followed the “ Cybercab event ” quickly faded.
See also: Tesla unveils Cybercab in China, rules out robotaxi sales and service
Tesla held an event to unveil the Cybercab in Austin on September 3rd and invited a wave of Tesla supporters and influencers to drive the driverless vehicle. For a few days, social media was abuzz with videos of the first rides. Tracker data shows exactly what that was like. The number of unique Tesla robo-cabs actually seen carrying passengers in Austin skyrocketed to over 100 in early September, up from the 20 to 40 range it had been stuck in for most of the year.
Then it collapsed. By September 22, the number of active seven-day vehicles had returned to 8. And the videos of the rides disappeared with it.
One of those early Cybercab rides turned a 10-minute commute into a 70-minute detour, and the flood of posts Tesla had planned for the week of the event dwindled to a trickle after Tesla influencers left town. Here’s the gap Tesla supporters continue to ignore. Tesla is registering its self-driving vehicles with the Texas DMV under the state’s new AV rules, and that registered fleet now stands at 476 VINs (409 Model Ys and 67 Cybercabs), up 285 in the last month.
Proponents point to this growing number, and especially the growing number of Cybercabs, as evidence that the fleet is growing. But a listing is a VIN in a database, not a car giving rides. Of those 476 registered vehicles, trackers have matched only 265 to license plates actually seen on the road, and just 179 have been seen in total in the past month.
See also: US safety regulator evaluates Tesla's Cybercab launch
In the past 7 days, only 8 have been observed carrying passengers. Tesla continues to “add” vehicles to its Texas robo-cab fleet on paper. That count has never reflected how many cars are actually operating at once. This is what a marketing event looks like when there’s no product development behind it. And by product development, I mean usable Cybercabs. I believe Tesla can ramp up production, and we’ve seen plenty of Cybercabs sitting in parking lots, but right now it has no way to turn this into autonomous passenger transportation at scale due to the same safety concerns we’ve been discussing for over a year.
Tesla needed a moment, and it got it on September 3. It invited the usual crowd of supporters and produced a week of brilliant video tours.
The active fleet chart shows the whole thing: a net increase of over 100 vehicles, then a drop straight back to 8. Once the influences wore off, so did the cars. And 8 is tough. That’s essentially where the service launched in June 2025. Fifteen months later, after an “event,” a Cybercab presentation, and hundreds of new registrations, the number of Tesla robo-taxis actually ferrying people around Austin in a given week hasn’t budged.
This is entirely because if Tesla were to deploy the system at scale, it would face too many accidents. So it's better to operate only a few vehicles at a time, in geographically limited areas, and at lower speeds.
See also: Tesla Cybercab: The discreet launch of the robotaxi
There would be nothing wrong with this if Tesla weren't trying to convince the public, and especially the stock market, that it "leads the autonomous market with no close second" when in reality, it's mostly an act.
