Tesla has registered 319 Cybercabs with Texas regulators, nearly double the 169 a month earlier, but a report on 14 October counts only 107 giving rides in Austin, where the service has a 264-square-mile area.
Tesla had 739 autonomous vehicles registered with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles as of 10 October 2026, of which 420 were Model Y vehicles and 319 were Cybercabs, according to a search summary of reports from Teslarati, Tesla Oracle and others. The Cybercab count rose by 150 from 169, which the summaries describe as nearly doubling the registered fleet.
Tesla’s own account is more upbeat. A summary of a post by the Tesla Robotaxi account on 10 October quotes it as saying: “One month after launch, we’ve scaled to 300+ Cybercabs serving Austin – an 8x increase in 30 days.” Teslarati’s headline also says that the fleet jumped eightfold in a month, with Dallas up next.
A report by The Motley Fool on 14 October gives a different picture of what is on the road. It says that Tesla has 107 Cybercabs actively giving rides in Austin out of 277 autonomous vehicles in service in total. The difference between 319 registered, more than 300 serving according to Tesla, and 107 active is not explained in the sources reviewed, and it may reflect vehicles that are registered but not yet in service, but that is an assumption and not a finding.
The service area covers 264 square miles of Austin and is open to anyone aged 13 or over, according to the Fool, and it operates from 6 am to 11 pm. The report says that Elon Musk wants to run it around the clock once the system can better detect small animals at night. Riders must use the Tesla Robotaxi app and cannot use a third-party platform such as Uber.
Demand is the weak point in the report. Cybercabs make up 39% of the robotaxi fleet but only about 11% of rides, with 531 trips reported so far, according to the Fool. The app ranked first in the travel category of the App Store at launch, and waiting times exceeded an hour on the first day.
The report compares Tesla with its rival. Waymo operates a larger fleet of more than 300 vehicles in Austin and is available around the clock through the Uber app, which has more than 200 million monthly users, according to the Fool. The article is an opinion-led investor piece, and the Waymo figures are the Fool’s, so they should be treated as approximate.
Dallas is the next city, according to the CultureMap headline, which says that Tesla’s driverless Cybercabs will soon drive in Dallas. A summary says that large numbers of Cybercabs were seen in Houston, which hints at a launch there, but the sources reviewed do not confirm any date for either city.
Investors will hear more soon. Tesla will hold its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, 21 October, with questions submitted through a shareholder portal until 4 pm Eastern on 20 October, according to Tesla Oracle. The same summary says Tesla reported 486,532 deliveries and 13.7 GWh of energy storage deployments for the quarter.
The call is likely to be the first chance to hear Tesla explain the gap between its registered fleet and the vehicles that give rides.
Image: A Tesla Cybercab (file photo). Photo: JustAnotherCarDesigner / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
