Teslas Robotaxi versagt aufgrund langer Wartezeiten und stockender Fahrten

*More from Bloomberg News reporter Kara Carlson:*

When Elon Musk kicked off Tesla’s quarterly earnings call in July 2025, robotaxis were top of mind. The carmaker had just launched its automated ride-hailing service several weeks earlier in Austin, to glowing early reviews from the hand-picked crop of initial riders.

“We’ve already expanded our service area in Austin,” the chief executive officer said. Tesla was planning to grow further in the city and quickly spread to California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida. “We’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in about half the population of the US by the end of the year.”

Almost a year later, Tesla has just 59 vehicles in its entire robotaxi fleet as of Tuesday, limited to three Texas cities.

Musk is known for making overly ambitious proclamations and missing self-imposed deadlines at Tesla and SpaceX, which is literally in the business of moonshots. Yet even by those standards, the gulf between his public robotaxi statements and what the business has achieved is vast. Three months after that earnings call, Musk said Tesla would have “500 or more” vehicles in the Austin area alone by the end of 2025.

The diminutive fleet figure, which Tesla hadn’t disclosed until new regulations made it public last month, is a sobering reminder of the real-world limitations of Musk’s hype machine. At a time when Tesla’s carmaking business is mired in a multiyear decline, the company’s market value has soared to new highs almost exclusively on the billionaire CEO’s fantastical promises of a future in which all cars will drive themselves and robots will babysit the kids. It’s all right around the corner, he says.

And with this bad news, stock prices will climb. Again.

>Almost a year later, Tesla has just 59 vehicles in its entire robotaxi fleet as of Tuesday, limited to three Texas cities.

That reeks of human supervision and operators. If anyone is hoping Tesla solves „self driving cars“, this is the metrics they should watch. If the robo-taxis was actually autonomous, then it would not make sense to keep the number of cars and locations low.

No. This is testing. And a smokescreen for investors.

If it actually worked, Tesla would do nothing else than making robo-taxis for their own Über-like service, killing off other ride-services, other car manufacturers, and personal car ownership. Going for total monopoly of the transportation market. That would have been the plan Elon sold investors all those years ago.

It’s absolutely WILD how much Musk just outright lies about the future.

>July of 2025: We’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in about half the population of the US by the end of the year.”
Almost a year later, Tesla has just 59 vehicles in its entire robotaxi fleet as of Tuesday, limited to three Texas cities.

He didn’t even make 1% of his goal. It’s literally about 0.00004% of the way to his goal if I did my math right.