Tag: robotaxi expansion

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Tesla Robotaxi Runs Later, Cybercab Fleet Hits 169 in Austin

Tesla just gave Austin one more hour. The company’s Robotaxi service now runs until 11 p.m. in its hometown, up from the previous 10 p.m. cutoff — and the gold Cybercabs behind it are multiplying fast. Texas registration data shows the Austin Cybercab fleet has reached 169 vehicles, roughly four times what it was at launch, with 111 added over the past two weeks alone.

The announcement landed quietly, as these things tend to do: a post from the official Robotaxi account on X, confirmed by Elon Musk. In August, Tesla had set hours at 6 a.m. through 10 p.m. This time the nudge is a single hour. It’s the kind of small move that tells you more than a press release would. Tesla isn’t rushing. It’s creeping toward all-night service, one safe hour at a time.

Why the last hour is the hardest

Musk himself explained the hesitation, and it’s a detail worth savoring. “The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night,” he wrote. “Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.”

It sounds like a joke until you think about it for thirty seconds. Then it sounds like the whole problem of autonomy, condensed into one sentence. The daytime stuff — lane keeping, traffic lights, highway merges — is increasingly solved. The frontier is edge cases: small, dark, quiet, unpredictable things that don’t show up on a sensor the way a delivery truck does. Tesla’s answer is software, not hardware. Musk has resisted adding lidar, radar or thermal cameras, insisting that visual-spectrum cameras plus AI photon-counting analysis can see in the dark just fine. “We are being extremely careful with autonomous safety,” he added — the same Musk who has promised full self-driving “next year” for a decade, now sounding like the most cautious engineer in the room.

Whether cameras alone can crack nighttime driving is the industry’s longest-running argument. Waymo’s approach throws lidar, radar and cameras at the problem. Tesla’s bet is that vision plus enough data wins. The Cybercab has no pedals and no steering wheel, so there’s no human fallback when the cameras miss something. That makes every added hour a small public statement of confidence.

169 and climbing

The fleet numbers are doing more talking than the hour extension. During the week of September 21, registered Cybercabs in Austin jumped from 58 on Monday to 125 by Friday, per Texas DMV data. Riders got an in-app note that the fleet had doubled past 100 vehicles for the first time. Momentum hasn’t slowed: 111 Cybercabs were added over the past two weeks, including 43 in just two days, October 1 and 2. The total now sits at 169.

That’s still a small fleet by ride-hailing standards. Waymo runs thousands of vehicles across its 15 markets and delivers more than half a million paid rides a week. But Tesla’s ramp is accelerating, not plateauing, and the company says 24/7 Austin operations could arrive as early as this month — timed with the release of FSD v15 on the Robotaxi vehicles. If that happens, the one-hour extensions will look in hindsight like the cautious prologue to a much bigger move.

Austin isn’t the only front. Tesla describes Model Y robotaxi operations as “ramping unsupervised” in Austin, Dallas, Houston and several Florida cities, with a safety-driver service in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Cybercab — purpose-built for driverless duty, two seats, gullwing doors — is the hardware designed to make the economics work. Every one that enters service in Austin is a data point for the cities that come next.

What it means for riders, cities and investors

For riders, the change is modest but real: late dinners and evening events in Austin just got a new ride option. The 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. window now covers most of a normal day. Anyone who has waited for a human rideshare driver at 10:30 p.m. knows the value of a car that shows up when the app says it will, no cancellations, no “on my way” fiction. When 24/7 arrives — and Musk says it’s weeks away — Austin becomes the first American city where you can hail a purpose-built driverless car at 3 a.m.

For cities, Tesla’s caution is actually the encouraging part. The hour-by-hour expansion is the opposite of the “move fast” playbook that burned early autonomy efforts. Regulators watching from other states can see a company solving its nighttime perception problem before declaring victory. That’s the kind of behavior that makes the next city’s permit conversation easier. The European robotaxi story is accelerating in Zagreb with fully driverless rides, and the 25,000-vehicle Lucid and Bolt partnership shows where the fleet race is headed globally. Cities that establish clear testing frameworks now will be the ones with options when the big fleet announcements land.

For investors, the math to watch isn’t hours — it’s vehicles and utilization. 169 Cybercabs growing at this pace, combined with a software release (FSD v15) and a stated 24/7 target, suggests Tesla believes the unit economics are close. The risk is that nighttime caution signals the opposite: a perception bottleneck that hardware can’t fix and software fixes slowly. Either way, Austin is the laboratory, and the results will be visible in the fleet numbers long before they’re visible in earnings.

One hour. 111 cars. A promise about grey kittens. Sometimes the future arrives not with a keynote but with a schedule change — and a founder telling you exactly which edge case is keeping him up at night. That’s honesty, and in autonomy, honesty is the rarest feature of all.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Momenta Plans Thousands of Robotaxis for Dubai, Europe

The robotaxi race just got a serious third contender.

Momenta Global, the Chinese autonomous driving company backed by Mercedes-Benz, plans to have thousands of robotaxis on the road next year as it pushes into Dubai and more European cities. Shuo Xie, the head of Momenta’s robotaxi business, laid out the plan in an interview with Reuters on September 30: hundreds of vehicles by the end of this year, then several thousand by the end of next year.

Those numbers would put Momenta in genuinely global company. Alphabet’s Waymo operates around 4,000 robotaxis across 15 US cities. China’s Pony.ai is scaling too. Momenta, founded by a former Microsoft researcher and partnered with Toyota and BYD, has been the quieter name in the field. It doesn’t plan to stay quiet.

Dubai, Europe, and Japan: the expansion map

The geography of the announcement is the story. Momenta is already testing robotaxis in five Chinese cities, plus Munich and Abu Dhabi. Now it’s in talks with a “few” European cities for further expansion, plans to deploy vehicles in Dubai next year, and has named Japan a priority market.

That’s a deliberately international playbook, and it looks different from the American one. Waymo is still overwhelmingly a US story, expanding city by city at home. The Chinese players — Momenta, Pony.ai, WeRide — are building across the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia, where regulators in places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi have been actively courting autonomous vehicle companies with permits and pilot zones.

Dubai’s interest is no secret. The emirate has set a public target of making a quarter of all journeys autonomous by 2030, and it has been signing up robotaxi operators as the path to get there. A company that can arrive with a proven vehicle and a fleet plan gets a red carpet. Momenta wants to be that company.

The chip play nobody is watching

Buried in the Reuters interview was the detail that might matter most. Momenta has been working with a chip company called XHeart to produce processors designed specifically for its autonomous driving software. Xie said the cost of those chips should be “significantly lower” than equivalent computing power from Nvidia, and that XHeart is now building a next-generation chip, the X9.

“In a couple of years the robotaxis that I am going to deploy around the world, hopefully a lot of them will be hosted on that X9 chip,” Xie said.

This is the unglamorous economics that decides the robotaxi business. Every robotaxi carries a small data center’s worth of compute, and that compute is one of the biggest line items in the vehicle cost. If Momenta can field capable autonomy on cheaper custom silicon while rivals pay Nvidia prices, the per-vehicle economics tilt in its favor. At hundreds of vehicles the difference is a rounding error. At thousands, it’s the business model.

Two businesses, one bet

Momenta runs two operations. The first sells advanced driver-assistance software to automakers — the revenue engine that funds the second. The robotaxi division is still early stage, with just over 100 vehicles deployed across three countries. The company raised around $751 million in a Hong Kong IPO in July to fuel the push, though its shares have since fallen about 45 percent as investors turned cautious on Hong Kong-listed AI stocks, and the company remains unprofitable while it spends heavily on research.

None of that is unusual for this industry. Every robotaxi company is burning cash to buy scale; the question is always whether the scale arrives before the money runs out. Momenta’s answer is a bet that international expansion — Dubai, Europe, Japan — plus cheaper custom chips gets it to unit economics faster than the competition.

What it means

For travelers, the robotaxi map is about to get a lot bigger than American suburbs. If Momenta’s timeline holds, Dubai visitors could be hailing driverless rides next year, and European cities are in active talks. The Middle East is shaping up as the proving ground where robotaxi companies compete head-to-head for the first time, and that competition should mean better service and lower prices.

For cities, Momenta’s pitch is a template worth studying. The company goes where regulators make room. Dubai and Abu Dhabi didn’t win robotaxi pilots by accident; they built the permitting frameworks and invited the industry in. European cities now in talks with Momenta are clearly paying attention. The jurisdictions that move first get the fleets, the data, and the jobs.

For investors, the thousands-by-next-year target is the number to watch. Hundreds of robotaxis is a pilot program. Thousands is a business. The XHeart chip partnership is the other number to watch — if custom silicon delivers the promised cost advantage, Momenta’s path to profitability looks different from everyone else’s. The fleet count at the end of 2027 will tell you whether this was a plan or a press release.

For more on the autonomous mobility race, see our Breaking News coverage, including Waymo’s robotaxi fleet surging 49 percent in Texas and Germany’s first cab-less driverless truck on public roads.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Waymo’s Texas Fleet Jumped 49% in Three Weeks

Somewhere in Texas, about 360 new robotaxis hit the road in 21 days. That’s not a growth curve. That’s a statement.

Fleet data reviewed this week shows Waymo now operating roughly 4,000 robotaxis across 15 U.S. cities, averaging 500,000 paid rides per week. Two years ago, in September 2024, the company ran commercial service in exactly three cities: Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The expansion since has been relentless, and the newest numbers show where the momentum is concentrated.

Texas. Of Waymo’s roughly 4,000 vehicles, about 80 percent sit in just two states, California and Texas. And Texas is where the action is right now: state registrations show Waymo’s fleet there reached 1,102 autonomous vehicles as of September 24, up from a little over 700 at the end of August. That’s a 49 percent jump in three weeks.

The Ojai factor

The surge has a name: Ojai. It’s Waymo’s new minivan, a modified Zeekr RT built on Geely’s SEA-M platform, finished with Waymo’s sixth-generation self-driving system at the company’s Arizona facility. The base vehicles ship from China without Chinese connected-car tech, then get outfitted in Mesa.

The Ojai now makes up about a third of the Texas fleet, roughly 367 vans in a single state. Three weeks ago, the entire country had fewer Ojais carrying riders than Texas does today. Research firm MoffettNathanson, which tracks Ojai imports through shipping records, says Waymo is on track to bring 5,100 of the vehicles into the United States by year-end, with Texas, Florida, and newer markets like Las Vegas as likely destinations.

The Ojai is designed to do one thing above all: drive down the cost per ride. It runs Waymo’s latest self-driving system, carries an upgraded rider interface, and even integrates Google’s Gemini AI as an in-car assistant. Cheaper vehicle, better experience, faster path to profitability. That’s the thesis.

There’s a catch, and it’s a big one. U.S. import tariffs on Chinese-built vehicles are eating into exactly the cost savings the Ojai was meant to deliver. Waymo appears to be absorbing that cost, prioritizing fleet scale over near-term margin. It’s a calculated bet: get the vehicles deployed, build the ridership habit, sort out the unit economics at volume.

The map keeps growing

The Texas surge is only part of the story. Waymo began admitting public riders in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa on September 1, each launch starting with dozens of vehicles and expanding gradually. Las Vegas followed on September 14 with a similar cautious ramp. The company also announced plans for Tokyo, targeting a 2027 commercial launch in partnership with taxi-app GO and taxi company Nihon Kotsu.

Meanwhile the competitive field is tightening. Tesla is charging for rides in driverless Model Y vehicles across Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, and began limited public rides in its purpose-built Cybercab, a two-seater with no steering wheel or pedals, in Austin earlier this month. Amazon’s Zoox started paid public rides in Las Vegas in August and is mapping Houston and San Diego for future launches.

Waymo’s lead is still substantial: 500,000 paid rides a week is a number nobody else in the business can touch. But the gap is no longer about whether robotaxis work. It’s about who can scale them fastest and cheapest.

The concentration question

Here’s the part of the story that deserves a closer look. For all the talk of 15 cities, roughly 80 percent of Waymo’s fleet sits in California and Texas. The other 800 or so vehicles are spread across Arizona, Florida, and the rest of the map. Most are the familiar white Jaguar I-Pace electric SUVs; the Ojais are the growing minority.

That concentration is a strategy, not an accident. California offers Waymo’s home turf, deep engineering presence, and early-adopter riders. Texas offers scale-friendly regulation, huge metro areas, and the Uber partnership that launched Austin service in March 2025 before spreading to Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

But concentration carries risk. A regulatory shift or a local backlash in either state would hit a disproportionate share of the business. And the newer markets, Denver, San Diego, Tampa, Las Vegas, are still thin. Scaling each of them from dozens of cars to hundreds will take months of careful work: mapping, safety validation, rider acquisition, local relationships.

What it means

For travelers in Waymo cities, the practical change is availability. More cars means shorter wait times and wider service areas. If you’re in Austin, Dallas, Houston, or San Antonio, the odds that a driverless ride is actually an option for your trip keep climbing.

For cities, the Texas example is becoming the template everyone studies. Fleet-friendly rules plus big populations plus willing partners equals rapid deployment. Cities that want robotaxi service are learning what it takes to attract it.

For investors, the numbers tell a clean story with one messy footnote. The clean story: 15 cities, 4,000 vehicles, half a million rides a week, and a purpose-built vehicle ramping fast. The footnote: tariffs are raising the cost of the very vehicle meant to make the economics work. Waymo is betting that scale cures all. The next few quarters will test that bet in public.

The robotaxi race has entered its industrial phase. The question is no longer who has the best demo. It’s who can put the most cars on the road at the lowest cost per mile. This week, the answer in Texas was Waymo, by about 360 cars.

For more on the autonomous mobility race, see our Breaking News coverage, including how driverless trucks are scaling toward 30,000 vehicles by 2030 and the first cab-less autonomous truck now delivering groceries in Germany.