Tesla will switch on commercial Robotaxi service in 12 US metropolitan areas at 6:00 a.m. local time on Sunday, the company confirmed in a Saturday investor update. The simultaneous launch in Austin, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando, and Nashville represents the most ambitious autonomous vehicle deployment in commercial history.
CEO Elon Musk used the announcement to set an aggressive scaling target, telling investors on a conference call that Tesla will have "approximately one million Cybercabs and Model Y Robotaxis on the road by the end of Q3 2026." The number dwarfs the combined deployed fleets of Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox by an order of magnitude.
Pricing Undercuts Uber by 60%
Tesla disclosed that introductory pricing will run at $0.31 per mile, roughly 60% below the average Uber X ride and 40% below Waymo's Phoenix pricing. The company expects unit margins of 65% at scale once Cybercab production ramps to its targeted 2 million units per year at the Texas Gigafactory in 2027.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives reiterated his $560 price target on Tesla shares, calling the launch "the most important strategic moment in the company's history" and projecting that Robotaxi alone could contribute $2.40 in earnings per share by 2027. Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas was similarly bullish, modeling a $1.2 trillion lift to Tesla's addressable market by 2030.
Regulatory Hurdles Largely Cleared
Tesla worked with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the past four months to secure a special unsupervised deployment exemption, a milestone that no competitor has yet achieved at this scale. The exemption requires Tesla to publish disengagement and incident data on a daily basis through 2027 and submit to quarterly third-party safety audits.
State authorities in all 12 launch markets pre-approved the rollout following six-month pilot programs that logged more than 14 million miles of supervised testing. Tesla's Full Self-Driving v14 software, which runs on the company's in-house HW5 inference chip, recorded one critical disengagement per 28,000 miles in the most recent reporting period — a 4.2x improvement over v13.