Elon Musk says Tesla’s Robotaxi race against Waymo “was never a real contest” after a community chart showed Tesla’s driverless fleet logging more weekly miles in Austin than Waymo. Electrek took a closer look at the numbers on Tuesday, October 27.
The Austin numbers
The chart comes from Robotaxi Tracker, which pulls figures from Tesla’s weekly Robotaxi safety report and Waymo’s quarterly safety data. In the week ending October 18, Tesla reported 438,000 miles with no safety monitor aboard in Austin, up 30% from the week before. Waymo averaged about 406,000 miles a week in Austin during the second quarter.
The catch, as Electrek points out, is timing: Tesla’s number is its latest week, while Waymo’s is an April-to-June average, because Waymo publishes its data about three months after each quarter ends.
The national picture
- Across all markets, Waymo averaged 3.90 million rider-only miles a week in Q2 2026. Tesla’s best week was 558,000 miles, so Waymo drives roughly seven times more.
- Austin makes up about 79% of Tesla’s weekly driverless miles. Dallas logged about 94,800 miles that week, while Houston, Tampa, Orlando and Miami together did about 25,000.
- Waymo has logged 271.3 million rider-only miles since 2020. Tesla has about 3.11 million driverless miles since January 22, 2026.
Why Austin jumped
Tesla launched public Cybercab rides in Austin on September 3 and has added vehicles quickly since. Robotaxi Tracker counts 463 Cybercabs registered in Texas, 337 of them added in the last 30 days. On the Q3 earnings call, Tesla’s AI software head Ashok Elluswamy said the company wants to “swarm Austin with Cybercabs everywhere,” and described the service as limited by the software for now, with highways, higher-speed roads, 24/7 operation and more weather conditions still to unlock.
For more on that call, see our write-up of Tesla’s Q3 outlook.
Source: Electrek.