Tesla announced this week that its robotaxi service is now live in Dallas and Houston. The company posted a 14-second video of a Model Y rolling through a city street with nobody in the driver's seat and called it expansion. (Tesla Robotaxi X post)
What Tesla did not say: how many vehicles are in either city, what the service boundaries are, or what has happened in the nine months since its Austin launch. The company's answers to those questions are a matter of public record — and Tesla has gone to considerable lengths to make sure nobody can read them.
Tesla has classified every crash narrative from its Austin robotaxi service as confidential business information in filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The company reported 15 crash incidents to the agency since the service launched in June 2025, including two that caused minor injuries. Tesla did not publicly describe what happened in any of them. (Electrek)
Other autonomous vehicle companies filing with NHTSA take a different approach. Waymo, Zoox, Aurora, and Nuro provide full incident descriptions in their reports. Tesla redacts every narrative. The agency's Standing General Order crash reporting portal, where the data was submitted, is publicly accessible. The narratives themselves are not. (Electrek)
Tesla declined to comment for this article.
The announcement came with service maps showing geofences Tesla did not disclose in its post. The Houston zone covers approximately 25 square miles, according to early user analysis of the maps. The Dallas zone appears to center around Highland Park. For context: Tesla's Austin service area has grown to roughly 245 square miles after nearly a year of gradual expansion from a starting footprint of about 20 square miles. Austin has 46 active vehicles, citing crowdsourced tracking data. Robotaxi Tracker, which monitors vehicle activity, showed no active vehicles logged in Dallas in the past 30 days as of publication. Tesla did not disclose fleet sizes for the new markets. (Electrek, Robotaxi Tracker)
The pattern is not new. Elon Musk predicted 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020. He promised 500 vehicles in Austin and more than 1,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area by the end of 2025. The actual figures were roughly 42 and 130. He said the service would cover half the U.S. population by the end of that year. It did not. (Electrek)
Tesla's approach to safety data has drawn scrutiny since the Austin launch. NHTSA contacted the company after videos surfaced showing robotaxis driving on the wrong side of road and braking erratically. The agency opened an investigation. Tesla has reported 15 crash incidents to NHTSA since the launch, including two that caused minor injuries. Electrek put the crash rate at 4 to 9 times worse than human drivers, depending on the benchmark. The service also shuts down during rain, a limitation that matters in Houston, which averages more than 100 rainy days per year. (CBS News, Electrek)
Tesla's $1.3 trillion market valuation rides in part on whether the robotaxi program works. The company is competing against Waymo, which is operating hundreds of vehicles across multiple U.S. cities, and Zoox, Amazon's autonomous vehicle unit, which is accelerating its own expansion. Both competitors file incident narratives in full with NHTSA. (Reuters)
Tesla is now operating in three Texas cities. What happened in the first one remains sealed.
