There is good news and bad news.
The good news: Tesla continues to expand its AI-trained robo-taxi service to more cities. The bad news: The rollout continues to be slower than investors hoped for, and most of the expansion remains in the company's home state of Texas.
Monday morning, Tesla announced that robo-taxi service would start in San Antonio this week, while adding that the service area was expanding in the original robo-taxi city, Austin, Texas.
San Antonio makes it (about) eight cities for robo-taxi: Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa. Sometimes Dallas and Fort Worth are lumped together, but Tesla also has robo-taxis testing in San Francisco.
Tesla launched its robo-taxi service in June 2025 and hoped to scale the service much faster. CEO Elon Musk hoped that Tesla robo-taxis would operate near 50% of the U.S. population by the end of 2025. Currently, Tesla robo-taxi coverage is closer to 10% of the U.S. population. And roughly two-thirds of those people live in Texas, where launching robo-taxis is significantly easier. There is no special robo-taxi license, and companies can self-certify they are ready to start. (The weather is helpful, too.)
To be sure, Tesla has expanded slowly out of an abundance of caution, which is a good idea. Still, robo-taxis aren't contributing significantly to Tesla's top and bottom line yet.
Musk hopes robo-taxis will start to show up, positively, in the financial statements in 2027. Investors hope he meets that timeline.
Whatever happens to service, robo-taxis will have an impact next year. Tesla will stop producing its Cybertruck so it can allocate more capacity to its two-seat robo-taxi, Cybercab.
Musk defended the decision to kill off the Cybertruck on Monday, saying on X: "The Cybertruck order rate far exceeds our production rate...This is not a case of Cybertruck being unprofitable, as has been misreported by legacy media, but rather that the opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production."
Tesla has made less than 100,000 Cybertrucks since its introduction in 2023. It's unlikely the car is profitable at that volume, including all the development and capital costs. Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment about Cybertruck profitability.
Regardless, the truck is going away so Tesla can focus more on AI-related applications, such as self-driving taxis.
Tesla stock was up 0.4% at $359.40 in premarket trading, while S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were up 0.7% and 1.1%, respectively.