Tesla’s nascent “Robotaxi” network drove fewer miles for paying customers in the second quarter than in the first, according to a chart the company released on Wednesday.
The quarter-over-quarter decline contrasts with Tesla’s rhetoric and actions over the past year. Tesla has staked much of its future on the idea of a massive, low-cost, cash-generating fleet of Robotaxi — or putting “balls to the wall for autonomy,” as CEO Elon Musk puts it framed it in 2024. The quarterly decline in Robotaxi miles also comes amid weakening earnings in Tesla’s core businesses, which fell short of Wall Street expectations, according to data released Wednesday. Tesla stock fell more than 13% early Thursday.
At a quick glance, the graph appears to show a steady increase in paid Robotaxi rides between August 2025 and June 2026. However, the numbers shown are cumulative and when broken down by quarter, show that Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet of Model Y SUVs carrying paid passengers covered approximately 1.1 million miles in the first quarter. That fell to about 700,000 miles in the second quarter, a drop of about 36%.
That’s despite the company expanding its fledgling operation to six cities across Texas and Florida, with a mix of unsupervised and supervised vehicles.
It’s possible Tesla is also counting the paid miles it’s driven in the San Francisco Bay Area, even though these Robotaxis-branded cars lack state-required licenses to operate autonomously and also have a safety driver behind the wheel. Tesla has referred to this feature as part of its “Robotaxi coverage”.
The drop in mileage also comes as Tesla made a stunning admission on a conference call Wednesday about its second-quarter results. In response to a question about how slowly Tesla is scaling up its Robotaxi service, Musk said the company needs to “accumulate driving data specific to the Cybercab” — the company’s gold, custom-built, two-seater sedan expected to make up the bulk of its fleet of autonomous vehicles — “before we can put a lot of it on the road.”
“Unlike, say, Model 3, Model Y and our other vehicles where we have a lot of vehicles on the road, millions of vehicles on the road, we don’t have that for the Cybercab. So we actually have to rack up miles with Cybercabs that are equipped with steering wheels and acceleration and brake pedals.” he said. “As we are certain of this, the number of Cybercabs in cities will increase dramatically.”
This represents something of a break from the company’s claims for years about how its fleet of nearly 10 million customer cars quietly collects data in the background to train future robotaxis (in addition to training its driver-assistance software for consumers, which Tesla calls Full Self-Driving).
On the call, Tesla executives framed the slow progress as a safety concern.
“Our goals are very ambitious for Robotaxi, but we have to be careful about causing accidents or harm to anyone,” Musk said.
He then said he doesn’t want Tesla Robotaxis to cause accidents because he believes bad media coverage could lead to a regulatory crackdown.
“Even though there are, I think, 30 to 40,000 car deaths a year in the United States alone, most of them don’t generate press, you don’t really read about any of them. But if we injure even one person, it will make global headlines and regulators will immediately curtail our operations,” he said.
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s Vice President of Artificial Intelligence, boasted that Tesla’s Robotaxis had “zero notable incidents” while driving “more than 380,000 miles” without a safety operator on board. It did not specify what the company considers “noteworthy incidents”, although it claimed that “any reports were of other factors that affected us when we were stationary”.
Tesla has reported 22 accidents to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the year since it began testing its Robotaxi service. While most of these involve other cars crashing into Tesla’s Robotaxis, the company has reported three accidents caused by its remote operators moving the vehicles remotely and several instances of the cars hitting objects at low speeds, such as curbs, poles and the bed of a trailer.
This represents another narrative shift for the company. Tesla spent years claiming that the biggest obstacle to full-scale Robotaxi development was regulatory — though the company never really specified what those prohibitive regulations were.
Now the company says proving safety is all that’s standing in the way of Robotaxis. And even though it’s still very early stages, Tesla still chose this moment to take a victory lap on its decision to build an autonomy stack that doesn’t use radar or lidar sensors like industry leader Waymo.
“Historically, the so-called experts have always claimed that you need lidars, radar, HD maps and the entire kitchen sink to drive safely. Here, we show that’s not the case. You can have safe, comfortable and affordable autonomy with cameras alone,” said Elluswamy.
Both Musk and Elluswamy also promised that growth is coming. They noted that the number of miles driven without supervision has increased roughly 10% each week since Tesla began offering them late last year.
“We’re going to continue to scale, I think, very, very quickly,” Musk said.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
