Tesla robotaxis face two-hour waits

Tesla’s Texas robotaxi rollout is running into a problem that is easy to miss if you focus only on the driving model: riders can’t reliably get cars when they want them, and when they do, the trips are not always smooth. Reuters reporters who tested Tesla’s service in Austin, Dallas and Houston found long waits, “no rides available” messages, cancellations and awkward drop-offs. In one Dallas test, a roughly 5-mile trip that would normally take about 20 minutes turned into nearly two hours from request to arrival. Tesla did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. (money.usnews.com) That matters because robotaxi services are judged as transportation products, not just autonomy demos. A car that can technically drive itself is only part of the service. Riders also need fast dispatch, enough vehicles in the zone, predictable pickup and drop-off points, and some way to recover when the system gets stuck. Reuters’ reporting suggests Tesla is still working through those operational layers even after expanding beyond Austin into Dallas and Houston last month. (money.usnews.com) The reporting also puts numbers on the gap between the pitch and the experience. Reuters said a reporter in Dallas requested a ride at 4:55 p.m., saw a “high service demand” message, then spent 36 minutes trying to book before a car appeared with a further 19-minute wait. Around the same time, Uber showed an 8-minute wait for a 22-minute trip to the same destination. (money.usnews.com) Austin appears to be further along, but not frictionless. Reuters reported that even in Tesla’s first launch city, app checks over a three-week period often showed no cars available, and waits commonly stretched into the 15-to-25-minute range. That is a different problem from whether the software can handle a left turn or a pedestrian crossing. It is a fleet-operations problem: how many cars are available, where they are staged, how tightly Tesla limits service areas, and how much slack the system has when demand spikes. (autos.yahoo.com) The safety side has added a second layer of scrutiny. Newly unredacted crash narratives submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed at least two Austin crashes in which teleoperators were remotely driving Tesla robotaxis at low speed. TechCrunch reported that one vehicle hit a metal fence in July 2025 after a remote operator took over, and another struck a construction barricade in January 2026 at about 9 mph. In both cases, there was a safety monitor in the vehicle and no passengers onboard. (techcrunch.com) Those incidents do not show only a perception or planning failure by the onboard system. They also highlight how much robotaxi operations depend on remote support and exception handling. Tesla told lawmakers earlier that remote operators can pilot vehicles at speeds under 10 mph to move them out of compromised positions, according to TechCrunch’s report on the NHTSA filings. That means the service depends not just on autonomy, but on the handoff between the car, the in-vehicle monitor and remote assistance. (techcrunch.com) Tesla’s own public timeline has raised expectations. Reuters noted that Elon Musk said last July that Tesla robotaxis would serve half the U.S. population by the end of 2025. Instead, the service remains limited to Austin, Dallas and Houston, and Musk said on Tesla’s April 22 first-quarter earnings call that the company was taking a “cautious approach” to avoid injuries or fatalities. Several analysts told Reuters after that earnings report that the rollout was moving more slowly than expected. (money.usnews.com) The thread running through all of this is that scaling robotaxis is not only about making the car drive. It is also about making the service show up, recover gracefully and keep riders confident that a short trip will actually be short. Reuters’ tests in Texas suggest Tesla has not solved that part yet. (money.usnews.com)