Uber and taxi rides often feature an awkward tension around feeling the need to converse. You won’t have that issue in empty Tesla robotaxis, and can instead worry about zipping through busy streets in a car with no driver.
Tesla is launching robotaxi rides in Dallas and Houston as part of its Texas self-driving taxi service network. The announcement came as they usually do, with a post on X. It showed an empty front seat of a driverless Model Y careening down the streets in Houston and Dallas, as well as maps of the coverage areas where customers can potentially hail a ride.
The posted coverage areas in Houston are rather specific, bounded by FM 1960 and U.S. Highway 290 in Harris County, and in Dallas will cover a central/north area around Highland Park. The difference from the rollout in Austin last year? These coverage areas are a bit smaller and not at all shaped like a penis.
In Houston, for instance, some might argue that the coverage area is a bit of an odd place to test robotaxis, as it’s a suburban area with just a few shops and some breweries—not exactly a hub of activity where people would hail rides to and from. But perhaps baby steps is the best approach during the initial rollout. Riders can try to hail a ride by downloading Tesla’s app on Apple’s App Store.
Hailing one, however, might be a bit of an issue. A third-party robotaxi tracker is putting the coverage in Dallas at just 31 square miles, and 25 square miles in Houston. But it gets worse. There appears, though this may obviously change, to be only a couple of Model Y’s available at the moment for both rather big cities. And the tracker is often showing a “Service unavailable” notification, according to the tracker. The proposed fleet sizes for both cities have not been announced as of yet.
So you may be in for a wait. It nonetheless appears a few people have actually successfully hailed the robotaxis in both cities, if you count influencers as people. One Houston rider went on a very exciting trip from a Tesla Delivery Center to a Starbucks, and a Dallas rider posted a screenshot of their 25-minute wait.
The announcement follows Alphabet-owned Waymo beginning its own service in Houston and Dallas earlier this year. As befits Tesla’s seemingly limited robotaxi rollout, the announcement is coming just days before the quarterly earnings set to be released on Wednesday. At least Elon isn’t avoiding Houston with this project.