Tesla expands robotaxi geofence in the most Musk way possible, just 22 days after launch – techAU

Tesla launched their robotaxi service in Austin, Texas back on June 22nd. This marked the official release of Tesla’s Full-Self Driving (Unsupervised) with nobody behind the wheel of cars taking paid rides on public streets.

The one downside was the service area was limited, offering around 20 minute rides if you rode the service from one end to the other.

Today, just 22 days after launch, Tesla’s dedicated Robotaxi account on X has confirmed the area has now expanded, highlighting that things are progressing well, with no major issues (nobody was injured).

The post from @robotaxi was suspiciously vague. Obviously potential customers are going to want to know how big the expansion was, and for those who live in the area, if it could perhaps service their needs for a daily commute.

Thankfully some early users of the platform (still in early access and invite only), fired up their robotaxi app to reveal (and shared) the updated geofence for the service.

Well as you can imagine from an Elon Musk enterprise, there’s a healthy dose of humour involed. The new map resembles.. well I’ll let you decide if it’s a middle finger or something else.

Let us know in the comments if you think this is a bit of harmless fun, or reflects badly on a service that will ultimately try to appeal to all users, including families.

I would expect this is an early joke, that will be done once, and quickly expand to be generic regions of coverage rather than a continued attempt to make shapes from the robotaxi maps in each city.

The most important part of this expansion is the rate at which it has occurred. Coming just 22 days after launch, may be viewed by some as being premature.

With an increased service area, you’d also expect an increased fleet of Robotaxi vehicles (currently Model Ys), in order to maintain current wait times. This could also be matched by an increase in expansion of the early access invites for riders to try the service.

Tesla’s who differentiator and the big hope is that the service can scale faster than Waymo, which has grown to a serious revenue stream across a range of cities. While Waymo has announced further expansions, this takes time to map each city and then maintain the changes to the city as roads and infrastrucutre changes.

Tesla’s computer vision AI approach mean they can ship vehicles from the factory, install the latest robotaxi software and deploy to locations they are legally allowed to do so. The only other factor is internal data benchmarks are tracking. Assuming there’s no emerging issues from a growth in service area, we could expect a further growth in the next few weeks.

The rate of scaling to new locations will need to be rapid to come close to Musks’ targets of being in a majority of US cities by the end of 2026.