Automated Tesla cars move in the opposite direction

Tesla’s emerging “Robotaxi” network traveled fewer miles to paying customers in the second quarter than it did in the first quarter, according to a new report. table The company released on Wednesday.

The quarter-on-quarter decline is inconsistent with Tesla’s rhetoric and actions last year. Tesla has staked much of its future on the idea of ​​creating a massive, low-cost, cash-generating robotaxi fleet — or going “to the wall for autonomy,” as CEO Elon Musk has put it. Framed it in 2024. Robotaxi’s quarterly step down also comes amid weak earnings in Tesla’s core business, which fell short of Wall Street expectations, according to numbers released Wednesday. Tesla stock fell more than 13% in early trading Thursday.

At a glance, the graph appears to show steady growth in paid Robotaxi trips between August 2025 and June 2026. But the numbers shown are cumulative, and when broken down by quarter, they show that Tesla Robotaxi’s fleet of Model Y SUVs carrying paid passengers covered about 1.1 million miles in the first quarter. That dropped to roughly 700,000 miles in the second quarter, a decline of about 36%.

This is despite the fact that the company has expanded its startup operations to six cities across Texas and Florida, with a mix of unsupervised and supervised vehicles.

Tesla will likely count paid mileage in the San Francisco Bay Area as well, though these branded taxis don’t have the permits the state requires to operate autonomously and also have a safe driver behind the wheel. Tesla has referred to this process as part of its “Robotaxi coverage.”

The drop in miles driven also comes as Tesla made a startling admission on a conference call Wednesday about its second-quarter results. Asked how slow Tesla was to scale up its Robotaxi service, Musk said the company needed to “accumulate driving data for the Cybercab” — the purpose-built golden two-seat sedan that is expected to make up the bulk of its autonomous vehicle fleet — “before we can put a lot of it on the road.”

“Unlike the Model 3, Model Y, and our other vehicles, for example, 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 the Cybercab that’s been updated and retrofitted with the steering wheels and the accelerator and braking pedals, that kind of thing, to calibrate the Cybercab chassis.” “And since we are confident of this, the number of e-taxis in cities will increase significantly.”

This represents something of a break from claims the company has made for years about how its fleet of nearly 10 million customer cars will silently collect data in the background to train future robotaxis (as well as train consumer driver-assistance software, which Tesla calls Full Self-Driving).

During the call, Tesla executives framed the slow progress as a matter of being cautious about safety.

“Our goals are very ambitious for a robotaxi, but we need to be careful about causing any accidents or causing any harm to anyone,” Musk said.

Then he said he didn’t want Tesla Robotaxis to cause accidents because he believed bad media coverage could lead to a regulatory crackdown.

“Although there are 30,000 to 40,000 car deaths per year in the United States alone, most of these deaths get no media coverage, you don’t really read about almost any of them,” he said. “But if we hurt even one person, it will make headlines around the world, and regulators will immediately clamp down on our activities.”

Ashok Elswami, vice president of artificial intelligence at Tesla, boasted that the Tesla Robotaxis had no notable accidents while driving “over 380,000 miles” without a safety agent on board. He did not specify what the company considered “notable incidents,” though he did claim that “any reports were of other actors impacting us while we were parked.”

Tesla has reported 22 crashes to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during the year since it began trialling its Robotaxi service. While most involve other cars crashing into the Tesla Robotaxis, the company has reported three incidents caused by its remote operators moving vehicles remotely, and multiple instances of cars hitting objects at low speeds including sidewalks, utility poles, and the bed of a tow truck.

This represents another narrative change for the company. Tesla has spent years claiming that the biggest hurdle to widespread Robotaxi deployment was regulatory in nature — though the company never specified what those prohibitive regulations were.

The company now says that proving safety is all that’s holding Robotaxis back. Although it’s still in the very early stages, Tesla is still choosing this moment to take a victory lap over its decision to build an autonomous cluster that doesn’t use radar or lidar sensors, like industry leader Waymo.

“Historically, so-called experts have always claimed that you need sensors, radars, high-resolution maps, and the entire kitchen sink to drive safely. Here, we show that’s not true. You can have safe, convenient, and affordable self-driving with just cameras,” Eleswamy said.

Both Musk and Illuswamy also promised that growth is coming. They noted that the number of unattended miles driven has risen approximately 10% each week since Tesla began offering it at the end of last year.

“I think we’re going to continue to expand very, very quickly,” Musk said.