Tesla used the hours before its Q3 2026 earnings call to drop a highlight reel instead of a press release. On October 21, 2026, Ashok Elluswamy, the company’s vice president of AI, posted a short video on X labeled simply “Robotaxi B-roll.” Buried inside it were two clips that outside observers immediately flagged: a Tesla robotaxi slowing to a stop as a Waymo vehicle swung wide into its lane, and a second, nighttime clip showing a Tesla robotaxi braking as an Avride vehicle drifted into its path. No collision happened in either clip. But the timing, released hours before investors got their first look at Tesla’s third-quarter numbers, turned an otherwise routine marketing clip into a story about how Tesla wants the robotaxi race to be judged.
The footage arrived the same day Tesla published its first Robotaxi Safety Report, a new page on the company’s site tracking driverless miles city by city. Together, the video and the report form a one-two pitch: look how careful our cars are around the competition, and look how much ground we’ve covered since January. Here’s what the clips actually show, what Tesla’s own numbers say, and how the picture compares with Waymo and Avride, the two companies named in Tesla’s own footage.
Don't miss new tech stories on Google
Add Tech Insider once in the Google app and our stories appear in your news suggestions.
What Tesla’s New Robotaxi Video Shows
The clip Elluswamy posted runs through a montage of Tesla robotaxi rides, mixing in moments of severe weather, pedestrians crossing on green lights, and stray animals near the roadway, according to coverage of the video republished by Business Insider. Two moments stand out from the rest because they involve named competitors rather than generic road hazards. Around the 1:44 mark, a Tesla robotaxi comes to a complete stop in its own lane while a Waymo vehicle executes a wider-than-usual right turn, briefly crossing into the Tesla car’s path before correcting itself. A separate nighttime sequence shows an Avride vehicle moving further into the Tesla robotaxi’s lane from the right side, prompting the Tesla car to brake.
Neither clip shows a crash, a near-miss in the dramatic sense, or any damage. What they show is two instances of a Tesla vehicle yielding right-of-way rather than pushing through it. That distinction matters because Tesla’s framing treats the footage as proof of cautious, defensive driving behavior around competitors. Independent reviewers have not verified the exact following distances, closing speeds, or how much margin existed before the vehicles would have made contact. Tesla did not publish sensor logs alongside the video, so the clips function as marketing material first and technical evidence second.
The Waymo Near-Miss: Inside the Clip
The Waymo sequence is the more widely circulated of the two. A Waymo robotaxi, working through a wider-than-normal right turn, begins to drift into the lane occupied by the Tesla vehicle. Rather than continuing forward, the Tesla robotaxi stops entirely and waits for the Waymo car to complete its turn and settle back into its own lane. Only then does the Tesla vehicle resume. It is a mundane traffic interaction by the standard of everyday driving, two vehicles briefly sharing space at an intersection, but it carries weight here because Waymo is the clear volume leader in the robotaxi business and the company Tesla is most often measured against.
Waymo has not issued a public response to the clip as of this writing. The company, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has spent the past year emphasizing its own safety record across a much larger operating footprint, and a single clip of a wide turn is unlikely to change how either side talks about safety. Still, the fact that Tesla chose to include a Waymo vehicle by name, rather than blur it out or describe it generically, signals that Tesla wants direct comparisons made.
The Avride Encounter at Night
The second clip, filmed after dark, shows less dramatic motion but a tighter margin. An Avride vehicle shifts into the Tesla robotaxi’s lane from the right as both cars move through traffic. The Tesla car brakes to create space rather than maintaining speed. Avride, a smaller and less visible player in the robotaxi market than Waymo, has not published a detailed response to the footage either. Public information about Avride’s hardware stack, sensor configuration, or current fleet size in Texas markets remains limited, which makes it harder to independently assess what was happening from the Avride vehicle’s perspective during the clip.
That gap in public data is itself notable. Tesla and Waymo both publish mileage figures, safety reports, or investor disclosures that outside analysts can pick apart. Avride does not offer the same level of public reporting, so its inclusion in Tesla’s video raises its profile without giving outside observers much to verify against.
Why Tesla Released This Footage Now
Timing is the real story here. Tesla posted the clip on October 21, the same day it held its Q3 2026 earnings call and the same day it quietly launched its first Robotaxi Safety Report. The company’s operating income fell sharply year over year as AI and R&D spending climbed, according to market coverage from Mboum, even as revenue beat Wall Street’s estimates on the back of energy storage growth. Robotaxi progress has become one of the few growth narratives Tesla can point to while core vehicle margins stay under pressure, so a video that makes the robotaxi look careful and competent lands at a convenient moment.
There’s also a regulatory backdrop. Tesla’s Cybercab program is currently the subject of a federal investigation, a story covered in detail here when NHTSA opened its probe into roughly 1,000 vehicles. A video showing the existing robotaxi fleet behaving cautiously around competitors is a useful counter-message while regulators are asking pointed questions about the next-generation vehicle. None of that means the footage is misleading, but it does explain why Tesla chose this particular week to publish it.
Tesla’s First Robotaxi Safety Report: The Numbers
Separate from the video, Tesla’s new safety report discloses that its robotaxi fleet logged 3.1 million autonomous miles between January 22 and October 18, 2026, with no reported injuries, no airbag deployments, and no pedestrian or cyclist impacts during that window, based on the company’s own figures. That total only counts fully driverless operation, meaning rides with no human safety monitor behind the wheel. Tesla began removing safety monitors from its Austin fleet in January 2026, and the mileage total has grown steeply since then, most of it accumulated after August.
Crowdsourced tracking from independent robotaxi watchers, cited by Erudite News, puts the registered Tesla robotaxi fleet at more than 500 vehicles across Texas and Florida as of October 2026. Tesla has not published an official fleet-size figure to confirm or dispute that estimate, so it should be treated as a third-party approximation rather than a company-verified number.
City-by-City: Where Tesla’s Driverless Miles Are Piling Up
Tesla’s safety report breaks the 3.1 million total down by market, and the gap between the lead city and everywhere else is stark. Austin, where Tesla has been operating the longest without a safety monitor, accounts for roughly two-thirds of all driverless miles logged. Dallas is a distant second, followed by Houston, Orlando, Tampa, and Miami. Notably, Tesla’s robotaxi service also runs in the San Francisco Bay Area, but that market requires a safety driver under current California rules, so it does not appear in the driverless mileage count at all.
| City | State | Driverless Miles (Jan 22–Oct 18, 2026) | Safety Monitor Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austin | Texas | ~2,120,000 | Removed, January 2026 |
| Dallas | Texas | 608,130 | Removed |
| Houston | Texas | 225,964 | Removed |
| Orlando | Florida | 61,053 | Removed |
| Tampa | Florida | 53,117 | Removed |
| Miami | Florida | 46,262 | Removed |
Tesla has also named Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Phoenix, and San Antonio as the next cities on its robotaxi roadmap, which would add Nevada and Arizona to a service footprint currently limited to Texas, Florida, and the Bay Area’s supervised deployment.
Cybercab Heads to Dallas Next
The robotaxi video and safety report landed in the same week Tesla confirmed its two-seat, steering-wheel-free Cybercab is headed to Dallas in November 2026, making it the first city outside Austin to get the vehicle. Tesla has already detailed the Cybercab’s stripped-down interior in earlier coverage of the vehicle’s two-seat layout, and the Dallas rollout is the next concrete test of whether that design can scale past a single market.
Tesla has said it wants to begin selling Cybercabs to customers by the end of 2026, even as current production stays focused on Tesla’s own internal robotaxi fleet in Texas. The company’s Q3 call, which confirmed the year-end sales target, framed Cybercab as a transport-as-a-service product first and a consumer purchase second, at least in its early phase.
Unsupervised FSD Still Lags the Robotaxi Fleet
It’s worth separating the robotaxi fleet’s progress from Tesla’s broader Full Self-Driving software. Tesla has pushed its timeline for unsupervised FSD, available to regular owners outside the robotaxi program, back to the second quarter of 2027, and even then it plans to restrict it to designated robotaxi zones rather than a nationwide rollout, a shift detailed in a recent report on the delay. The driverless miles in this week’s safety report come entirely from the dedicated robotaxi fleet operating under Tesla’s own supervision structure, not from customer-owned vehicles running unsupervised software.
Waymo’s Scale Advantage, by the Numbers
Whatever the Waymo clip in Tesla’s video shows about a single turn, the scoreboard between the two companies is lopsided. Waymo had logged more than 271 million autonomous miles as of June 2026, according to figures republished in coverage of the video, compared with Tesla’s 3.1 million driverless miles through mid-October. Waymo also operates across 14 or more U.S. cities, runs more than 500,000 paid weekly rides, and is targeting 20,000 robotaxis on the road by the end of 2027, roughly double its current capacity.
Waymo’s financial backing matches its operational scale. The company has raised $27.1 billion across five funding rounds, including a $16 billion Series D in February 2026 led by Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital, according to data tracked by StockAnalysis.com. Alphabet remains Waymo’s majority stakeholder even after that round. In October 2026, Waymo also secured a $5 billion term loan from PIMCO, Blackstone, and Sixth Street Partners earmarked for fleet expansion, on top of an implied valuation that has climbed as high as $176 billion based on recent secondary-market share pricing, up from a $126 billion valuation recorded in February 2026.
Employee Count and Revenue Run Rate
Waymo runs with roughly 2,500 employees and an estimated $350 million in annual run-rate revenue, figures that underline how much smaller Waymo’s organization is relative to its valuation and mileage totals. Tesla, by contrast, folds its robotaxi operation into a much larger automotive and energy business, making a clean revenue comparison difficult without Tesla breaking the segment out separately.
Avride’s Place in the Robotaxi Race
Avride is the least publicly documented of the three companies named in Tesla’s video. Unlike Tesla and Waymo, Avride has not published a safety report, a mileage count, or a funding disclosure that would let outside analysts size up its current operation the way they can with its two larger rivals. What is confirmed is narrower: Avride operates in at least some of the same Texas markets where Tesla and Waymo are testing and running robotaxi service, and its vehicle appeared in Tesla’s own nighttime footage navigating near a Tesla robotaxi. Beyond that, claims about Avride’s sensor suite, fleet size, or safety record should be treated as unverified until the company publishes its own data.
Tesla vs. Waymo vs. Avride: A Side-by-Side Look
Lining up what’s publicly confirmed about each company makes the size mismatch easy to see. Tesla has the newest driverless mileage disclosure and the most aggressive expansion plan on paper, but Waymo is operating at a scale that dwarfs both rivals combined.
| Metric | Tesla Robotaxi | Waymo | Avride |
|---|---|---|---|
| Driverless miles logged | 3.1 million (Jan 22–Oct 18, 2026) | 271+ million (as of June 2026) | Not publicly disclosed |
| Cities served (driverless) | 6 (Austin, Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Tampa, Miami) | 14+ | Not publicly disclosed |
| Majority owner | Tesla, Inc. (public company) | Alphabet Inc. | Not publicly disclosed |
| Known funding / valuation | N/A (part of Tesla’s public market cap) | $27.1B raised; valuation near $126B–$176B | Not publicly disclosed |
| Weekly paid rides / fleet target | Fleet size not officially confirmed (500+ est.) | 500,000+ weekly rides; 20,000-vehicle target by end of 2027 | Not publicly disclosed |
The honest read of that table is that Tesla’s robotaxi avoiding Waymo and Avride in a video clip says very little about which company builds the safer or more capable system overall. It says Tesla wants that comparison made while it is still the smallest of the three operations by mileage and city count.
What Tesla Executives Are Saying
Tesla executives used the Q3 call to lay out how they see the Cybercab and robotaxi business developing over the next year. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, told investors, “We’re trying to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year, 2026,” a target he expanded on by noting that Texas-built units are currently feeding Tesla’s own internal robotaxi fleet rather than going to buyers, according to Reuters.
Moravy elaborated on the distinction between the two, saying, “In short we’re trying to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year in 2026, obviously we’re producing a lot in Texas but all of those are going to our own internal Robotaxi fleet, and as Tesla grows we’ll mainly deliver fully designed autonomous vehicles to our customers and Cybercab will be the first,” a point reported by Electrek.
Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, described how he expects the Cybercab to be used once it reaches the public, telling investors it is “primarily going to be something that is offered as like transport as a service, whereas our other cars would be more, you know, the cars that you’d want to own, like the 3 and the Y and whatnot, and the Roadster, obviously,” per TechCrunch. Musk reinforced that framing elsewhere, saying “the vast majority of the Cybercab stuff will be Tesla-owned and transport-as-a-service,” according to Teslarati.
Musk has also pointed to validation, not manufacturing capacity, as the real bottleneck on faster robotaxi expansion. “The limiting factor for expansion is really rigorous validation,” he said, a comment made as NHTSA examined Tesla’s self-certification data on the Cybercab, as reported by USA Today. That comment lands differently now that Tesla has put out a video explicitly designed to showcase cautious driving behavior around competitors just weeks later.
The NHTSA Shadow Over the Celebration
None of this week’s robotaxi news happens in a vacuum. NHTSA’s investigation into roughly 1,000 Cybercab units, which examines whether the vehicle’s design and self-certification meet federal safety standards, remains open and unresolved. That probe is the backdrop against which Tesla’s safety report and competitor-avoidance video should be read. A clean mileage disclosure and a flattering video clip do not resolve the regulatory questions NHTSA is asking, and Tesla has not indicated when it expects the investigation to conclude.
The contrast is worth sitting with: Tesla is simultaneously telling investors it wants to sell Cybercabs to the public by year-end while a federal agency is still reviewing whether roughly 1,000 of the vehicles already on the road comply with safety rules. Both things are true at once, and this week’s video doesn’t change either one.
Historical Context: From Safety Monitors to Driverless Miles
Tesla’s robotaxi program has moved through distinct phases since its public debut. The service launched in Austin with a safety monitor in the front passenger seat, a human employee positioned to intervene if the software made a mistake. Tesla began pulling those monitors starting in January 2026, a gradual process rather than a single flip of a switch. The mileage data in this week’s safety report shows how much that removal accelerated through the year, with the bulk of the 3.1 million driverless miles logged in the months after August 2026 rather than spread evenly across the full ten-month window.
That acceleration matters for how this week’s video should be read. A year ago, Tesla’s robotaxi program was still operating with a human safety net in nearly every vehicle. Today, the fleet is logging hundreds of thousands of driverless miles per month in Austin alone, and Tesla is comfortable enough with that record to put out footage naming its two most visible competitors. Whether that comfort is fully earned is a separate question from whether the mileage growth itself is real, and the growth in Tesla’s own disclosed numbers is not in dispute.
Market and Investor Reaction
Tesla shares moved modestly in extended trading after the Q3 earnings release, with revenue beating Wall Street estimates even as operating income fell sharply year over year on higher AI and R&D spending, according to earnings coverage aggregated by Mboum. Energy storage growth helped offset softer automotive margins, a trend explored in detail in Tesla’s broader Q3 earnings breakdown, while the robotaxi business remains a story investors are told to watch rather than a disclosed revenue line they can model directly.
Musk also used the call to say a merger between Tesla and SpaceX “would be a good idea,” though he offered no new structural details on how such a deal might work, a comment that added another layer of speculation to an earnings call that was supposed to be about quarterly deliveries and robotaxi progress. Investors reacted to the mix of signals cautiously, treating the robotaxi video as a sentiment booster rather than a material financial disclosure.
What Happens Next: Predictions for the Robotaxi Race
- Expect Tesla to keep releasing B-roll style footage in the run-up to major milestones. It’s a cheap way to shape sentiment while the NHTSA Cybercab probe remains open and unresolved.
- Cybercab’s Dallas debut in November 2026 will be the next real test of whether Tesla can repeat the Austin playbook in a second city, rather than a one-off pilot.
- Waymo will likely keep leaning on its mileage and city-count lead, 271 million-plus miles against Tesla’s 3.1 million, as its central argument against Tesla’s safety claims rather than responding clip for clip.
- Avride’s appearance in Tesla’s video will probably push the company to publish more of its own operating data, simply because it now has visibility it didn’t previously have.
- Unsupervised FSD outside the dedicated robotaxi fleet stays delayed to Q2 2027 at the earliest, meaning this week’s mileage gains are confined to Tesla’s own supervised robotaxi program, not customer vehicles.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Tesla’s new robotaxi video actually show?
A short highlight reel, posted by Tesla AI VP Ashok Elluswamy on X on October 21, 2026, that included two clips of a Tesla robotaxi slowing or braking as a Waymo vehicle and an Avride vehicle each entered its path. No collision occurred in either clip.
Who posted the Tesla robotaxi video, and what did he call it?
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI, posted the clip on X and labeled it “Robotaxi B-roll.”
Did the Tesla robotaxi almost crash into a Waymo or Avride vehicle?
The video shows the Tesla robotaxi yielding, stopping, or braking in both encounters, with no collision in either case. Tesla has not released sensor logs or following-distance data, so the exact margin between the vehicles has not been independently verified.
How many driverless miles has Tesla’s robotaxi fleet logged?
Tesla’s first Robotaxi Safety Report, published October 21, 2026, lists 3.1 million autonomous miles driven without a safety monitor between January 22 and October 18, 2026, with zero reported injuries or airbag deployments.
Which cities have Tesla robotaxi service right now?
Driverless service currently runs in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Tampa, and Miami. Tesla also operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, but that market still requires a safety driver under current rules. Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Phoenix, and San Antonio are named as upcoming markets.
When is Tesla’s Cybercab launching in Dallas?
Tesla has said the two-seat, steering-wheel-free Cybercab will arrive in Dallas in November 2026, making it the first city outside Austin to receive the vehicle.
Is Tesla’s Cybercab under federal investigation?
Yes. NHTSA has an open investigation covering roughly 1,000 Cybercab units, examining the vehicle’s design and self-certification against federal safety standards. The probe had not concluded as of this report.
How does Tesla’s robotaxi mileage compare with Waymo’s?
Waymo had logged more than 271 million autonomous miles as of June 2026, operating across 14 or more U.S. cities. Tesla’s 3.1 million driverless miles cover a narrower window and a smaller six-city footprint, making Waymo’s operation substantially larger by both measures.
