Tesla’s rocket-shaped Houston Robotaxi map has a hole where downtown should be

Tesla has made its Houston Robotaxi service area roughly ten times bigger and drawn it in the shape of a rocket, stretching from a small suburban zone all the way into downtown. Inside that map, downtown does not always work. Ethan McKanna, who runs the crowdsourced site Robotaxi Tracker, dropped a pickup pin in downtown Houston, well inside the published boundary, and the app answered: “Location not available.”

A service map is a promise about where a car will come for you, and anyone weighing a driverless ride over a regular taxi plans around it. McKanna, who worked at Tesla this summer and follows its fleet more closely than almost anyone outside the company, called Houston “by far the most egregious ‘fake’ AV service area” he has seen. One trip quote he posted showed a forty-minute ride to cover a couple of blocks.

The route explains the time. The app planned a pickup on the east side of downtown and a drop-off at the Houston Police Department headquarters on Travis Street, a short walk away. Instead of crossing downtown, the car was set to head south through Midtown and the Museum District toward the Texas Medical Center, then loop back north. McKanna’s reading, as Electrek reported, is that the Robotaxi is steering around downtown railroad crossings. Tesla said on its last earnings call that safety is the main brake on expansion, and Electrek notes the cars still stick to lower-speed roads and have had trouble with train crossings.

The fleet is the other gap. Robotaxi Tracker puts the new Houston area at about 254 square miles and counts 34 driverless Model Y cars to serve it, up from 22 three months earlier, with no Cybercabs in the city yet. That works out to one car for every 7.5 square miles, or roughly a third of Manhattan per vehicle. According to the Houston Chronicle, the zone now reaches Bellaire, the Heights, Montrose, Midtown, downtown and East Downtown, and the cars run with nobody in the driver’s seat or the front passenger seat.

Every robotaxi map is a little generous, and McKanna says so himself. His tracker also trimmed Waymo’s Orlando area by 10 square miles, or 8.4%, because Waymo’s published map included the airport while its app would not yet accept the airport as a drop-off. The difference is where the hole sits. Waymo’s is on the edge of its map; Tesla’s is in the middle of the city’s business district. McKanna was not dismissive of the ride itself, either. Apart from the routing, he wrote, it “feels really good in Houston,” with reasonable waits and “significantly better driving than my recent Waymo rides.” He expects Tesla to fix the problem, and Electrek’s report carried no explanation from the company.

The comparison with Waymo is hard to avoid. Waymo is adding nearly 250 square miles over the coming week across Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area, about the size of Tesla’s whole Houston map, in cities where it already drives without anyone at the wheel. It logged 3.9 million rider-only miles a week in the second quarter, against 558,000 in Tesla’s best week, Electrek calculated from the companies’ own reports. Elon Musk said this week that the race against Waymo “was never a real contest.” In Houston itself, Waymo has offered fully driverless rides since February and opened them to everyone in August.

The service exists only in the US, in a handful of Texas and Florida cities, and Tesla has given no date for Robotaxi rides anywhere else. The bigger Houston zone went live on October 26, announced from Tesla’s Robotaxi account on X with “Houston, we have liftoff.” When people pointed out the rocket shape, Musk replied: “I swear it’s just a coincidence.” Uber, Nuro and Lucid plan to start their own Houston robotaxi service in mid-2027.

Until the routing changes, the fastest way across those two blocks of downtown Houston is still on foot.

Tags: Elon Musk, tesla, Robotaxi, Houston, Waymo, self-driving cars