Tesla stock is down more than 12% today, wiping out over $140 billion in market value, after the automaker’s Q2 2026 earnings missed on profit and free cash flow turned negative.
The slide got worse during the earnings call, when Elon Musk repeated the same robotaxi and Optimus promises he’s been making for years.
Tesla told shareholders this week that its Robotaxi service is expanding. The company’s own chart proves it isn’t.
In its Q2 2026 update, Tesla leaned on a cumulative “paid Robotaxi miles” chart climbing past 2.4 million miles as its headline proof of momentum. But break that curve into quarters and the growth flatlines: Robotaxi added roughly 900,000 paid miles in Q2 2026, the same as it did in Q1.
Tesla switched on its “Robotaxi” service in Tampa and Orlando on Monday, adding two Florida cities to a driverless network that still runs on a couple dozen cars. The company’s @robotaxi account announced it in a four-word post: “Robotaxi now in Tampa & Orlando!”
The timing isn’t subtle. Tesla reports second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, and Robotaxi is the story Elon Musk keeps selling to investors. Two new city names the day before make for a nice slide. The fleet behind them tells a different story.
Tesla and Starlink say SpaceX’s satellite internet is now “directly integrated” into the Cybercab, Tesla’s dedicated robotaxi.
The reveal came through a pair of posts on X on Monday, with a cutaway diagram showing a Starlink antenna sitting in the vehicle’s roof. Neither company explained why a car that drives itself on its own computer needs internet from space.
Tesla has filed four new “Robotaxi” crash reports with NHTSA, and the most revealing one involves a Tesla remote operator driving the vehicle into a tree stump in Houston.
It’s the third crash Tesla has now reported involving a human operating the car remotely caused the collision — and the first one Tesla has formally coded as remote operation in its filing.
Tesla shareholders have flooded the company’s Q2 2026 earnings Q&A portal with questions, and the most-upvoted ones tell a bleak story: retail investors are now demanding that Elon Musk explain why the company keeps missing its own short-term goals.
The tone has shifted from asking about Tesla’s grand vision to asking why almost none of it is showing up on schedule — on robotaxi, “Full Self-Driving,” and Optimus.
Tesla is building a purpose-built, wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle, a company policy advisor told lawmakers in Washington, DC, on Monday.
But Tesla gave no timeline, no vehicle, and no details, and it’s not clear the “active product” is anything more than the Robovan it unveiled nearly two years ago.
Tesla says “Cybercab employee rides at Giga Texas” are “starting soon” — its first stated step toward putting people inside the wheel-less, pedal-less robotaxi.
But the announcement, spread across two Tesla accounts and roughly 2.9 million combined views, is thinner than it sounds. It’s not clear whether Tesla means Cybercabs running a real ride service in Austin or simply driving employees around a factory parking lot.
New Jersey lawmakers are advancing a bill that would require driverless commercial vehicles to carry cameras plus two additional sensor types — a mandate Tesla’s camera-only Robotaxi can’t meet.
The proposed law, S1677, would effectively lock Tesla out of the most densely populated US state unless it adds the radar and lidar hardware that Elon Musk has spent years insisting his cars don’t need.
Waymo has activated fully driverless operations in Las Vegas, its riders will now see vehicles with no human at the wheel, and the Alphabet unit says Denver, San Diego, and Tampa are next in line.
The move adds four new markets to Waymo’s driverless footprint and pushes the company deeper into its target of 1 million paid rides per week by the end of 2026.
The driving technology company Mobileye plans to launch a robotaxi service in an as-yet-unnamed US city in 2027, it said earlier today. The service will be vertically integrated, using Mobileye's Moovit mobility platform to interact with customers booking rides, coordinate drivers, and so on. The Israeli company, which was bought by Intel in 2017 before going public again in 2022, says it will start with around 100 robotaxis early next year.
"Mobileye has spent more than two decades building the technologies required for autonomous driving," said Amnon Shashua, founder and CEO of Mobileye. "Today we are taking the next step: combining those technologies with operational ownership to create a financially and geographically scalable robotaxi business designed from the ground up for global deployment."
The company first rose to prominence in the mid-2010s, when Tesla began using Mobileye's advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) as part of Autopilot. That relationship lasted until 2016, when Mobileye dropped Tesla as a customer after being alarmed that a driver assistance system was being sold to end users as driverless technology. Since then, Mobileye has continued to work with other partners on ADAS and autonomous vehicles.
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Tesla didn’t report a single at-fault “Robotaxi” crash in the latest NHTSA autonomous-vehicle data — its only fresh incident was a Model Y getting rear-ended while stopped, clearly the other driver’s fault.
That sounds like good news for Tesla’s safety record. But live fleet data points to the real reason the crashes have dried up: Tesla’s robotaxis are barely running, and the active fleet is shrinking a year into the program.
Baidu’s Apollo Go has received a Level 4 autonomous driving permit in Switzerland for AmiGo, a robotaxi service it is running with Swiss Post’s PostBus, putting the Chinese tech giant ahead of Waymo and Tesla in deploying driverless vehicles into European public transport.
The Federal Roads Office (FEDRO) special permit covers an 80 km² service area across three eastern cantons, and Baidu says the project is on track to become the largest planned automated public transport operation of its kind in Europe.
Waymo is launching its first-ever membership program, “Waymo Premier,” offering its most frequent riders priority pickups, 10% cashback, and early access to new cities for $29.99 per month.
The invite-only program marks a significant step in Waymo’s effort to build rider loyalty as it scales toward 1 million weekly rides and expands into 20+ cities.
Waymo has acquired a massive 5,500-acre autonomous vehicle proving ground in Wittmann, Arizona, for $220 million — nearly double the $125 million Apple paid for it in 2021. The facility was the centerpiece of Apple’s now-dead self-driving car program.
The deal, recorded June 5 in Maricopa County filings, adds a world-class test facility to Waymo’s infrastructure as the company races to scale its robotaxi fleet to 1 million weekly rides by the end of the year.
Tesla announced today that its unsupervised “Robotaxi” service now covers the entire Austin metro area, a significant expansion of its geofenced operating zone.
It’s a notable milestone on paper, but the actual fleet serving this massive area remains tiny — just ~20 active unsupervised vehicles, according to the latest data, a number that has actually been shrinking.
Tesla has been granted a new patent for a miniature camera cleaning system with a built-in wiper designed to keep vehicle cameras clear for autonomous driving.
The patent addresses one of the most frustrating and well-known issues with Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system — dirty cameras that constantly trigger alerts telling drivers to clean them. But Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet in Austin already has its own camera washer hardware that consumer vehicles don’t get.
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