Tesla Robotaxis Now Cover 50% of the USA

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… in a fairytale.

Naturally, there have been so many claims and forecasts about Tesla “Full Self Driving” and robotaxis over the past decade that it’s become easy to forget them and to brush new ones under the rug quickly. However, Elon Musk made a huge one last year, and I think it’s important to not forget it, because we are in a fresh round of hype and one has to keep recent credibility in mind when considering current claims.

On Tesla’s Q2 shareholder call last year, on July 23, 2025, Musk said: “I think we will probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year.” That’s robotaxi service — where someone pays for a robotaxi ride instead of an Uber/taxi ride — across half of the United States (population wise). That’s what Waymo is offering, but on a much larger scale.

In actuality, Tesla achieved robotaxi service in 0% of the country, for 0% of the population.

Now, one can say that this is just a slightly missed target. But it’s not! That’s not even close to a slight miss. That’s a HUGE miss. That’s a miss of around 170 million people!

The other problem is this follows a long history of Elon Musk massively mis-forecasting Tesla FSD/robotaxi progress. He made claims in 2016 about 2017 that the company has not achieved a decade later. Is the prediction about Tesla autonomous ride-hailing coverage going to be a few months off the mark (a slight miss) or another decade plus off the mark? He has made claims repeatedly that have been orders of magnitude off the mark.

Also, this is not some super long-term forecast. He made this prediction just 6 months ago tomorrow! This is a short enough timeframe that the CEO of a major auto or tech company should not be making such a gigantic claim without effectively knowing it would be achieved. Normal car companies let you know when a new model launch is happening several months in advance because they know that model will be ready for production and sale then. If you don’t have clear evidence that you can get from covering 0% of the market with a new service to 50% (170 million people, give or take) in 5 months, why are you saying such a thing on an investor call?

In 6 days, Tesla is going to have its next shareholder call. Will Mr. Musk provide an update on when Tesla is going to achieve that 50% coverage target? Is he doing to explain why Tesla robotaxis still serve 0% of the population and what caused his prediction to be so wrong? Is anyone going to needle and press him on what exactly he got wrong when he made that forecast, why he was so far off of his expectations? Or are they going to ask him more leading questions that hype up a new dramatic prediction that will blow your socks off? Is there any accountability for making false claims and predictions time and time again?

Of course, one has to wonder how the company’s finances will look as well when it has just had the worst year of sales and the worst 4th quarter since 2022. That’s a whole other topic, unless you presume that hype about what is just around the corner for Tesla AI and robotaxis is meant, in part at least, to distract from those trends.