Tesla launches Robotaxi service in Dallas and Houston

Mars Finance News: On April 19, Tesla officially announced via social media that its Robotaxi taxi service has officially expanded to the cities of Dallas and Houston. The service covers the core business districts and residential areas of both cities. Users can complete the entire process—such as hailing a ride and making payments—through Tesla’s official app, with no need for human drivers to be involved throughout. Technologically, unlike competitors such as Waymo that adopt solutions combining lidar and vision, Tesla’s purely vision-based approach is the core feature of this service. It relies only on cameras to obtain environmental information and uses algorithms to perform 3D space reconstruction and object recognition. Preliminary pricing information shows that Robotaxi costs about $1.5 per mile, roughly 20% lower than local ride-hailing services such as Uber. It is reported that Tesla’s Robotaxi service was first launched in Austin last year, and starting in January 2026 it will provide passenger service without a safety driver. With the addition of Dallas and Houston, the number of operational cities in Texas has increased to three, making it the most densely covered region among its service areas. However, according to crowdsourced data from the Robotaxi Tracker website, these two newly added cities currently each have only 1 robot taxi in operation, while Austin has 46 active vehicles, suggesting that the new markets are still in an initial rollout stage. (Wide-Angle Observation)