Tesla Robotaxi service expanding to California and Florida soon with low costs per mile

Tesla will be bringing its robotaxis to California after the summer and has been in talks with various other states that are easier on autonomous vehicles regulations such as Florida, Arizona, or Nevada.

According to Elon Musk, the rapid ride-share platform expansion will start in the next few weeks, with robotaxis likely arriving to the Bay Area in September. The goal for Tesla's ride-share service is to cover 50% of the US population by the end of 2025 and have robotaxi rides materially impact its bottom line by the end of 2026, as per Elon Musk:

So I think it's going to - the actual cost per mile of Cybercab will be very low. The cost per mile of our existing fleet will be higher, but still very competitive. So maybe something over $0.50... So really, it tells us robotaxi will go from tiny to gigantic in terms of operations in a pretty short period of time. Like my guess is it has a material impact on our financials around the end of next year.

During its quarterly earnings presentation, Tesla officials remarked that the lessons learned from the current Austin robotaxi pilot are not geofenced like the service area, and can be applied anywhere. This will allow it to scale the Robotaxi network very quickly from a technical standpoint once it gets the green light from state authorities.

Said Austin service area will be increased ten times during the summer, way beyond what Waymo or other competitors are doing because Tesla's vision-only approach allows for faster validation and scaling. The Nevada DMV has confirmed that it already held talks with Tesla officials about the robotaxi launch there and doesn't see any hurdles after it fills the necessary documentation.

As for when will the rapid robotaxi expansion bring revenue and pad Tesla's bottom line, Musk said that the current service with factory Model Y units has running costs of about fifty cents per mile, which is still very competitive.

When the Cybercab two-seater, which is built as a robotaxi from the get-go, gets added to the fleet in 2026, its costs per mile of about thirty cents will bring the overall service expenditures down and also allow Tesla to finance faster expansion with loans instead of its own money.