Tesla is taking its Robotaxi service to Fort Worth, Texas. The service's account on X posted at 23:36 local time on Sunday 1 November (05:36 UTC on 2 November): "Robotaxi available in Fort Worth starting tomorrow, 6am." That makes Fort Worth the fourth Texas city for Tesla's ride-hailing service, after Austin, Dallas and Houston.

It is not a city Tesla had named. When it published its first Robotaxi safety report on 21 October, Tesla listed four cities as "coming soon": Las Vegas, Phoenix, Jacksonville and San Antonio, as TeslAnt reported. Fort Worth was not among them.

The launch zone

Tesla's map, headed "Launch geofence", shows a single zone around downtown Fort Worth. It reaches Saginaw in the north, with a narrow strip running further north along Interstate 35W, and Loop 820 and White Settlement in the west. In the south it ends just past Interstate 20 and takes in part of Benbrook. In the east its edge runs through Haltom City and stops short of Forest Hill.

As with its enlargement of the Houston zone in October, Tesla gave no area figure. It also did not say:

  • how many cars will serve Fort Worth, or whether any of them are Cybercabs;
  • whether a Tesla employee will ride along at first;
  • what a ride will cost.

A second zone in one metro area

Fort Worth gives Tesla a second zone in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, which it entered in April, when Dallas and Houston opened on the same day. Tesla enlarged the Dallas zone on 29 August, from about 31 to about 81 square miles by NotATeslaApp's count. The two city centres are about 30 miles apart, and Tesla has not said whether the zones will join.

Dallas is already the service's second-busiest city. In Tesla's safety report it accounted for 608,130 of the 3,112,541 miles driven with nobody from Tesla aboard between 22 January and 18 October, or 19.5%. Austin accounted for 68%.

The fleet behind the service is still growing. On the morning of 2 November Tesla had 1,244 vehicles on the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles' register of automated vehicles: 671 Model Ys and 573 Cybercabs, after 40 Model Ys were added on 1 November. The register covers the whole state and does not show where a car operates.

The scrutiny goes with it

The expansion comes while federal regulators are still asking questions. NHTSA is reviewing claims that Tesla's robotaxis speed through school zones. Tesla's sworn answers to NHTSA's Special Order on the Cybercab's certification were due on 30 October, and NHTSA has not yet posted them.

What it means in Europe

For European owners nothing changes yet. The service runs only in the US, and in Europe Tesla offers its software only in supervised form, approved country by country.