Tesla launched its unsupervised Robotaxi service in Houston and Dallas on April 18, 2026, making them the third and fourth cities to receive fully driverless rides — and the first outside California and Texas's capital.

New Cities, Small Geofences

Houston's initial service zone covers approximately 12–15 square miles in the city's northwest, centred on the Jersey Village and Willowbrook areas. Dallas launched with a larger footprint of roughly 30–35 square miles, including much of the urban core and the Park Cities neighbourhood.

Both zones are small by design. Austin started with a 20-square-mile area and took nearly a year to grow to its current 245 square miles — the new cities are following the same cautious ramp pattern.

Videos shared by early riders confirm neither city has a safety operator in any seat. The rides are fully unsupervised, with no human in the driver's seat or the passenger seat.

Building Toward Seven Cities

Tesla outlined its H1 2026 rollout targets during Q4 2025 earnings: Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas. With Dallas and Houston now live, five cities remain on the schedule through June.

Phoenix is reportedly the next in line, with preparation activity already visible on the ground.

Performance and Limitations

The Austin fleet has reported 15 incidents to NHTSA since launch, with crash rates described as four to nine times higher than human drivers depending on the benchmark used. The service currently suspends operations during rain.

Fleet size in Austin sits at between 4 and 12 unsupervised vehicles out of roughly 80 in total — suggesting both new cities are starting with similarly small operational pools.

What It Means for European Owners

The US rollout has direct implications for Tesla's European FSD trajectory. The Netherlands became the first EU country to grant type approval for FSD Supervised on April 10, under UN Regulation R-171. The commercial viability Tesla is demonstrating with Robotaxi in US cities strengthens the case for regulators in Germany, France, and other EU member states to follow the Dutch approval.

A vote at the EU Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles (TCMV) is expected in May or June 2026. A positive outcome would extend FSD Supervised access across all 27 member states simultaneously, without requiring individual national approvals.

For now, European Tesla owners are watching the US expansion closely. Each new city Tesla adds to its Robotaxi map is another data point in the regulatory argument for wider European access.

Update: 2026-04-30

On 30 April 2026, Electrek reported that Tesla's unsupervised Robotaxi fleet has finally started visible scaling. Cumulative vehicle count across the three Texas cities reached 25 — 19 in Austin, 3 in Dallas, and 3 in Houston — after sitting in single digits for most of 2025. Austin alone added more vehicles in the past two months than in the previous twelve, suggesting Tesla has cleared the permitting and technical hurdles that had kept the count flat. Tesla is also recruiting fleet support specialists across nine cities, including Las Vegas, Tempe, Palo Alto, Tampa, Doral, and Orlando, well ahead of any service announcement in those markets.