Despite nearly killing a few kids and a cat, Waymo has been dominating the autonomous taxi service market. The driverless Jaguar I-PACE fleet is currently offering rides in 10 cities across the United States.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been promising his own army of robotaxis for quite some time, but there’s always some kinda setback. This time, customers noticed a massive price hike that makes the service almost unusable. Unless you love Elon Musk and want to give him more money.

Across social media, the car community has noticed that short trips in Austin, Texas — one of Tesla Cybercab’s two locations — have become quite expensive. Previously, the base fare was $1 plus $1 for each mile. However, the base fare  was raised to $3.25 seemingly without any warning.

This has made two-mile trips cost $5.25 (previously $3) and 10-mile trips cost $13.25 (previously $11). The new pricing has made shorter trips in the Tesla Robotaxi not as convenient.

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However, this could be Tesla’s way of introducing a more maintainable pricing structure, with Musk looking to scale up operations. One issue with the Robotaxi right now is the limited number of vehicles available to those who want to try it out. And as always, this has gone against claims made by Elon Musk — although we aren’t surprised by now.

Elon Musk threatens to release more Robotaxis, but they’re nowhere near ready

Awkward former MAGA crony Elon Musk introduced Tesla’s Cybercab concept in late 2024 at a movie studio lot in California. Called “We, Robot,” it was a chaotic event full of dancing robots and activities like hitting a Cybertruck with a sledgehammer — and barely any information about the autonomous taxis at all.

“You’ve got to be joking. I feel like I missed something,” wrote one self-driving car fan on Reddit. “No details at all, no specs, no insight. Just Elon being even more awkwardly terrible than usual, making another promise of next year (with the obligatory regulatory approval cop out), and a quarter mile ‘demo’ on a closed course.”

So yeah, it’s what you probably expected. But for me, it just felt like a strange way to introduce a service where we entrust our lives to an autonomous vehicle driving around the city.

Well, Musk did stick to his word in some ways. The Robotaxi rolled out in mid-2025 as he promised, but it was only available to Tesla investors, enthusiasts, and influencers — invite only. That may have been for the best, however. For the next six months, Tesla’s autonomous vehicles were crashing at a rate much higher than human drivers, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation and Tesla’s own data. There was a concerning incident every every 55,000 miles as the Robotaxis roamed Austin and San Francisco.

When combined with the “We, Robot” reveal, it felt more like a rushed way to grab attention back from Waymo rather than truly give us a trusted, quality taxi service. Along with the frequent accidents and dangerous maneuvers — despite having human monitors — Musk initially offered the service at a flat rate of $4.20, then $6.90, which, again, felt more like Musk trying to be clever rather than care about customer experience.

Right now, Tesla Robotaxis are not permitted to operate at Level 4 autonomy (like Waymo) in California, likely due to the ongoing accidents and poor driving skills. The Robotaxis in California still have humans monitoring and operating the vehicles in the front seat. In Austin, however, the Robotaxis are operating at Level 4. In theory.

“Obvious to anyone with eyes that lives in Austin. The Robotaxis operate so much dumber than the already not perfect Waymo’s,” said one Reddit user. “You can spot them from a mile away. Clearly Tesla has zero faith in them as every Robo is flanked by [chase cars] with two people in it.”

This hasn’t stopped Musk from stating that the Robotaxis will be heading to five other cities in the United States. Then again, I wouldn’t really listen to the guy.

Back in October 2025, he stated on a podcast there will be “500 or more” Robotaxis in Austin by the end of the year. By December, however, there were only 32 vehicles, some of them just Model Y’s with a safety monitor inside. This didn’t stop him from saying Waymo’s 2,500 autonomous vehicles across the United States were “rookie numbers.” At the time, Waymo had 200 vehicles in Austin.

Even worse, only 19% of the existing Tesla Robotaxis are operating. There are only a handful of vehicles to flag down at a time. This explains why nobody is really able to catch a ride in a Tesla Cybercab. Electrek even said: “This isn’t a commercial service. It’s a tech demo with a booking screen.”

Is the price increase an indicator that Musk is going to crank up the Tesla Robotaxi operations? Honestly, I hope not. I personally don’t want any in Los Angeles, at least not until they improve.