Tesla’s Robotaxi service has a new city, and it showed up with a big map. Rides opened in Fort Worth, Texas at 6 AM local time on Monday, Nov. 2, inside a launch zone Tesla watcher Sawyer Merritt puts at about 143 square miles (370 km²). That makes Fort Worth the seventh US city with unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi rides and, by his count, the third-largest service area in the network on day one.
Tesla announced it the night before from its official Robotaxi account, in one line: “Robotaxi available in Fort Worth starting tomorrow, 6am.” The post went up at 12:36 AM ET Monday, Nov. 2 / 9:36 PM PT Sunday, Nov. 1 (2:36 PM JST Monday), and the first rides were bookable at 7:00 AM ET / 4:00 AM PT on Monday (9:00 PM JST Monday). If you’re reading this in Tokyo on Monday night, the first Fort Worth riders are probably finishing their breakfast tacos about now.
Everything is bigger in Fort Worth (including the geofence)
The launch map Tesla shared shows one zone centered on downtown Fort Worth. By EVwire’s read of the map, it reaches White Settlement in the west, Haltom City in the east, Benbrook and Forest Hill in the south and the edge of Saginaw in the north. EVwire’s own estimate lands at roughly 142 square miles, close to Merritt’s 143, and puts the zone at about 13 miles across and 15 miles top to bottom.
Here’s how the seven cities stack up, using the geofence sizes Merritt posted on Monday (his estimates, in square miles):
- Austin: 272
- Houston: 254
- Fort Worth: 143 (new on Nov. 2)
- Dallas: 81
- Miami: 31
- Orlando: 26
- Tampa: 24
Add those up and you get 831 square miles, the same total Whole Mars Catalog posted a little later. Whole Mars also called Fort Worth the biggest zone Tesla has ever launched a new city with. Houston only reached 254 square miles after its expansion in late October (we covered that Starship-shaped map), so the claim holds up. Merritt also estimated that Tesla’s unsupervised geofences now cover about 1% of the entire US population. That’s his math, not Tesla’s, but it’s a fun number to watch.
Merritt called it Tesla’s first new-city expansion in about three months, after Miami, Orlando and Tampa joined Austin, Dallas and Houston. Fort Worth also gives Tesla a second foothold in Dallas–Fort Worth, one of the largest metro areas in the US. The Dallas and Fort Worth zones don’t touch yet. Whole Mars is already asking how long until they merge.
What Tesla didn’t say
The announcement was a single sentence and a map, so a lot is still open. As TeslaNorth pointed out, Tesla didn’t say how many vehicles will serve Fort Worth at launch, whether there’s a safety monitor on board, what rides cost, or whether the $0 first-ride offer new riders have seen in Dallas and Houston applies here too. The independent tracker robotaxistats already lists Tesla in Fort Worth as live, alongside Waymo’s driverless service in the region.
The surrounding numbers are moving fast, though. Tesla’s Texas Robotaxi roster hit 1,204 vehicles in a late-October count, just behind Waymo’s 1,259 (our breakdown here). Service hours now run from 6 AM to 2 AM after a recent update (details here), and on its Q3 call Tesla said Cybercab rides would start in Dallas this month and that it’s aiming for around-the-clock service by the end of 2026. Fort Worth being right next door to Dallas makes it an obvious place for Cybercabs to show up later, though Tesla hasn’t said so.
The EVX Take
For a sense of scale from Japan, 370 km² is bigger than the whole city of Nagoya (about 326 km²), and Tesla’s seven zones together, about 2,150 km², cover more than three times the area of Tokyo’s 23 wards. That’s the gap Japanese buyers are looking at. FSD (Supervised) still isn’t approved for customer cars here, though Tesla Japan has been testing it on Japanese roads since August 2025, and Japan’s Level 4 rules have allowed driverless service in set areas since April 2023. Japan’s Level 4 projects so far are mostly small shuttles on fixed routes. Tesla is opening whole cities at a time with cars people can book from an app. Waymo is coming here with Toyota-built vehicles in 2027 (our story). Every new Texas city adds to the case Tesla can make to Japanese regulators that the same software deserves a test here.
Lester’s take
I’ve bought FSD on four Teslas. Then I moved to Japan, where my Model Y does a great job of driving me around in the sense that I’m the one driving. So I’m cheering for Fort Worth from about 10,000 km away. A 143-square-mile launch map is Tesla saying “we’re not here to test the waters, we’re here to swim.” Fort Worth folks, please take a ride, film it, and post it. Some of us in Tokyo are living vicariously through you. And if anyone at Tesla is reading: Nagoya would fit inside that map with room left over. Just saying.
Sources: Tesla Robotaxi on X, Sawyer Merritt on X (launch, geofence sizes, population estimate), Whole Mars Catalog on X, TeslaNorth, EVwire, robotaxistats. Not a Tesla App had no Fort Worth story at the time of writing.
— Lester Miyashiro, EVX News
Featured image: Downtown Fort Worth seen from the Trinity Trails (May 2021). Photo: DerekAyala27 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0, cropped).