Tesla just made its Houston robotaxi zone about ten times bigger, and drew it in the shape of a rocket. The new service area runs from the original patch in northwest Houston all the way through downtown to Bellaire, roughly 254 square miles of driverless Model Y territory with nobody in the front seats.
The official Robotaxi account announced it at 9:38 AM ET / 6:38 AM PT on Monday, Oct. 26 (10:38 PM JST Monday) with a map and a line that only works in one American city:
Look at the map for two seconds and you’ll see it. The old zone, about 25 square miles around Jersey Village and the Willowbrook corridor along U.S. 290 and State Highway 249, is now the nose cone. A long body runs southeast past the 610 Loop, and the tail flares into fins around Bellaire and southwest Houston. It looks a lot like Starship, which is built about 350 miles down the coast at Starbase. Elon Musk’s comment on the timing: “I swear it’s just a coincidence 😂”
Six cities, one leaderboard
Sawyer Merritt, who keeps a running tally of the service maps, put the new Houston area at 254 square miles, a 916% jump in one day. Here’s how Tesla’s unsupervised service areas stack up now, in square miles:
- Austin: 272
- Houston: 254
- Dallas: 81
- Miami: 31
- Orlando: 26
- Tampa: 24
Every one of those is driverless only, no safety monitor in the car. Houston went from fourth place to a close second overnight. Houston Public Media notes the new shape covers much of the 610 Loop, though a slice of the northeast Loop sits outside the fins. Waymo already runs driverless rides in Houston, and Zoox is testing there.
Houston launched on April 18, the same day as Dallas, as Tesla’s first unsupervised expansion beyond Austin, and the zone barely changed through late September, Teslarati reports. Rides there are still in Model Ys. The Cybercab only carries public riders in Austin for now, though Teslarati says dozens to nearly 200 have been seen staging in Houston lots. EVwire independently estimated the new area at 8 to 10 times the old one.
The factory is waiting on the map
A bigger map is the bottleneck Tesla actually wants to fix right now. In a new Cybercab factory tour with Munro Live, vehicle engineering chief Lars Moravy said the line doesn’t run every day. “The line can run so fast it’s currently outpacing our robotaxi deployments,” he said, calling it “a bit of a race right now to see who can go faster,” as Drive Tesla Canada reported. Texas already lists 970 Tesla robotaxis, 463 of them Cybercabs, per our F1 weekend count. More square miles means more places to send them.
The Robotaxi account added one more line on Monday afternoon: “Austin’s robot population is growing.” Cybercab rides are due in Dallas next month, as Tesla said on its Q3 call, and the Robotaxi app itself just got a proper big-screen version for iPad, iPhone Duo and Android foldables in version 26.10.3, Not a Tesla App found.
For a sense of scale from Japan, 254 square miles is about 658 km², a bit bigger than all 23 wards of Tokyo combined (about 628 km²). None of it is available here, of course. FSD (Supervised) still isn’t approved in Japan.
Sources: Tesla Robotaxi on X (2), Elon Musk on X, Sawyer Merritt on X (2), Teslarati, EVwire, Houston Public Media, Drive Tesla Canada, Not a Tesla App.
— The EVX News team
Featured image: Tesla’s map of the old and new Houston Robotaxi geofences, Oct. 26, 2026. Image: Tesla / @robotaxi on X (extended to 16:9).
