Credit: Tesla Robotaxi/X
Tesla’s Robotaxi service will soon run until 2 AM, and the company expects to offer rides around the clock before the end of the year. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI software, gave the timeline on Tesla’s Q3 2026 earnings call on October 21, after an analyst asked whether regulators or software are now the bigger limit on growth.
Elluswamy said the hours have grown in steps since the service launched. “For example, we had initially had the Robotaxi service from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., then we expanded to 10:00 p.m., 11:00 p.m. Now it’s going to be pretty soon 2:00 a.m.,” he said. The most recent of those changes came at the start of October, when Tesla extended Austin Robotaxi service to 11 PM. Tesla’s Q3 Update, posted the same afternoon as the call, now lists Austin hours as 6 AM to midnight, so a 2 AM cutoff would add two more hours on top of that.
According to Elluswamy, the pace depends on what the AI software can handle. “We just want to make sure that there’s not a single safety incident. That is our operating principle,” he said.
Beyond the later cutoff, Tesla plans to open up more of the day and more of the road this year. “We will see that over the rest of this year, we’ll unlock 24/7 operation, go to higher speed roads,” Elluswamy said. He added that Tesla will expand to more weather conditions and highways, and that “all of that will be done hopefully by the end of this year, at which point you will see a lot more scaling, a lot more cities being covered by Robotaxi.”
Tesla is expanding to more cities while also packing Austin with vehicles, and Elluswamy said “we do six cities now.” Those six are Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa, the same cities listed in Tesla’s first Robotaxi Safety Report, which also names Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Phoenix and San Antonio as coming next.
On the question of what is holding Tesla back, Elluswamy said the answer will change soon. “So it’s not purely regulatory or something like that. It is technology-driven, but we do see that pretty quickly become regulatory, perhaps in Q1, Q2 timeframes,” he said, pointing to the first half of 2027.
Round-the-clock rides have been on Tesla’s list since at least early September, when Elluswamy replied on X that 24/7 service was about a month away and that “the next tech to merge on the v15 plan will enable it,” as we reported in our story on how Cybercab could run all night with v15.
Night driving has its own edge cases, and when Austin moved to 11 PM, Musk wrote on X that the main thing Tesla was trying to solve was making sure the cars don’t run over pets that are hard to see in the dark. The Robotaxi Safety Report counts 862,000 miles driven after dark through October 18, out of 3.1 million autonomous miles in total.
Would you book a driverless Robotaxi ride at 2 AM?
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