Ethan McKanna, the creator of Robotaxi Tracker and a former Tesla employee, says parts of Tesla’s rocket-shaped Houston service area get no pickups at all. After riding the service following its October 26 expansion, he called Houston “by far the most egregious ‘fake’ AV service area” he has seen. His evidence includes a pickup pin inside Tesla’s published downtown outline that the app refused, and one quoted ride that took about 40 minutes to cover two blocks.
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McKanna also said the service “feels really good in Houston,” with reasonable waits and driving he rated significantly better than his recent Waymo rides, so the complaint is about the map rather than the cars.
The evidence so far is narrow. It rests on one rider’s pickup test, one quoted trip and the tracker’s own fleet counts, and Tesla has not published pickup data by neighborhood that would settle where rides actually start and end. Tesla also has not said whether the downtown refusal is a temporary routing limit, a railroad-crossing restriction or a deliberate exclusion, and none of the sources read include a Tesla statement on the point.
The rocket-shaped geofence
Tesla redrew its Houston Robotaxi zone on Monday, October 26. The April launch area covered about 25 square miles in northwest Harris County; in Electrek’s report on the expansion, Robotaxi Tracker now puts the area at about 254 square miles, roughly ten times larger. The original zone became the nose cone of a rocket, with a long body running southeast to downtown and Bellaire and fins flaring at the end. Tesla’s Robotaxi account announced it on X with a pun on the Apollo line about Houston and liftoff, adding that a bigger service area was live.
The tracker counts 34 unsupervised Model Ys in the fleet, up from 22 three months earlier, and no Cybercabs. That works out to about one car per 7.5 square miles. Austin, by comparison, has grown to 397 driverless vehicles, more than half of them Cybercabs, and Waymo has run driverless rides in Houston since February and expanded to nearly 50 square miles in May.
Lambert credits McKanna and Robotaxi Tracker as a leading independent source on Tesla’s fleet and service areas, noting that Tesla shares little data of its own. The Austin precedent shows how that dynamic plays out: after Tesla’s July 2025 Austin map drew comparisons, Elon Musk replied to the jokes with the phrase “Bigger, longer and uncut,” and the city has since grown into the company’s largest driverless operation. Lambert’s argument is that a geofence outline says little about what Tesla can operate, since fleet size and routing limit service far more than boundaries do.
Downtown blocks the app refuses to serve
The central claim comes from McKanna and was reported in Electrek’s October 28 article. He dropped a pickup pin well inside the downtown polygon Tesla had published, and the app answered that the location was not available and told him to move the map and choose a different one. He acknowledged that autonomous-service maps are often approximate, since operators do not serve every street inside the advertised area, and said he understood Tesla had drawn the shape so it could get the starship outline.
Electrek’s Fred Lambert argues that is a poor reason to publish availability that does not exist. Lambert’s view is that Tesla drew a rocket first and worked out where the cars could actually go second.
The 40-minute, two-block trip
On October 26 McKanna posted an app quote for a ride he described as 40 minutes to cross two blocks downtown. The app quoted a 2:05 pm pickup on the east side of downtown and a 2:48 pm drop-off at Houston Police Department headquarters on Travis Street. Instead of crossing downtown directly, the route ran south through Midtown and the Museum District to the Texas Medical Center area before looping north.
McKanna suspects the vehicles avoid downtown railroad crossings, which he said fits other strange routing he has seen in Houston, and he expects Tesla to fix it. Train crossings have been a known difficulty: on its earnings call Tesla said safety is its biggest bottleneck for Robotaxi expansion, and the company still limits service to lower-speed roads and avoids complex settings.
Waymo’s smaller map correction
The tracker applied the same standard to Waymo a day later. On Tuesday, October 27, Robotaxi Tracker reported that Waymo’s Orlando service area shrank by 10 square miles, an 8.4 percent drop to 109 square miles, because the airport had been included in the published map even though riders cannot yet select it as a drop-off. Waymo may be preparing airport service.
Lambert contrasts the two cases: Waymo’s gap is an airport at the edge of its map, while Tesla’s gap sits in the middle of downtown. Earlier maps drew similar scrutiny, including Austin in July 2025, and Tesla has since stretched Austin to its whole metro area with only about 20 vehicles at the time and opened Dallas and Houston with small geofences in April. Tesla has not said which Houston areas are served, and the next change to the polygon, or a fix to the downtown routing McKanna expects, would be the clearest sign of how much of the rocket is real.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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