Tesla’s quiet buildout of its Bay Area ride-hailing fleet has turned into a numbers story that is hard to ignore. With 1,655 robotaxi-branded vehicles now registered in California, the company has rapidly closed the gap with long-time autonomous leader Waymo and forced regulators, rivals, and riders to reassess what “self-driving” really means on the streets of San Francisco and beyond. The race is no longer about who got there first, but about whose model can scale fastest under some of the toughest safety rules in the United States.
Behind the headline figures is a clash of philosophies about automation, regulation, and labor that will shape how Californians hail rides over the next decade. Waymo is still ahead in fully driverless deployments, yet Tesla’s hybrid approach, mixing human workers with advanced driver-assistance software, is letting it flood the market with vehicles far more quickly than many expected earlier this year.
Robotaxi math: Tesla’s 1,655 cars versus Waymo’s 1,955
The most striking development is how quickly Tesla has scaled its presence in California’s robotaxi ecosystem. The company has registered 1,655 vehicles for its Bay Area ride-hailing service with the CPUC, a figure that puts it within striking distance of Waymo’s 1,955 autonomous taxis in the state and turns what looked like a distant chase into a live contest for market share. That registration tally, which only took a few months to assemble, signals that Tesla is treating the Bay Area as a flagship proving ground rather than a tentative pilot.
Waymo still holds the numerical edge in fully autonomous vehicles, with 1,955 robotaxis operating in California, but Tesla’s 1,655 cars, along with a smaller group of 128 vehicles registered under a different category, show how quickly the newcomer has bulked up its fleet relative to incumbents like Zoox, which has 229 vehicles in the state. Those comparative figures, laid out in recent coverage of the California robotaxi landscape, underscore that the gap between Waymo and Tesla is now measured in a few hundred cars rather than an order of magnitude, a shift that would have seemed unlikely when Tesla’s service first appeared in the Bay Area.
How Tesla’s Bay Area rollout caught up so fast
Tesla’s surge is the product of a compressed rollout that treated the Bay Area as both test bed and launch market. The company’s ride-hailing service in the region began operating in August, and within a few months it had moved from a handful of early vehicles to a fleet in the low thousands, a pace that reflects both aggressive internal targets and a willingness to work within California’s existing regulatory categories rather than wait for bespoke approvals. That strategy has allowed Tesla to scale quickly while still presenting the service to riders as a distinct “Robotaxi” experience.
Behind the scenes, Tesla has been recruiting factory workers and sales staff to help operate its Bay Area service, a sign that the company is leaning on its existing workforce and infrastructure to support the new business line. Internal expectations described in that reporting suggest that only a fraction of the 1,655 registered vehicles are on the road at any given time, but the registration volume itself gives Tesla flexibility to ramp up operations as demand and staffing allow. The result is a rollout that looks less like a cautious pilot and more like a full-fledged network build, even if the software and regulatory status still lag the marketing.
Not quite “self-driving”: Tesla’s regulatory workaround
For all the talk of robotaxis, Tesla’s service in California is not registered as an autonomous vehicle operation, a distinction that matters both legally and practically. State regulators maintain some of the strictest rules in the country for companies that want to carry paying passengers using an autonomous vehicle, and Tesla has sidestepped that framework by keeping human drivers in the loop and classifying its cars differently. In effect, the company is selling a robotaxi-branded ride that is still, in the eyes of California law, a human-driven service augmented by advanced driver-assistance features.
This approach lets Tesla avoid the more onerous autonomous permitting regime that applies to companies like Waymo, which must report detailed safety data and secure explicit approvals for driverless operations. Coverage of Tesla’s regulatory posture notes that its Robotaxi service in California operates under categories that do not require it to be listed as an autonomous provider, even as the company markets the rides under the “Robotaxi” label. That gap between branding and legal status is central to Tesla’s strategy: it allows rapid fleet expansion while regulators and the public continue to debate how much autonomy is actually on the road.
Waymo’s lead, Zoox’s niche, and the new pecking order
Waymo still sets the benchmark for fully driverless service in California, but the competitive map is shifting as Tesla’s fleet grows. Recent tallies show Waymo with 1,955 autonomous taxis in California, compared with Tesla’s 1,655 and Zoox’s 229, a distribution that highlights both Waymo’s head start and the speed with which Tesla has closed the distance. Zoox, with its smaller fleet, is carving out a more focused niche, while the two larger players battle for scale in San Francisco and other dense urban corridors.
Waymo’s broader ambitions are reflected in reporting that pegs its valuation near $100 billion and notes that it is running hundreds of robotaxis in multiple cities, including around 700 in Los Angeles alongside its California deployments. That scale, combined with its 1,955 vehicles in the state, keeps Waymo in the lead for now, but Tesla’s ability to register 1,655 cars in a matter of months suggests that the pecking order is no longer fixed. Instead, California is becoming a live test of whether a software-first, human-in-the-loop model can catch up to, or even surpass, a pure-play autonomous strategy.
From hype to hiring: Tesla’s human-powered Robotaxi model
Behind the glossy promise of self-driving rides, Tesla’s current robotaxi operation looks more like a hybrid between a traditional ride-hailing service and a tech pilot. The company has been actively recruiting factory workers and sales staff to operate its Robotaxi service, signaling that human labor is central to how the network runs today. Job postings and internal expectations described in recent reporting indicate that Tesla anticipates only a subset of its registered fleet will be active at any one time, with staffing levels and shift patterns determining how many cars are actually on the road.
That human-centric model is a sharp contrast with Waymo’s driverless approach, where the goal is to remove the safety operator entirely and let the software handle every aspect of the trip. Tesla’s strategy, by comparison, leans on its existing workforce and dealership-style infrastructure to seed the service quickly, even if that means the “Robotaxi” label currently overstates the level of autonomy involved. It is a bet that riders will care more about convenience, price, and brand than about whether a human is still sitting behind the wheel, at least in the early years of the rollout.
San Francisco as ground zero: outages, politics, and public trust
San Francisco has become the symbolic and practical center of the robotaxi race, and recent events there have highlighted both the promise and the fragility of fully autonomous services. In a massive San Francisco blackout on Dec 20, Waymo robotaxis reportedly froze and stalled at dark intersections, forcing the company to suspend service while crews dealt with the power disruption and traffic chaos. Video coverage of the incident described how the outage exposed vulnerabilities in how the vehicles handle edge cases, especially when traffic signals and street lighting fail simultaneously.
Waymo later said it had closely coordinated with San Francisco city officials and proactively paused its service as of Satu, a move that was framed as a safety-first response to the blackout. Reporting on the incident noted that the company temporarily halted its robotaxi operations in San Francisco after the massive power outage, underscoring how dependent fully driverless fleets remain on stable infrastructure and clear operating conditions. For Tesla, which still relies on human drivers in its Robotaxi-branded cars, the blackout served as an implicit contrast: its model may be less futuristic, but it is also less exposed to the kinds of system-wide failures that can paralyze a purely autonomous network.
Regulators push back as Tesla leans into the Bay Area
California regulators have not been passive observers of Tesla’s rapid expansion. Earlier in the year, officials clarified that reports of Tesla planning to roll out a fully autonomous robotaxi service in the Bay Are over a single weekend did not match the approvals on file, and they stressed that any move into true driverless operations would require additional permits. That clarification was a reminder that, despite the marketing language, Tesla’s current service is still constrained by the same rules that apply to other ride providers when a human remains behind the wheel.
The CPUC’s role in registering 1,655 Tesla vehicles for the Bay Area ride-hailing service illustrates how the state is threading a needle between encouraging innovation and maintaining control over safety and labor standards. By allowing Tesla to register such a large fleet while still treating it as a non-autonomous service, regulators have effectively created a sandbox in which the company can test its Robotaxi concept without crossing the legal threshold into full autonomy. At the same time, that structure gives the state leverage to demand more data and impose new conditions if Tesla seeks to remove drivers or expand beyond the Bay Area under the Robotaxi brand.
Investor expectations: from 1,000 cars today to 1 million tomorrow
The rapid buildout of Tesla’s California fleet is not just a transportation story, it is also a financial one. Analysts at Morgan Stanley have projected that Tesla could have 1,000 Robotaxis in 2026 and as many as 1 million by 2035, a forecast that assumes both continued fleet expansion and significant progress on autonomy. Those expectations were reinforced when Musk, in remarks highlighted under the heading “Fleet Expansion Late,” announced plans to double the number of Robotaxi vehicles operating by the end of the year, effectively using California as a launchpad for a much larger global network.
Market watchers have tied those ambitions to Tesla’s stock performance, noting that TeslaTSLA was recently trading around $482.65 with a move of 0.51%, figures that reflect how investors are already pricing in a substantial robotaxi business alongside the company’s core vehicle sales. Coverage of Tesla’s Bay Area Robotaxis has emphasized that the company might get to a 1,000 Robotaxis in the Bay Area this year after all, a milestone that would validate some of the more bullish projections and put additional pressure on Waymo and Zoox to accelerate their own deployments. The financial narrative, in other words, is now tightly bound to the registration counts on California’s roads.
Waymo’s safety record and the stakes of scale
Waymo’s lead in fully autonomous operations comes with a heavier burden of scrutiny, particularly around safety. The company has reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that seven collisions had occurred with its vehicles, incidents that regulators and the public are watching closely as robotaxis move from novelty to everyday presence. Those reports, discussed in recent video coverage of the 2025 robotaxi surge, highlight both the relative rarity of serious incidents and the heightened expectations that come with removing human drivers from the loop.
For Tesla, which is not yet operating as an autonomous provider in California, the safety conversation is more diffuse, focused on its driver-assistance software and the training of the human workers who staff its Robotaxi service. Yet as the company pushes toward more automation and larger fleets, it will inevitably face the same demand for detailed safety data and transparent reporting that Waymo already navigates. The contrast today is stark: Waymo’s 1,955 vehicles are fully driverless in many scenarios and thus subject to direct federal and state oversight, while Tesla’s 1,655 cars operate in a gray zone where branding outpaces regulation. How long that gap can persist will depend on both accident statistics and political appetite for tighter rules.
What California’s robotaxi race means for riders
For riders in the Bay Area and across California, the emerging robotaxi landscape offers more choice but also more confusion. On one side are Waymo’s fully driverless cars, which can show up in San Francisco or Los Angeles with no one in the front seat, yet may be unavailable during events like the recent blackout when the company paused service. On the other side are Tesla’s Robotaxi-branded vehicles, which look and feel more like a traditional ride-hail trip, with a human driver present even as the company markets the experience as a step toward autonomy.
Those differences will shape how quickly Californians embrace each model. Some riders may prefer the predictability and perceived safety of a human driver, especially after seeing reports of Waymo robotaxis stalling at intersections during the San Francisco outage, while others may be drawn to the novelty and potential cost savings of a fully autonomous ride. As Tesla continues to register vehicles with the CPUC and Waymo refines its operations after incidents like the blackout, the state’s streets are becoming a live referendum on what kind of automation people actually want. The only certainty is that the numbers, from 1,655 to 1,955 and beyond, will keep climbing as both sides race to define the future of urban mobility.
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