ROBOTAXI · Robotaxi
85 Percent Driverless: Austin Cybercab Share Sets Another Record
Spotters logged 636 Cybercab sightings in Austin on Thursday, 538 of them driverless. Robotaxi Radar said that is an 85 percent driverless share, an all-time high, set in a week with no festival in town.
Harper Quinn, Live desk
Published · 2 min read
AUSTIN, Texas - The Cybercab driverless share in Austin has set another record. CybercabSpotter, a crowd-sourced tracking account, logged 636 Cybercab sightings in the city on Thursday, 15 October. Of those, 538 were tagged driverless.
Robotaxi Radar, which follows the same board, put the driverless share at 85 percent, an all-time high. The previous best was 84 percent, logged on X Takeover Saturday during the second Austin City Limits weekend. One week before that, on Thursday, 8 October, the share had reached 81 percent, then a record of its own.
The climb came in four straight steps. Radar's daily chain for the week ran 68 percent, then 72 percent, then 80 percent, then 85 percent. Radar called the low-70s reading early in the week a blip, not a new level, and the rest of the week bore that out.
The change is in the supervised column. Sightings without the driverless tag fell to 98 on Thursday, down from 235 on Monday, a drop of 58 percent. Total sightings eased to 636, the lowest of the week's four weekdays. The record was set by fewer sightings with a safety monitor on board, not by a surge in reports.
The week as a whole was busier, not quieter. Across four clean weekdays, spotters logged 2,777 Cybercab sightings, up 26 percent from 2,206 over the same four weekdays a week earlier.
This time there is no festival asterisk. The 84 percent mark came on a Saturday when Austin City Limits and X Takeover both drew crowds to the city. Radar noted that no festival was in town this week, so the 85 percent figure holds up without that caveat.
Read the figures with care. A sighting is a report, not a car, and one Cybercab can be logged many times as it crosses town. The counts are not a Tesla fleet number. Tesla's own Robotaxi account said on 10 October that more than 300 Cybercabs now serve Austin, and an independent tracker counted 159 Cybercabs among the city's driverless Tesla cars. Even so, four days of climbing on an ordinary week, with the supervised count more than halved, is the clearest sign yet that unsupervised Cybercab rides are becoming the normal look of the Austin board.
Harper Quinn covers Cybercab robotaxi launches, Austin fleet ops, and the day-to-day of street boards versus live hail. Based in Austin.
