Trick Or Treat: Austin Cybercab Sightings Smash Record On Halloween, 95 Percent Driverless

AUSTIN, Texas - Halloween fell on a Saturday this year, and Tesla's Cybercabs owned the night. Community trackers logged 1,576 Cybercab sightings across Austin on 31 October, an all-time high, and 1,493 of them showed nobody in the driver's seat.

The tally comes from Cybercab Spotter, an account that counts the gold two-seat robotaxis seen on Austin streets each day and posts camera stills of the cabs it logs. Robotaxi Radar, which breaks the daily numbers down, called it "an all-time Cybercab record in Austin."

The margin is wide. The previous high was 1,250 sightings on the Saturday of the Formula 1 weekend at the Circuit of the Americas, so Halloween beat it by 26 percent. The driverless count beat the old record of 1,159 by 29 percent, according to Robotaxi Radar.

Measured against a normal weekend, the jump is bigger still. On Saturday, 17 October, with no major event in town, trackers counted 1,020 sightings. Halloween came in 55 percent higher, and the driverless count was 68 percent higher. When CyberCab.news reported the first four-figure days two weeks ago, the driverless share stood at 87 percent. On Halloween it was 94.7 percent, second only to the 95.3 percent recorded on Thursday.

A second tracker saw the same pattern from a different angle. Robotaxi Tracker, which measures how often robotaxis appear in camera snapshots around Austin, reported that Cybercabs out-appeared Waymo every hour from noon to 7pm on Halloween, peaking at 25.9 sightings per 1,000 snapshots at 4pm.

Tesla joined in the fun. Its Robotaxi account marked the night with a short video of two skeletons taking a driverless Cybercab ride through Austin, captioned "Bone voyage."

The trackers are careful about what the numbers mean. A sighting is logged each time a Cybercab is spotted, so the same car can be counted more than once, and the totals measure how busy the cabs are, not how many exist. Robotaxi Radar also cautioned that a Saturday Halloween is about as big a night as Austin streets get, making this an event number rather than a new baseline. For the size of the fleet, the Texas motor vehicle roster now lists 573 Cybercabs among Tesla's 1,204 registered robotaxis.

Even so, the trend line points one way. Through early October, Robotaxi Radar's chart shows daily totals mostly between 500 and 900. Since 23 October, every day has topped 800. On the busiest night of the autumn, the city's newest taxis were out in greater numbers than on Formula 1 weekend, and almost none of them had anyone at the wheel.