Six Hours Ahead: Cybercab Beat Waymo on Austin's Traffic Cameras Over ACL Weekend

AUSTIN, Texas - For six hours last weekend, Austin's traffic cameras caught more Cybercabs than Waymos.

Ethan McKanna, who runs the Robotaxi Tracker account and posts Austin robotaxi data on X, charted robotaxis per 1,000 traffic camera snapshots, hour by hour, across the second weekend of the Austin City Limits festival. From 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on both Saturday, Oct. 10, and Sunday, Oct. 11, Tesla's purpose-built Cybercab came out ahead of Waymo. His chart tallies it as six hours with Cybercab in front.

The peak tells the story. Cybercab's highest hourly reading on the chart was 21.6 per 1,000 snapshots on Saturday afternoon, above the 18.3 marked as Waymo's Saturday high. Avride and Zoox, the other two services on the chart, stayed far below both.

McKanna was candid about the rest of the weekend. He wrote that Waymo was a bit ahead at other times and far in the lead overnight because it runs around the clock. Tesla's Robotaxi service in Austin runs from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., and the chart shades those overnight hours as outside Tesla's service window.

Robotaxi Radar, which tracks Tesla's rollout, read the same data as Cybercab density starting to surpass Waymo at certain times of day. It pointed to the festival crowds as a possible reason Tesla put more Cybercabs on the road, and said it would watch whether the pattern holds during the week.

The climb has been quick. A week ago, this site reported McKanna's count of 2.2 Cybercabs per 1,000 vehicles in frame, against a usual Waymo figure of about 3 to 3.4. The two measures are not identical, and a camera snapshot is not a fleet count. Still, the car that trailed Waymo on Austin streets in early October led it through the busiest afternoon hours of a festival weekend.

Tesla says more than 300 Cybercabs now serve Austin. For a few hours on Saturday and Sunday, the cameras agreed: the gold two-seater was the robotaxi Austin was most likely to see.