Cowtown Calling: Tesla Robotaxi Rolls Into Fort Worth With A 143-Square-Mile Map

FORT WORTH, Texas - Tesla's Robotaxi service opened in Fort Worth on Monday morning, the first new city the company has added in about three months and the fourth in Texas.

Tesla's official Robotaxi account announced the launch late on Sunday with a single line, "Robotaxi available in Fort Worth starting tomorrow, 6am," and a map of the service area. Rides began at 6am Central time on 2 November.

The launch map is wide for a first day. It takes in downtown Fort Worth and reaches from near White Settlement in the west toward Haltom City in the east, and from the edge of Saginaw in the north down toward Benbrook and Forest Hill in the south. Tesla watcher Sawyer Merritt put the Fort Worth zone at 143 square miles, nearly twice the 81 square miles Tesla serves in Dallas, about 30 miles to the east.

Fort Worth makes seven cities for Tesla's unsupervised Robotaxi service. By Merritt's count, Austin has the largest zone at 272 square miles, followed by Houston at 254, Fort Worth at 143 and Dallas at 81. The three Florida cities are smaller: Miami at 31 square miles, Orlando at 26 and Tampa at 24.

Add up the four Texas cities and Tesla now covers about 750 square miles of the state. Merritt estimated that the combined service areas across all seven cities now take in roughly 1 percent of the United States population.

The new city arrives as the fleet behind the service grows quickly. Texas motor vehicle records, as tracked by Tesla watchers, listed 1,244 vehicles under Tesla Robotaxi LLC on Sunday, 671 Model Ys and 573 Cybercabs, just 15 behind Waymo's 1,259. Earlier on Sunday, CyberCab.news reported a gap of 55. Those are registrations, not a count of cars carrying riders.

Tesla has not said which vehicles will run in Fort Worth or how many. For riders across the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the change is simpler: the app that has worked in Dallas now works at the other end of the Metroplex too.