Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ expansion looks like another stock pump before earnings

Tesla launched its “Robotaxi” service in Dallas and Houston yesterday — expanding to two new cities for the first time since Austin. There’s just one problem: there are virtually no cars available.

Data from Robotaxi Tracker shows that Tesla’s new Houston and Dallas deployments have had 0% to 2% availability over the past 24 hours, with only brief spikes to around 50% during a narrow morning window before dropping back to zero. It looks like Tesla deployed a car or two in each city and called it a launch.

The pre-earnings pattern

If this sounds familiar, it should. In January, Tesla announced it had launched “unsupervised” Robotaxi rides in Austin — just days before its Q4 2025 earnings call. The stock jumped 4% on the news. But as we reported at the time, Tesla’s ‘unsupervised’ Robotaxis vanished a week after that pre-earnings announcement.

Now Tesla is running the same playbook. Q1 2026 earnings are on Wednesday, April 22 — three days from now — and the company suddenly has a “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston” headline to wave in front of investors on the earnings call.