Tesla Robotaxi Houston: The Rocket-Shaped Map Includes Downtown Streets the App Won't Serve
Tesla stretched its Houston Robotaxi area into a rocket shape on Monday - but a former Tesla employee who rode the service says a downtown pickup pin inside the published map is refused by the app, and one two-block trip was quoted at about 40 minutes.
Tesla's new rocket-shaped Robotaxi service area in Houston includes parts of downtown where the service will not actually pick riders up, according to Ethan McKanna, the creator of Robotaxi Tracker and a former Tesla employee, Electrek reported Wednesday. On Monday Tesla expanded its Houston Robotaxi geofence from a small launch zone in northwest Harris County into a long corridor reaching downtown and Bellaire, announcing the rocket-shaped map with 'Houston, we have liftoff.'
McKanna, whose crowdsourced tracker follows Tesla's Robotaxi fleet and service areas and who worked at Tesla this summer, rode the service after the expansion and called Houston 'by far the most egregious fake AV service area' he has seen. In a video he posted, a pickup pin dropped in downtown Houston - well inside the polygon Tesla published - is refused by the app: 'Location not available. Move the map to select a different location.' McKanna acknowledged that operators' service-area maps often do not cover every street inside the advertised polygon, but singled out Houston as the worst case he has seen, saying Tesla appeared to draw the area that way 'so they could get the starship shape.'
The routing showed the same gap. A trip quote McKanna posted the day before set a 2:05 p.m. pickup on the east side of downtown and a 2:48 p.m. drop-off at Houston Police Department headquarters on Travis Street, a couple of blocks away - about 40 minutes in the car for a two-block trip, on a planned route running south through Midtown and the Museum District to the Texas Medical Center area and then looping back north. McKanna's read is that the Robotaxi appears to be avoiding railroad crossings downtown, which he said fits other strange routing he has seen in Houston; he expects Tesla to fix it.
He was not down on the service overall: apart from the map and routing issue, he wrote that it 'feels really good in Houston,' with reasonable wait times and 'significantly better driving than my recent Waymo rides.' Electrek noted the standard cuts both ways - Robotaxi Tracker reported Tuesday that Waymo's Orlando service area had shrunk by 10 square miles after the airport was added to its published map before the app would serve it - but in Orlando the gap sat at the map's edge, while Houston's dead zone sits in the middle of downtown. For Houston riders, the practical lesson is to test the pin before counting on the rocket: the map shows where Tesla wants to be seen, and the app shows where its cars will actually go.
