Tesla's once-bullish tone on robotaxis shifts

By Chris Kirkham and Akash Sriram LOS ANGELES, July 23 (Reuters) - A year ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company's robotaxi network would expand at a "hyper-exponential rate" and be available to half the population of the U.S. by the end of 2025. On Wednesday's earnings ‌call, Musk and his executive team struck a more guarded tone as they fielded analysts' questions about a slower-than-expected rollout. Since launching a small robotaxi ‌pilot in Austin in June 2025, Tesla has expanded to only a handful of other cities, in Texas and Florida, with service often limited to outlying areas. Tesla said paying customers have traveled ​2.5 million miles in its robotaxi service, including 380,000 miles in rides without an in-vehicle safety monitor. Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi miles remain well below the more than 220 million autonomous miles driven by Waymo through the end of March, underscoring the lead Alphabet's self-driving unit holds in commercial deployment, Forrester analyst Paul Miller said. Barclays analysts wrote earlier this month that Tesla's perceived advantage in robotaxis is its "ability to scale more rapidly," but instead it "has been seen by many investors as somewhat 'slow.'" Investors have valued Tesla on ‌the promise that robotaxis and its Optimus humanoid robots will ⁠one day become its primary revenue drivers. The stock trades at more than 166 times forward earnings estimates, far above the multiples of traditional automakers and Big Tech companies. The stock, which has fallen nearly 17% this year as of last close, ⁠was down about 4% in premarket trading. WHY THE ROLLOUT IS SLOWER Before the Austin launch last year, Musk talked about how Tesla's technology is "a general solution that works anywhere," in contrast to the more deliberate, city-by-city approach of Alphabet's Waymo, the U.S. leader in driverless taxis. On Wednesday, Musk and other executives delved into the specific details of scaling up robotaxi ​service ​in individual cities. "Regulatory situations are different city by city," said Lars Moravy, Tesla's vice president ​of vehicle engineering. "The reason we're expanding city by city is ‌to make sure that we're meeting all of those one at a time." CFO Vaibhav Taneja added "there are different kinks... not just on the software front, but on the operations front, that we're trying to tackle." He said the company wants to "sort these things out in a smaller fleet in a controlled manner" before going "really high in terms of deployment." Wells Fargo analyst Colin Langan asked why the number of vehicles is still "in the dozens as opposed to hundreds." What is the "roadblock to start adding more vehicles on the ground?" he asked.