Texas publishes the fleet of every authorized automated-vehicle operator, vehicle by vehicle, and at 10:47 UTC on 22 September the state's own lookup returned 476 vehicles for Tesla Robotaxi and 988 for Waymo. Across the thirty days to that pull Tesla's count rose 149% and Waymo's 43%, the comparison doing the rounds on X this morning. Counted in vehicles, which is how the registry is kept, Waymo added 297 and Tesla added 285.
Both percentages are correct. What they rank is the starting points. Tesla opened the window on 191 vehicles and Waymo on 691, a base 3.6 times larger, so two similar adds divide into very different figures: 285 ÷ 191 = 149.2%, and 297 ÷ 691 = 43.0%. The twelve-vehicle gap between the adds runs the opposite way to the percentages.
The two fleets are not even the same vintage. Every one of Tesla's 476 vehicles is a model-year 2026 car, while Waymo's 988 carry model years running back to 2021, 91 of them, and 676 of 2024, which is what an installed base looks like beside a build-out. Alphabet publishes weekly rides and has never filed a Texas vehicle count; Tesla has published neither.
Seven days ranks them a third way: +37 against zero
Over the week to 22 September Tesla added 37 vehicles, 8.4% on a base of 439, and Waymo added none. Three windows on one table, three different rankings.
The bull reading treats that third one as momentum: a fleet early in its ramp belongs in percentages, and +37 against zero is the ramp arriving. The daily series says the zero is a tail rather than a stall. Waymo has been on 988 since 2 September, the day it went up by 252.
Neither month is a growth rate
Waymo's count moved on two of the thirty days: +45 on 25 August and +252 on 2 September. Those two days are the entire month, the other twenty-eight are flat, and the newest Waymo VIN on the state's list is dated 2 September. Tesla's moved on nine days and sat still on twenty-one, once going down by a single vehicle on 28 August. Its biggest day, +106 on 2 September, is 37.2% of the month, and its two biggest together are 64.9% of it.
A percentage taken across that measures when each operator filed paperwork rather than how fast either builds cars. Filing dates are the only thing an hourly poll of a registry can see.
A tracker's first sighting is not a registration date
The third-largest robotaxi fleet in Texas is Avride's, 344 Hyundai Ioniq 5s on the state's list this morning, and it has moved once in the whole published series: 317 vehicles from 9 June to 10 August, 344 from 11 August, unchanged for six weeks. Anyone reading the day a poller first saw those VINs as the day Texas registered them would report an arrival that happened in the spring.
The same registry is not a robotaxi leaderboard either. Behind the six names the trackers follow — Waymo, Tesla, Avride, Nuro at 47, Zoox at 44 and May Mobility at 22, or 1,921 vehicles between them — sit freight carriers holding the same class of authorization: Aurora with 91 vehicles, Gatik 64, Kodiak 33, Torc 32, Bot Auto 13 and Waabi 13.
476 cars is 3.2% of what moves Tesla's revenue by 1%
Set against the scale we worked out in August, 476 vehicles is 3.2% of the roughly 14,800 cars needed to move Tesla's revenue by 1%, and the month's 285 additions are 1.9% of it. The Cybercab column has gone from 45 to 67 in seventeen days, and 67 is 14.1% of the Texas fleet.
Registered is not deployed, and the state is plain about what it publishes: an authorization holder may "maintain the listing of their active vehicles by adding and deleting specific vehicles", and nothing in the program asks whether a listed car carries anyone. Crowd-sourced ride receipts on the same tracker matched 19 plates to a fare in the past thirty days, against 476 registered — the gap we flagged in August when the Texas count was 186.
Our year-end cone started from 420 registered on 3 September. Nineteen days later the registry reads 476, so +56, or 2.95 vehicles a day. Its lowest case puts 1,000 cars in Austin and 700 across Dallas and Houston by 31 December, so its Texas share is 1,700, and reaching that from here needs 12.2 a day. The measured pace is a quarter of the bottom of our own range.
One thing would overturn all of this: the registry moving on most days instead of in batches. A fortnight of daily adds at anything like twenty a day, and the percentage comparison is tracking a build rate rather than a filing schedule.
Vehicle counts, fleet mix, model years and authorization numbers for Tesla Robotaxi, Waymo, Avride, Nuro, Zoox, May Mobility, Aurora, Gatik, Kodiak, Torc, Bot Auto and Waabi are from the Texas Motor Carrier Credentialing System's public operator lookup, paged VIN by VIN at 10:47 UTC on 22 September 2026; the quoted description of how a holder maintains its vehicle list is from the department's automated-vehicle program page. Daily levels before 22 September, the dates each count moved and the ride-receipt figures are from FSD Database's hourly poll of the same registry, whose 22 September totals match the state's own for all six of those names; the receipts are crowd-sourced sightings rather than state or company data. Every percentage, per-day pace and share here is ours, computed from those counts. The post shown is the framing under examination, not a source for any figure here.
