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TSLA

Robotaxi's weakness at night, Cybertruck and Semi deliveries roughly halved in Q3, Cybercab outnumbered by Waymo 1 to 7

Sources (3)

Musk himself has tied the weakness of vision-only recognition at night to the shortening of operating hours. The Q3 delivery beat came entirely from Model 3/Y pushing out inventory, while Cybertruck and Semi fell 48% year on year.

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The Cybercab fleet grew from 45 to 169 in a month, but that is still 1 to 7 against Waymo's 1,154 in Texas, and the first month of rides went badly. Together they strike at two stories: that vision-only can scale to truly driverless operation, and that new products add incremental growth.

Key evidence

  • Musk on X, 3 Oct: Austin Robotaxi operating hours are extended from 10pm to 11pm. His explanation is that at night vision-only cannot see a small grey cat lying on grey tarmac, which in effect concedes a night-time weakness of vision-only.
  • On launch day in Austin in June 2025, the operating window ran from 6am to midnight. After 15 months the service closes an hour earlier than on launch day (11pm against midnight). The fleet is bigger, but the operating window has shrunk rather than grown.
  • Waymo's sixth-generation system has triple redundancy from 13 cameras, 4 lidars and 6 millimetre-wave radars, and runs the same way day and night, in all weather.
  • Other models in Q3 (Cybertruck and Semi) delivered only 8,295 units, down 48% year on year (15,933 in the same period last year).
  • Of the 486,532 vehicles delivered in Q3, Model 3/Y accounted for 457,387 and held up the total, leaving only 8,295 for Cybertruck and Semi combined (the end of Model S/X production in Q2 also adds to the year-on-year gap).
  • Semi only delivered its first trucks to Pepsi and DHL on 27 Sep, and the ramp is slow (of Einride's 500-truck order, only about 75 are due in 2026).
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  • Dedicated Cybercabs registered in Texas rose from 45 at launch to 169 in a month (nearly quadrupled).
  • At the same point Waymo has 1,154 vehicles approved for commercial use in Texas (including 359 of the new Ojai model). Across the US it has more than 4,000 vehicles on the road, more than 500,000 paid rides a week and a cumulative 270 million fully driverless miles.
  • Waymo already operates in 15 cities, with another 15 queued plus international launches in London, Tokyo and Munich. Tesla still has only one city, Austin.
  • Cybercab's 169 against Waymo's 1,154 in Texas alone comes to roughly 1 to 7. Tesla's Texas Robotaxi fleet also has 420 converted Model Ys, which are not open to individual owners.
  • Paying passengers report long waits, misplaced pick-up and drop-off points, and technical faults such as butterfly doors and the trunk not closing properly (echoing the 17 Sep case in which a 10-minute ride took 70 minutes).
  • The 169 is a registration count, not a count of truly driverless vehicles in operation (crowd-sourced tracking on 23 Sep once showed only 8 active on the road in Austin, so registered does not mean running).

Catalysts to watch

  • Q3 results on 21 Oct, to test the real hit to gross margin from collapsing Cybertruck demand, with higher prices and fewer sales
  • Further changes to Austin Robotaxi operating hours (whether they reopen to midnight or later)
  • Official word on Cybercab expansion to new cities, and disclosure of how many vehicles actually run driverless
  • The pace of Waymo's launches in new cities (15 cities in the queue plus three international cities)

Risks

  • Musk's cat explanation may be softened for public relations and is not third-party testing
  • Ending Model S/X production in Q2 accounts for part of the year-on-year gap for other models, so the 48% fall cannot all be put down to Cybertruck
  • The 169 is a registration count, and the number of vehicles actually active could be far lower (only 8 were running at one point on 23 Sep)
  • The Cybercab ramp is still early, and a rise that nearly quadrupled the fleet in a month is itself a positive signal

Sources 3

  1. Musk X post, 3 Oct (Electrek and multiple sources)
  2. BigGo and multiple sources breaking down official Q3 deliveries, 2 Oct
  3. CNBC, 3 Oct, citing Texas DMV public records

A brief is a lead for our research, not a verified conclusion or advice.