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 US population 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 travelled 4.02-million kilometres in its robotaxi service, including 611,550km in rides without an in-vehicle safety monitor.Its unsupervised robotaxi distance is well below the more than 354-million autonomous kilometres driven by Waymo through to the end of March, underscoring the lead Alphabet’s self-driving unit holds in commercial deployment, said Forrester analyst Paul Miller.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 carmakers and Big Tech companies. The stock, which has fallen nearly 17% this year as of last close, was down 9.8%, set for its biggest percentage drop in more than a year.Investors have valued Tesla on the promise that robotaxis and its Optimus humanoid robots will one day become its primary revenue drivers. Picture: (SOPA Images) Tesla, which had a market capitalisation of about $1.4-trillion (R23.4-trillion) before the selloff, lost more than $140bn (R2.3-trillion) in market value.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 US 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 we’re meeting all of those one at a time.”Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s CFO, said: “There are different kinks, not only on the software front, but on the operations front that we’re trying to tackle”.He said the company wanted 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 was “in the dozens as opposed to hundreds”. He asked what is the “roadblock to start adding more vehicles on the ground”.Tesla vice-president of AI Ashok Elluswamy said even with a few vehicles “you can get a lot of miles out of them”. He said the growth in robotaxi miles driven is “literally exponential. Just it’s in the early part of the exponential. That’s why it’s hard for others to comprehend”.Musk on Wednesday’s call reiterated Tesla was balancing the pace of the expansion with safety. “We want to grow as fast as possible with robotaxi without harm to anyone.”In an investor presentation in January, Tesla said its robotaxis would expand to seven metro areas by the end of June: Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa and Las Vegas.Until Tuesday, Tesla had only launched in three of those cities — Dallas, Houston and Miami — with service limited to outlying sections of Houston and Miami.The company announced on Tuesday it was “now in Tampa and Orlando” after several analyst reports ahead of earnings that mentioned the slow expansion. But the service areas in those cities, like Miami and Houston, were limited to less-trafficked neighbourhoods outside the city centres.Customer testing of the robotaxi service in the weeks after the Dallas and Houston launches found long waiting times, with sometimes no availability at all.Reuters