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Elon Musk’s company is giving us a preview of the price wars coming to the robotaxi industry.
Elon Musk’s company is giving us a preview of the price wars coming to the robotaxi industry.
by
Andrew J. Hawkins
Jan 27, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC
Andrew J. Hawkins
is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
Tesla’s robotaxis are not robotaxis in the sense that they’re not fully driverless and still feature safety monitors with access to a kill switch in case anything goes wrong. But the automaker is shaking things up with its approach to pricing, according to a new analysis of the nascent market.
Obi, an app that aggregates real-time pricing and pickup times for multiple ridehailing services, published a sequel to its report from last year that analyzed Waymo’s prices and rider satisfaction compared to traditional ridehail services like Uber and Lyft. The new report now factors in Tesla’s service, since the previous survey represented data prior to Elon Musk’s entry into the market.
The report is based on over a month of data collected between November 27th, 2025, and January 1st, 2026. A total of 94,348 rides from Waymo, Tesla, Uber, and Lyft were included as part of the dataset.
In its analysis, Obi found that Tesla’s robotaxis are significantly less expensive than Waymo, and even Uber and Lyft — but also have some of the longest wait times in the industry. Tesla’s robotaxis were so cheap that it recalled the early days of Uber, when the ridehail company used venture capital cash to significantly undercut legacy taxi operations with dirt-cheap UberX prices.
The average price of a Tesla robotaxi ride in San Francisco was $8.17, and rarely exceeded $10 per trip, according to Obi’s analysis. That’s way cheaper than the next cheapest option, Lyft, which averages $15.47 per ride. Tesla was averaging $1.99 per kilometer, the lowest figure of that category that Obi had ever seen in its reporting. Compare that to Waymo’s $5.72 per kilometer, and you start to get the picture of how Tesla could shape the competitive landscape.
Speaking of Waymo, the robotaxi pioneer is getting more affordable. Back in June, Obi reported that Waymo’s robotaxi rides were on average 30–40 percent more expensive than Uber and Lyft. But now the gap is narrowing, both because Waymo has been dropping its own prices but also because Uber’s and Lyft’s prices are rising. Waymo is now an average of 12.7 percent more expensive than Uber and 27.3 percent more expensive than Lyft. For longer rides between 4.3–9.3 kilometers, Waymo is only 2 percent more expensive than Uber and 17 percent more expensive than Lyft on a per-kilometer basis.
Of course, there are a number of caveats to get out of the way before you can start making apples-to-apples comparisons between Tesla and Waymo. For example, Tesla only operates a handful of vehicles in San Francisco and Austin, while Waymo says it has around 2,000–2,500 across five US cities. As of December 2025, Waymo says it’s providing 450,000 paid trips each week. Tesla lacks the necessary permits to begin driverless operations in California, and has only just started testing fully driverless vehicles in Texas, albeit with chase cars. And there are multiple experts who have raised doubts as to whether Tesla will ever achieve full autonomy with its current hardware.
Still, Tesla’s dirt-cheap robotaxi prices are a sign of the fierce competition that is surely coming for the robotaxi market. The company’s willingness to aggressively subsidize its service in the hopes of grabbing market share from its competitors is noteworthy, but also begs the question: How long can Tesla keep this up? The fact that the company is pricing its service this low at the onset, even before removing safety monitors from its vehicles, may strike some as putting the cart before the driverless horse. But time will tell how committed Tesla is to this pricing structure.
You may not have to pay much for a Tesla robotaxi ride, but patience is definitely a requirement. The company’s robotaxi service in San Francisco features by far the longest wait times, with an average ETA of 15.32 minutes — “considerably higher” than Waymo, Uber, and Lyft, Obi says.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s average ETA is 5.74 minutes. And outside of a peak demand time in the afternoon when Waymo ETAs are significantly longer, the Alphabet company’s wait times are frequently shorter than Uber’s and are getting closer to Lyft’s at many times of the day, Obi says.
As for consumer demand, Obi surveyed 2,000 people from California, Nevada, Texas, and Arizona to find out how they were feeling about these new robots. Enthusiasm is growing, with the survey showing a significant increase in comfort levels riding in an robotaxi compared to the last survey — up from 35 percent to 63 percent.
People aren’t thrilled by the high costs, with 45 percent of respondents citing it as a concern. Other points of dissatisfaction are long wait times (33 percent), cancellations (29 percent), and lack of competition (24 percent). But confidence in the technology is trending high. More than half of respondents believe robotaxis will be safer than human-driven rides within five years, signaling growing trust despite some recent high-profile headlines. Still, safety remains a sticking point, with over 50 percent of respondents citing it as a persistent worry and 47 percent saying they’re concerned about possible failures.
Obi says it hopes to include Zoox, which recently launched a free robotaxi service in San Francisco, in its next analysis.
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Andrew J. Hawkins
Autonomous Cars
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