Tesla’s fledgling “Robotaxi” network drove fewer miles for paying customers in the second quarter than in the first, according to a chart the company released Wednesday.

The quarter-over-quarter decline runs counter to Tesla’s rhetoric and actions over the past year. Tesla has staked much of its future on the idea of ​​a massive, low-cost, cash-generating Robotaxi fleet, or going “against the wall for autonomy,” as CEO Elon Musk put it in 2024. The quarterly reduction in Robotaxi miles also comes amid weakening profits in Tesla’s core businesses, which underperformed Wall Street expectations, according to figures released Wednesday. Tesla shares plunged more than 13% in early trading Thursday.

At a glance, the graph appears to show steady growth in paid Robotaxi rides between August 2025 and June 2026. But the numbers shown are cumulative and, when broken down by quarter, show that Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet of Model Y SUVs carrying paying passengers covered about 1.1 million miles in the first quarter. That figure fell to about 700,000 miles in the second quarter, a decline of about 36%.

This despite the company having expanded its fledgling operation to six cities in Texas and Florida, with a mix of supervised and unsupervised vehicles.

Tesla is also likely counting paid miles driven in the San Francisco Bay Area, even though these branded Robotaxis do not have the state-required permits to operate autonomously and also do not have a safety driver behind the wheel. Tesla has referred to that operation as part of its “Robotaxi coverage.”

The decline in miles driven also comes as Tesla made a surprising admission in a conference call Wednesday about its second-quarter results. In response to a question about how slowly Tesla is scaling the Robotaxi service, Musk said the company needs to “accumulate driving data specific to the Cybercab” (the company’s purpose-built two-seat gold sedan that is expected to make up the bulk of its autonomous vehicle fleet) “before we can put many of them on the road.”

“Unlike, say, the Model 3, Model Y and our other vehicles, where we have a lot of vehicles on the road, millions of vehicles on the road, we don’t have that for Cybercab. So we actually have to put in the miles with Cybercabs that are equipped with steering wheels and gas and brake pedals, that kind of thing, to calibrate the Cybercab chassis,” he said. “As we are sure, the number of cyber taxis in cities will increase dramatically.”

This represents something of a break from claims the company has made for years about how its fleet of nearly 10 million customer cars has been quietly collecting data in the background to train future robotaxis (in addition to training driver-assist software for consumers, which Tesla calls Full Self-Driving).

On the call, Tesla executives framed the slow progress as a matter of safety caution.

“Our goals are very ambitious for Robotaxi, but we must be careful not to cause accidents or cause harm to anyone,” Musk said.

He then said he doesn’t want Tesla Robotaxis to cause accidents because he believes bad media coverage could lead to a regulatory crackdown.

“Although there are, I believe, between 30 and 40,000 automobile deaths per year in the United States alone, most of them don’t generate any press, in fact almost none of them are read about. But if we injure even one person, it will be front-page news around the world, and regulators will immediately clamp down on our activities,” he said.

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI, boasted that Tesla Robotaxis have had “zero notable incidents” driving “over 380,000 miles” without a safety operator on board. He did not define what the company considers “notable incidents,” although he stated that “any reports have been from other actors that impacted us when we were stationary.”

Tesla has reported 22 accidents to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the year since it began testing its Robotaxi service. While most of them involve other cars crashing into the Tesla Robotaxis, the company has reported three crashes caused by its teleoperators moving the vehicles remotely and multiple cases of cars crashing into objects at low speed, including curbs, utility poles, and the platform of a crane.

This represents another narrative shift for the company. Tesla spent years claiming that the biggest obstacle to large-scale Robotaxi deployment was regulatory in nature, although the company never actually specified what those prohibitive regulations were.

Now the company says that proving safety is the only thing holding Robotaxis back. And while it’s still in the early stages, Tesla still chose this moment to take a victory lap over its decision to build an autonomy stack that doesn’t use radar or lidar sensors, like industry leader Waymo.

“Historically, so-called experts have always claimed that you need lidars, radars, HD maps and the entire kitchen sink to drive safely. Here we show that that is not true. You can have safe, comfortable and affordable autonomy with just cameras,” Elluswamy said.

Both Musk and Elluswamy also promised that growth is coming. They noted that the number of unattended miles driven has increased about 10% each week since Tesla began offering them late last year.

“I think we will continue to scale very, very quickly,” Musk said.