Tesla’s robotaxis are live in Orlando.

On July 21, 2026, Tesla switched on its Robotaxi service in Orlando and Tampa — the second wave of its Florida expansion after Miami earlier this month. This isn’t a demo or a supervised pilot: driverless Model Ys with no one in the driver’s seat are picking up passengers, navigating on Tesla’s Unsupervised Full Self-Driving stack, and dropping them off. You hail one from the Tesla Robotaxi app the way you’d hail an Uber.

We’re building our first depot in Greater Orlando, so we watched this launch the way a marina watches the first boats arrive. Here’s what actually launched, why the coverage zone is more interesting than it looks, and the question this raises that almost nobody is asking yet.

What launched, exactly

• Live driverless service — passengers ride with an empty driver’s seat. There is no safety attendant in the vehicle.
• Model Ys, not Cybercabs — today’s fleet is Tesla’s own Model Ys running unsupervised FSD. The purpose-built Cybercab — no steering wheel, no pedals — is still in testing, and there’s still no public order book for individual buyers.
• A geofenced zone — local reporting puts the initial “green zone” at roughly 25–45 square miles of central and southern Orlando, centered on the Semoran Boulevard / Lee Vista corridor near Orlando International — though it doesn't yet drop off at the airport terminals, the theme parks, or downtown.
• App-hailed, cheap — rides come through the Tesla Robotaxi app; reported pricing starts at $3.25 plus about $1 per mile.

The zone Tesla picked is a tell

Look at that geofence again: Semoran and Lee Vista, hugging Orlando International. Anyone who lives here recognizes it instantly — that’s the airport corridor. Semoran is the main artery to MCO, and Lee Vista is the commercial spine beside it. Tesla didn’t start with downtown bar traffic or suburban school runs — it started where ride demand is densest, most predictable, and runs all day: people moving around the airport’s orbit. (No terminal drop-offs yet — the day that changes, this zone becomes the busiest robotaxi market in Florida.)

That’s the same playbook it ran in Austin and the Bay Area — open a compact, high-demand zone, then widen it in steps as the system proves out. (Reading from Austin, where all of this started? We made you a page.) If Orlando follows the pattern, the zone grows from here. And Orlando is a strong market to grow in: tens of millions of visitors a year, most of whom land without a car, in a metro built around exactly the kind of point-to-point trips a robotaxi is good at. It’s a big part of why we picked Greater Orlando for depot #1 in the first place.

The question nobody’s asking: where do these cars live?

Every robotaxi on the road right now needs the same things between rides: charging, cleaning, inspection, and a place to wait that isn’t a curb. Today, that’s Tesla’s problem — the Orlando fleet is Tesla-owned, and Tesla self-hosts its own operations, out of sight. Which is exactly why it’s easy to forget the infrastructure exists at all. Passengers never see it, the same way airline passengers never see the hangar.

Tesla has been clear about the long-term model: a network where individually owned cars — eventually Cybercabs — earn on the platform, the way hosts earn on Airbnb. The moment that order book opens, the infrastructure question stops being Tesla’s and lands on every owner: your car just finished twelve rides, it’s at 18% charge, somebody spilled a smoothie in the back, and it’s 1am. Where does it go?

Our answer is a depot: a dedicated facility where the car lives, charges, gets cleaned and inspected, and goes back out — while the owner gets a monthly statement instead of a second job. If you want the full primer, we wrote one: what a robotaxi depot actually does. If you want the economics, the earnings calculator will run your scenario and email it to you — projections, not guarantees, as always.

What this launch changes for would-be owners

Honestly? It doesn’t change the math — it changes the credibility of the math. Every earnings model for a Cybercab has rested on an assumption that unsupervised robotaxi service would actually operate in real cities, at real scale, in mixed traffic and Florida weather. As of this week, that assumption is a thing you can go ride in Orlando for the price of a short fare. The revenue side is still unproven for individual owners — no order book, no owner earnings history, and we’ll keep saying so — but the core technical bet is now carrying passengers a few miles from where our depot will stand.

Our first dock opens in Greater Orlando in Q3 2026 with 50 founding stalls. You don’t have to live in Florida — or the US — to hold one: the car earns at the depot, and you watch it from wherever you are. Reserving costs $450, fully refundable until your Cybercab is onboarded, and credits in full against the $1,000 onboarding fee.