Nevada clears Tesla, Waymo, Uber for 8,000 Clark County robotaxis

The Nevada Transportation Authority on Thursday unanimously cleared Tesla, Waymo and Uber to run commercial robotaxi services in Clark County, with a combined ceiling of 8,000 vehicles over the next 12 months, TechCrunch reported. Tesla holds up to 5,000 of the slots. Waymo and Uber get up to 1,000 each, and Uber's allocation runs through partnerships with Motional and Zoox.

Tesla's own engineers are already dialing back what that ceiling means. "The 5,000 has always been a ceiling for us. I don't think we'll be in a position by this time next year to deploy 5,000 vehicles, and it's not [because of] the technology," Eric Early, Tesla's Cybercab chief engineer, told the authority. Early added that Tesla would "be extremely happy and satisfied if we could get ourselves up to 2,500, maybe a bit higher than that in the next year."

The taxi and livery incumbents pushed back. Kimberly Maxson-Rushton, representing the Livery Operators Association, told commissioners the filings "raise two grave concerns. One deals with the oversaturation of the commercial transportation industry as a whole in Nevada and the second one deals with the overcrowding of the roadways, and specifically the Golden Triangle," the corridor between the airport and Las Vegas Boulevard where much of the current AV testing sits, alongside downtown and the Town Square shopping district.

Uber went into the hearing arguing for a hybrid model that keeps human drivers in the mix alongside autonomous vehicles, a distinct pitch from Waymo's fully driverless posture. Waymo itself walked in with fresh regulatory tailwind from earlier this month, when California cleared it for paid rides across 18 counties, one of dozens of autonomous-vehicle stories on our tracker in recent weeks.

What the commissioners granted are permission slips, not deployments. Whether Vegas gets thousands of robotaxis or a few hundred over the next year turns on how fast each company can build and stand up service in the Golden Triangle, and how tightly the state chooses to police the ramp.