These are the states where Tesla is racing to hit Elon Musk's end-of-year Robotaxi goal (www.businessinsider.com)

Tesla is ramping up hiring and regional operations as it pushes to meet Elon Musk’s goal of running Robotaxi service in eight to ten metro areas by the end of 2025. The company has launched paid services in San Francisco and Austin and says it aims for more than 1,000 vehicles; shareholder guidance named Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston and Miami next. Public job listings — more than 40 roles across a dozen-plus cities including Orlando, Tampa and Las Vegas — seek fleet support, vehicle operators, incident specialists, insurance-claims staff and engineers, while "Project Rodeo" test drivers continue to collect city-specific training data (Austin reportedly had ~300 test drivers ahead of launch). For the AI/ML community this signals Tesla’s push to operationalize its vision-only autonomous stack at scale, betting on camera-trained models (no LiDAR/radar) and massive fleet data to reach commercial ride-hailing quickly and cheaply. That approach contrasts with Waymo/Zoox, which have already accumulated far higher ride counts using different sensor stacks, and highlights trade-offs in safety validation, data needs and edge-case coverage. The biggest barrier remains regulatory: U.S. oversight is decentralized, California still requires multiple permits for commercial AVs (Tesla lacks a commercial AV permit there), and many states vary on insurance and authorization timelines. Tesla’s hiring surge shows readiness to scale operations, but technical validation and patchwork regulation will determine how fast its vision-first Robotaxi strategy proves viable.