Tesla announced on Monday, October 26, 2026, that it had significantly expanded its Houston geofence, the designated area where riders can hail a robotaxi, drawing the boundary in the shape of a rocket in an apparent nod to SpaceX. The company's Robotaxi account posted "Houston, we have liftoff" and "Bigger service area now live." Robotaxi Tracker, a third-party site that monitors autonomous-vehicle coverage, estimated the addition at about 229 square miles, far larger than Waymo's roughly 50-square-mile zone in the same city. Within days, users began reporting that not every part of the new map actually worked and that short trips were being routed on long loops.
The specific two-block example came from Ethan McKanna, the founder of Robotaxi Tracker and a former Tesla employee, who traveled to Houston to try the service after the expansion. Electrek reported that McKanna posted a trip quote showing a 2:05 p.m. pickup on the east side of downtown and a 2:48 p.m. drop-off at Houston Police Department headquarters on Travis Street, only a couple of blocks away. Rather than cutting across downtown, the planned route ran south through Midtown and the Museum District to the Texas Medical Center area, then looped back north. McKanna's own read was that the car appeared to be avoiding railroad crossings downtown.
Business Insider, whose social post carried the claim, described the same item as a route showing "a 40-minute trip to travel two blocks in downtown Houston." The Next Web independently repeated the figure and the loop through Midtown and the Texas Medical Center. Grouped together, the three outlets agree on the actor, the city, the timing and the two-block distance, which is why the substance of the claim holds. The main caveat is that the evidence is an app-generated itinerary and estimated duration rather than a trip that was completed and independently timed, so the 40 minutes describes a quoted route plan more than a measured journey.
Other rider reports from the same rollout are related but separate and should not be folded into this claim. Content creator Hy Luu told Business Insider that his first Houston ride, a roughly 13-mile trip from home to work, took far longer than his usual 45-minute drive in his own Tesla, with a substantial wait for the car before pickup. McKanna also shared screen recordings in which the app returned "location not available" for pins dropped inside the published geofence, and he called Houston "by far the most egregious 'fake' AV service area" he had seen. Tesla did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
It is also worth noting that McKanna was not uniformly negative. He wrote that apart from the routing problem the service "feels really good in Houston," citing reasonable wait times, a large service area and, in his view, better driving than his recent Waymo rides, and he said he expects Tesla to fix the routing. On the central claim, the record supports that a rider publicly posted a roughly 40-minute robotaxi route for a two-block downtown Houston trip, with the modest qualification that the posting was a quoted route rather than a verified completed ride.
