August 28, 2026 - Nevada Approves 8,000 Robotaxi Permits

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for August 28, 2026, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry. 

For those who attend the annual CES every January in Las Vegas, one of the most miserable parts of the week used to be the wait in the taxi line to get around all the different venues hosting events and suites where companies were holding meetings. Las Vegas is a city that relies heavily on tourism and large conferences and is notoriously unwalkable, making services like taxis essential. The emergence of ride-hailing, like Uber and Lyft, in the mid-2010s made transportation around town much easier, but still slow and costly. There are currently 3,250 permitted taxis in Las Vegas and an estimated 7,000 ride-hail vehicles. 

CES 2027 in January could see a substantial new player in the local mobility market: robotaxis. The Nevada Transportation Authority has issued permits for 8,000 robotaxis to be deployed over the next year in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located. Tesla has a permit for 5,000 robotaxis, Waymo can operate 1,000 vehicles, and Uber can run another 1,000. Uber will be running vehicles provided by Motional and Zoox. Zoox already has a permit of its own for up to 100 vehicles that it got about a year ago, and it has been operating several dozen of its robotaxis since late 2025. 

Tesla doesn't expect to deploy its full allotment, with Cybercab Chief Engineer Eric Early telling TechCrunch it would be satisfied to get 2,500 vehicles on the road. Waymo is most likely to use its full allotment as it has now begun deploying the Zeekr built Ojai in several cities, and it will start receiving Hyundai Ioniq 5s later this year. Motional has been testing its systems in Las Vegas since 2018 and has provided over 100,000 rides with safety drivers through 2023. Now that Zoox has received a NHTSA waiver for its purpose-built robotaxi, it is also planning to ramp up production at its facility in Fremont, California. Even if the full allotment of robotaxi licenses isn't used, Las Vegas will likely be one of the largest robotaxi markets in the world by the end of 2027. 

Thanks for listening.