Yikes! Elon Musk's Robotaxi Fleet Is Smaller Than Pepsi's Doritos Truck Fleet

Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) has spent years pitching investors on an autonomy revolution, but PepsiCo Inc. (NASDAQ:PEP) disclosed it is running more driverless vehicles on U.S. roads than Tesla’s entire unsupervised robotaxi service.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that PepsiCo has 41 fully driverless box trucks on public roads in Arizona, Texas and Arkansas, hauling Doritos, Cheetos and Gatorade between bottling plants, warehouses and retailers like Walmart Inc. (NYSE:WMT) and Dollar General Corp. (NYSE:DG).

The trucks have been operating with no human on board since June 2025. PepsiCo told the Journal the fleet has logged zero accidents and arrives on time 99% of the time once weather and traffic variables are stripped out.

Autonomous trucking startup Gatik builds the trucks with Isuzu Motors, running them on Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) DRIVE AGX in-vehicle compute.

The Doritos Math Is Brutal For Tesla

Tesla’s unsupervised robotaxi fleet has reportedly shrunk to roughly 20 vehicles in Austin, six in Houston and three in Dallas. On June 3, Tesla expanded the Austin geofence to cover the entire 245-square-mile metro area, stretching that fleet thin.

Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Waymo dwarfs both, with about 3,000 robotaxis across 10 U.S. cities completing 500,000 paid rides per week.

PepsiCo placed a 100-truck Tesla Semi order in December 2017 and has reportedly received about 36 of them eight years later. Volume Semi production only began in late April.

Prediction Markets Are Skeptical Of Musk’s Autonomy Pitch

Tesla’s $1.54 trillion market capitalization rests heavily on the autonomy thesis. JPMorgan upgraded the stock to Neutral last week with a $475 price target, framing the company as a “physical AI” play.

Musk has tied any meaningful robotaxi fleet ramp to the delayed Full Self-Driving v15 software rewrite, pushing serious volume to late 2026 or early 2027.

Polymarket and Kalshi traders look less convinced. A Polymarket contract on whether Tesla launches an unsupervised robotaxi service in California by June 30 sits at roughly 6%, on more than $108,000 in volume.

Kalshi traders give Musk’s Optimus humanoid robot just a 15% chance of a commercial release this year, on $305,000 in volume.

A snack company’s driverless lead may complicate Musk’s autonomy pitch as Tesla heads into July earnings.

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