After years of delays, Tesla’s long-awaited robotaxi finally launched yesterday in Austin, and the lack of any discernible bad news about the first day in action led to an 8% pop in the price of the company’s shares.
The launch is very important to Tesla, which has been struggling due to weak demand for its regular vehicles. Indeed, CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said that most of the company is riding on the success of its autonomous products.
Was it the biggest test ever? God, no. It was within a well-mapped subsection of the city, there was a safety monitor in the front passenger seat, it had remote operators ready to potentially step in and in some instances follow behind, it operates only from 6 a.m. to midnight in good weather, and only a chosen few pro-Tesla influencers were invited.
But dang it, it worked.
After taking a couple of rides in the robotaxis yesterday, Wedbush Securities analyst and Tesla bull Dan Ives reiterated his belief that the service could add another $1 trillion to the company’s $1 trillion market cap.
“Overall, these Robotaxis exceeded our expectations and offered a seamless and personalized travel experience that has lit the spark for autonomous driving,” Ives wrote.
The Takeaway
“The future of the company is fundamentally based on large-scale autonomous cars and large scale and large volume, vast numbers of autonomous humanoid robots,” Musk said during the company’s last earnings call. Traders seem to agree, so this first launch going according to plan was good news.
Coke does it again!
Morgan Stanley analyst Dara Mohsenian, who has an overweight rating and $81 price target on the stock, wrote that Fairlife has driven about 60% of Coke’s growth year to date in the US, based on Nielsen scanner data.