What’s Tesla hiding?
Reverse Hockey Stick
Tesla’s shares plummeted after Bloomberg reported that the company was pushing back its much-hyped “robotaxi” event from August 8 to no sooner than October.
Shortly after the Elon Musk-led company’s Q1 earnings fell far short of expectations earlier this year, the mercurial CEO took to X-formerly-Twitter to announce the reveal of a “robotaxi,” a move that disappointed investors at the time.
And given the latest news, shareholders are becoming suspicious of the company’s driverless taxi service hype, with shares falling roughly eight percent on Thursday and several more points immediately after the markets opened on Friday.
The slide put an end to an 11-day rally, with Tesla surpassing expectations with its Q2 sales numbers, and the approval of Musk’s gargantuan $56 billion pay package.
The delay raises plenty of glaring questions: will the company have anything to show by October? After all, Musk has promised a fully autonomous vehicle to become a reality “next year” every single year for the last decade.
Hopes and Dreams
Musk has since doubled down on the company’s controversial and misleadingly-named “Full Self-Driving” software, a Level 2 autonomy driver assistance feature that still requires drivers to pay attention to the road at all times.
Given the hundreds of collisions and dozens of deaths related to the company’s overarching Autopilot system, plenty of Tesla owners have seemingly been lulled into a false sense of security, triggering several government probes.
Instead of focusing the company’s efforts on an actually-affordable vehicle — something for which investors have been calling for years — Musk has drawn a line in the sand.
“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” he told investors on an earnings call earlier this year.
In short, there’s a good chance we’ll see only a hint of what a Tesla driverless vehicle could look like later this year.
Given the company’s less-than-stellar track record on timing — it took five years after announcing its Semi truck to ship the first one to customers and over four years to ship the first Cybertruck — it’s likely that a roadworthy and certified Tesla robotaxi is still many years away.
Musk has long garnered a reputation for overpromising and underdelivering, and October’s announcement likely won’t be much different.
More on Tesla: We’re Shocked to Hear That Tesla Is Delaying Its Amazing “Robotaxi” Event
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