Tesla’s exciting ride
Huge news week for Tesla, and it’s only Tuesday. Hop on in — you have to push in the handle to open the door — and let’s go for a ride:
Over the weekend, Tesla began testing its driverless cars without safety monitors — a move that sent Tesla up and competitors Uber and Lyft down as investors viewed it as concrete momentum toward Tesla’s autonomous future.
Having a truly autonomous ride-hailing service would bring Tesla closer to catching up with Waymo, which is leading the battle for the driverless future. Tesla ultimately hopes to use its autonomous tech to turn much of its existing fleet into driverless cars and quickly scale its Robotaxi service — a move that would help prove itself to be an AI company rather than just a car company.
Rival Ford announced it is taking a massive $19.5 billion write-down on its EV investments, and will repurpose its EV battery plant for energy storage batteries. Tesla’s share price was unperturbed in after-hours trading.
Finally, new monthly US sales data from Cox Automotive confirmed that Tesla’s sales are declining — but also revealed a surprise: its market share is rising.
Wedbush Securities analyst and Tesla bull Dan Ives is so excited for the company’s next year that he published a series of characteristically bold predictions Monday, including aggressive Robotaxi expansion across the US in 2026, reaching 30-plus cities, and that Tesla will command about 70% of the global autonomous market over the next decade.
The Takeaway
That’s not all from Ives, who appears to realize that Musk cannot pull off this miracle alone. He expects that federal regulatory barriers around Full Self-Driving and autonomous driving will ease significantly under President Trump, and anticipates an executive order early next year that would shift more authority to federal regulators and reduce state-level control over autonomous driving rules.
Ives says that would be pretty dang lucrative: with a current ~$1.4 trillion market cap, Tesla could reach $2 trillion within the next year, with a bull case of $3 trillion by the end of 2026.