Due to the postponement of the release of its autonomous taxi RoboTaxi from August to October, Tesla has ended its 11 consecutive price increases.
On July 11th local time, according to foreign media reports, Tesla has postponed the RoboTaxi launch event planned for August to October, so that the project team has more time to manufacture more prototype cars and conduct testing.
According to insiders, the news of the delay of about two months in this release has been conveyed to internal employees. This week, the design team was informed that certain elements of the car need to be redesigned.
In April of this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk set August 8th as the initial date for the press conference. In addition, Tesla announced on July 2nd that it delivered 444000 vehicles in the second quarter ending June 30th, exceeding market expectations. Recently, the optimistic sentiment in the market has driven Tesla's stock price up for 11 consecutive days, increasing its market value by over $257 billion.
However, after the news of the delayed release of RoboTaxi came out, on the 11th, Tesla's (Nasdaq: TSLA) stock price closed at $241.03 per share, down 8.4%, marking the largest decline since January this year, wiping out all gains so far this year and turning downwards. At present, the total market value of the company is 768.7 billion US dollars, with an overnight evaporation of 70.9 billion US dollars (approximately 514.6 billion yuan).
On the other hand, the stock prices of Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft, which provide ride hailing services, both saw a significant increase due to this news. On the 11th, Uber (NYSE: UBER) rose 6.1% to close at $73.48 per share, while Lyft (Nasdaq: LYFT) rose 4.6% to close at $13.53 per share.
Tesla has not yet made a public response to the news. The analysis points out that the plan to build an autonomous taxi service has been brewing at Tesla for many years, at least dating back to Musk's development strategy for the company in 2016.
In recent years, Musk has prioritized this project over developing electric vehicles that are cheaper than Tesla's current cheapest Model 3 model. In 2019, Musk announced during a post earnings conference call that Tesla would launch one million autonomous taxis in 2020, but this goal was not achieved.
During the post earnings conference call for the first quarter of this year, facing questions from investors about affordable electric vehicles, Musk said, "Actually, we should be seen as an AI robotics company. If you only see Tesla as an automotive company... then you're wrong
Furthermore, for Tesla, the "release" date does not necessarily mean that the new product will be officially launched in the near future. For example, Tesla launched the all electric heavy-duty truck Semi in 2017, but delivery did not begin until December 2022.
However, there are still optimistic voices in the face of a decline in stock prices. As a long-term bullish on Tesla, Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, a US investment bank, said, "Although people will clearly have a negative reaction to the August 8th delay, we believe that the timing of autonomous taxis, partnerships, and ultimately the emergence of autonomous driving and AI driven technology will make us stick to our bullish argument on Tesla
Tesla's self driving taxis can be traced back to 2016, which is the second chapter of Musk's Tesla "grand plan" to develop autonomous driving capabilities through a large amount of car driving data and achieve car sharing through autonomous driving.
Musk stated at the earnings conference in April this year that the Tesla Robotaxi is called "Cybercab", which is a vehicle customized for taxi services. As part of the fleet, Tesla owners may also send their cars out to make money, which Musk described as a "combination of Airbnb and Uber".
Tesla's confidence in promoting autonomous taxis lies in the powerful advantage of its intelligent driving software FSD (fully autonomous driving). Tesla has introduced "end-to-end neural network" technology, which deeply learns from over a million driving data and uses artificial intelligence technology to influence vehicle control, such as operating steering wheel pedals, turn signals, etc., instead of hard coding every driving behavior.
In the first quarter of 2024, the total actual road mileage of Tesla FSD has reached 1.25 billion miles (approximately 2 billion kilometers), far exceeding the total mileage of other companies. Tesla expects that at the current pace, the total mileage of FSD is expected to reach 6 billion miles within a year.