Italian luxury sports car maker Ferrari (NYSE: RACE) is Morgan Stanley’s pick as the firm’s “favorite electric vehicle stock for 2022,” according to a note released by the Autos and Shared Mobility team. Led by analysts Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley’s team of stock professionals chose Ferrari over other high-powered EV stock favorites, including Rivian and Tesla, both of which are widely considered the most promising and overall leader of the EV industry, respectively.
“Ferrari was listed as “Our new ‘Top Pick’ (replacing GM),” Morgan Stanley wrote in a note to investors released this morning. “Can justify 100% of the company’s market cap with ‘fine-art’ ICE business…leaving [for] the EV business (currently in skunkworks) for free. This makes RACE our favorite EV stock for 2022.” Ferrari was listed ahead of Rivian, which is ranked 2nd on Morgan Stanley’s list, and Tesla, which sits in fourth, behind Freyr, a Norway-based company in the business of manufacturing battery cells with sustainable energy.
US Auto Stock Rankings for FY 22 | Morgan Stanley/Adam Jonas
Ferrari is the new ‘Top Pick’ ?? $RACE$GM$RIVN$TSLA pic.twitter.com/KRcbjahHOb
— David Tayar (@davidtayar5) January 4, 2022
Morgan Stanley’s outlook on Ferrari is interesting, especially as the company has not technically made any formal statement regarding plans to transition to a full lineup of electric cars. The Italian company does have plans to launch its first all-electric model in 2025, company boss John Elkann said in April 2021. Ferrari’s commercial boss, Enrico Galliera, said it would not produce any BEV models until EV tech would allow the company to “produce a car that fits with our position.” Galliera said, “If we bring in new technology, then we need to bring something new to the market. That’s how Ferrari has always worked with new technology. The evolution of new technology is 100% in the DNA of Ferrari.”
The company’s position regarding EVs was only solidified in 2021, as Elkann stated during the Ferrari Q2 Earnings Call that executives welcomed regulations that would restrict the widespread production of gas-powered engines. However, there could be a substantial wait for Ferrari to make a full-fledged shift to EVs, as Elkann added, “… we’ll have changes within the energy supply, which could lead to having alternatives, for example, e-fuels or hydrogen. But that is really 2030, 2040, and most likely midpoint 2035, where we’ll see this happening. What we want to make sure is to be able to use the technologies available, which today are hybrid going to electric and exploiting those to the fullest and in the best way possible.”
Tesla Model 3 Performance charms legendary Ferrari test driver
Morgan Stanley placed an “Overweight” rating on Ferrari with a $350 price target. Ferrari shares were trading at $235.10 at the time of writing.
Interestingly, Rivian and Tesla were subsided by Morgan Stanley’s note. Rivian began deliveries of its first EV, the R1T pickup truck, in late October. Morgan Stanley’s note indicates that Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN) is “The One” for your portfolio, based on “a clean-sheet strategy with deterministic capital (raised ~$25bn) focused on adventure and commercial fleets.” Analysts stated that 2022 will be a tumultuous year for the automaker’s stock as it attempts to ramp manufacturing. Rivian will break ground on its second U.S. facility during Summer 2022. The new plant will be located near Atlanta, Georgia.
Rivian was given an “Overweight” rating with a $147 price target. Shares were trading at $100.65 at the time of writing.
Meanwhile, Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) is ranked as the fourth-best EV stock for 2022. “While Tesla is not our top EV pick, it’s arguably our most ‘important’ stock pick. Not owning Tesla means not owning the one company that could make all your other EV names obsolete. A big 4Q delivery beat is just the opening act. Gigapress and structural pack come to life in 2022.”
Tesla will also have Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas coming to life this year, which could expand the production output by 1 million units when coupled with potential expansions at Fremont and Gigafactory Shanghai. Tesla came just shy of the 1 million unit mark that many thought the company would reach this year. However, the automaker is still the most valuable car company in the world and is the sole reason for the EV movement in 2022.
Morgan Stanley gave Tesla an “Overweight” rating with a price target of $1,200. Shares were trading at $1,143 at the time of writing.
Disclosure: Joey Klender is a $TSLA Shareholder. He currently does not own any $RACE or $RIVN shares.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
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