One of Tesla’s biggest bulls on Wall Street is ARK Invest, headed by investor Cathie Wood. Ahead of the Robotaxi unveiling event on Thursday, the firm is outlining its expectations.
While basically everything people are hearing about the event is speculation, there are some certainties: Tesla will unveil a Robotaxi and Tesla is holding the event at Warner Bros. Studios.
However, the details of the event are still up in the air. ARK and Wood both believe Tesla will fill in the blanks in terms of timeline and how they plan to launch the Robotaxi fleet in the coming years.
Tesla’s Robotaxi event makes things ‘more real’
Wood says this will make things “more real.” She also recognized Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have predicted autonomous vehicles “every two years for the last five years. I’ll say we expected it last year.”
Other firms, like Morgan Stanley and Guggenheim, have put out more explicit timeline expectations, with Adam Jonas of the former firm saying 2025 or 2026. Guggenheim said Tesla is “extremely unlikely” to reveal an efficient path to Robotaxi commercialization within the next 12 to 24 months.
Tesla ‘extremely unlikely’ to reveal efficient path to Robotaxi commercialization: analyst
Tesla has competition, and it has arrived
Wood believes that competition, which has arrived in the form of Waymo, is being tested by people, introducing them to the prospect of autonomous transportation.
This makes Tesla’s event even more important, because the longer it waits to roll out something that is driverless, the more time it gives the competition to build a rapport with potential customers.
Wood said (via Yahoo Finance):
“This is not if. It is when for Tesla. For Tesla, it’s also how quickly will they roll out? How quickly will they go national? Or even, global with their aspirations?”
ARK also believes Musk has positioned Tesla to take a considerable share of the autonomous vehicle market because of its focus on the project for several years:
“[Musk] has positioned Tesla to win the lion’s share of this market. And this AI project is a winner-take-most project. The company that gets people from Point A to Point B, the fastest, the safest, with as little wait time as possible is going to win the lion’s share of the market. When people see Tesla’s strategy is, and put that together with the fact that Waymo is already doing this…it must be possible.”
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