Tesla's Cybercab will make its official debut in Austin next week—no steering wheel, and no pedals. Nevada’s regulators had just, before that, loosened its grip on it in Las Vegas by allowing it to operate paid, driverless rides. This was supposed to be a fairly clean bullish story. But when the market opened on Monday, the entire rally from the previous week was fully given back.
$TSLAB hit a mid-session high of 366.42 last Friday, closed at 349.53 on Monday, then traded sideways for the following few days, and is now hovering around 349. The pricing window for this permission-related news is only a day and a bit. With the same news, bulls see it as a commercialization turning point; the seller’s money is treated as a one-time positive catalyst, and the gap in between is what this article is set to unpack.
That Nevada Department of Transportation Services vote raised Tesla’s cap on driverless taxi vehicles in Clark County from 10 to 5,000, effective for the next year. At the same meeting, Waymo and Uber also received licenses, but at a smaller scale. This is the ceiling for permissions—it’s a different thing from the number of vehicles already deployed. How big is the difference? Tesla’s own people put it more directly than anyone else. After the meeting, Cybercab chief engineer Eric Early said that 5,000 has always been the upper limit they were given. By this time next year, Tesla won’t be able to deploy 5,000 vehicles either; he said the bottleneck isn’t technology. He added that being able to do a little over 2,500 vehicles would already make them very satisfied. For a company’s chief engineer to proactively push down expectations on the very day it obtained the license—nobody says something like that casually.
The event scheduled for September 3 is set in Austin. What’s confirmed so far is that it will be invitation-only with the entire session livestreamed. Seats were given to the highest-scoring group of Robotaxi passengers from an in-app raffle. Tesla’s Model Y driverless cars have already been running for a while in several cities in Texas and Florida, and this event is more like inserting the Cybercab into a fleet that’s already in motion. The “getting it started” piece has happened long ago. A launch event that puts a new vehicle on stage, versus an operational change that can be recorded in the income statement—those should be two different prices in the stock market.
The reason behind Monday’s long black candle wasn’t actually about autonomous driving. News about a new round of auto tariffs weighed down the entire U.S. auto-plant sector. At the same time, China announced a recall covering nearly 3 million vehicles. The reason: after severe collisions and electrical circuit failures, the mechanical emergency door handles are not easy to find, which could block escape and rescue. The numbers look alarming, but the remediation is limited—OTA software pushes plus warning labels. The actual money being paid out is limited. This round of checks on hidden door handles targeted multiple automakers at the same time; Tesla is simply the largest by market size among them. In Monday’s drop, the sentiment drag was more than the bookkeeping loss on paper.
To judge how far robotaxis have progressed, mileage is the toughest set of data. Tesla’s Q2 earnings call revealed that cumulative supervised/unsupervised driving exceeded 380,000 miles. The company said that so far there hasn’t been any noteworthy accident. In the same metric for passenger-carrying, Waymo’s driverless ride miles by mid-year have already approached 200 million miles. The company said those miles can still keep rolling up by a large margin each week. Yet the gap between 380,000 and 200 million is a difference in scale, not the kind of small remaining segment left on a progress bar.
Robotaxis account for less than 0.5% of Tesla’s revenue last year, but in Morningstar’s valuation model they represent more than 30%. That firm’s current fair value estimate is $450—placing today’s price in the undervalued range. But this is a model from one institution; the market hasn’t formed that consensus. On the bullish side, the more aggressive view comes from Wedbush’s Dan Ives, with a $600 target price. His logic is that Tesla sells cars at near-cost prices to lock in the installed base, then recovers gross margin through software and mobility subscriptions.
The most specific argument from the bears comes from Gordon Johnson of GLJ. He counted an active Robotaxi fleet of only 31 vehicles; the number truly operating in an unsupervised manner is even smaller. They are all constrained within geofenced areas, and remote human staff are always ready to take over. He cites crowdsourced data to claim that on FSD v14, models like the AI4 need takeover about once every 40 miles. He then pulled up collision records over the past year involving safety drivers in the vehicle. His conclusion is that the market’s valuation for robotaxis and the level of revenue this business can generate right now are not on the same scale. His reliance on crowdsourced data is a soft spot, and Tesla also hasn’t provided better public numbers to rebut either the fleet size or the takeover interval.
I agree with Morningstar’s framework. Robotaxis are indeed the main driver of this stock’s valuation; the auto-selling portion can’t currently support that price. In Q2 revenue, the company hit a record high, but operating margin fell to 1.4%. Earnings per share were far below market expectations, and capital expenditures are still moving higher. The core business is having cash eaten away along the autonomous-driving line; the pace of monetization must outpace the pace of consumption. But on the timeline, I weigh Early’s statements more than Ives’s target price. For the $600 case, the subscription revenue and fleet revenue must bring gross margin back in next year. Early’s original wording indicates that the capacity and operations side aren’t ready yet—and that side can’t be accelerated by just writing code.
So on September 3, there is only one direction of signals that can change the judgment: whether there is a safety driver in the car, and whether the ride is actually paid. If either of those two points truly lands, Johnson’s argument will immediately weaken significantly, and Nevada’s 5,000-vehicle cap will shift from paper to a production-scheduling issue. If what’s unveiled on stage is a vehicle without a steering wheel, paired with a livestream segment, then September 3 is a launch event—not a commercialization timing milestone.
The downside risk cuts just as sharply in the opposite direction. Musk himself said on the call that safety is the biggest constraint right now; one serious accident with casualties can become a global headline. Bad news along this line doesn’t need to be proportional—one incident is enough. The string of updates tied to
#Robotaxi over the next two weeks means that rather than fixating on daily ups and downs, it’s better to record the safety-driver issue in your notebook. Whether the valuation model can hold hinges on that single variable.