Morgan Stanley in new $TSLA note on the Tesla Semi:
"Tesla can generate ~$12-18k/month from its autonomous trucking software ($0.85-$1/mile subscription fee x 18k miles driven per month). This compares to ~$100/month for FSD on consumer vehicles today.
If Tesla reaches 82k Semis on road by 2040 (13.5% share of the autonomous addressable market), that would represent $17B of software revenue and ~$7.5B of incremental EBIT (10% upside to our base case) – note that this does not include the upfront sale of the vehicle or incremental revenues for Tesla charging. Recall, Tesla originally outlined a manufacturing target of 50,000 Semi trucks per year, therefore assuming 80k will be deployed in total over the next ~15 years is a conservative starting point, in our view.
Similar to passenger vehicles, we expect to hear pushback to Tesla's passive optical approach to autonomy (no radar/LiDAR), especially considering the higher speeds/heavier weight of Semi vs. light vehicle applications of FSD. Additionally, there may be greater regulatory scrutiny of camera-only FSD on Semi that may weigh on Tesla's ability to roll out an unsupervised autonomous Semi. However, we note that this skepticism has been around for years and has not prevented Tesla from rolling out Robotaxi operations that are beginning to scale more quickly. Also, even skeptics of the camera-only approach acknowledge that high resolution camera and AI driven algorithms are rapidly improving. As such, if Tesla puts a Semi on the road that works well, we doubt that the market will overly analyze the tech stack that enables it."$TSLA
"Tesla can generate ~$12-18k/month from its autonomous trucking software ($0.85-$1/mile subscription fee x 18k miles driven per month). This compares to ~$100/month for FSD on consumer vehicles today.
If Tesla reaches 82k Semis on road by 2040 (13.5% share of the autonomous addressable market), that would represent $17B of software revenue and ~$7.5B of incremental EBIT (10% upside to our base case) – note that this does not include the upfront sale of the vehicle or incremental revenues for Tesla charging. Recall, Tesla originally outlined a manufacturing target of 50,000 Semi trucks per year, therefore assuming 80k will be deployed in total over the next ~15 years is a conservative starting point, in our view.
Similar to passenger vehicles, we expect to hear pushback to Tesla's passive optical approach to autonomy (no radar/LiDAR), especially considering the higher speeds/heavier weight of Semi vs. light vehicle applications of FSD. Additionally, there may be greater regulatory scrutiny of camera-only FSD on Semi that may weigh on Tesla's ability to roll out an unsupervised autonomous Semi. However, we note that this skepticism has been around for years and has not prevented Tesla from rolling out Robotaxi operations that are beginning to scale more quickly. Also, even skeptics of the camera-only approach acknowledge that high resolution camera and AI driven algorithms are rapidly improving. As such, if Tesla puts a Semi on the road that works well, we doubt that the market will overly analyze the tech stack that enables it."$TSLA
