Would you greet a robotaxi? Musk Betting Cabins will give Tesla a lift after boycots and sales deposit

Elon Musk promised in 2019 that Tesla would be “Robotaxis” without a director on the road next year “, but it didn’t happen. A year later he promised to deliver them the following year, but that didn’t happen either.

Despite the empty commitments, the promises continued to come. Last year in January Musk said: “Next year we will certainly have more than a million robotaxis.”

Would you settle for 10 or 12?

Musk seems to be about to realize his robotaxi vision with a test run of a small team of self-driving taxis in Austin, Texas, from Sunday. However, reaching a million can take a year or more, although the billionaire should be able to expand the service this year if the Austin demo is a success.

The commitment could not be higher, nor the challenges.

While Musk who made ‘promises’ next year, rival Waymo was busy using taxis without a director in Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin and other cities by using another technology that made it possible to get on the market faster. It has just completed its 10 millionth paid ride.

Boycots related to Musk’s politics have the sale of Tesla tanks. Rival makers of electric vehicles with new competing models have stolen the market share. And investors are sharp after a stock of $ 150 billion when Musk chose a social media fight with an American president who supervised federal car regulators who could make the robotaxi out roller much more difficult. The stock was recovered somewhat after Musk said he regretted his comments.

The shareholders of Tesla have been with Musk over the years because he has tarted the opportunities by building a successful standing electric vehicle company – self -driving car promises – and they earn a lot of money in the process. A decade ago, Tesla traded for around $ 18. The shares closed on Friday at $ 322.

Musk says that the Austin test will start modest enough, with only 10 or 12 vehicles that passengers pick up in a limited area. But then it will rise quickly and spread to other cities and ultimately next year hundreds of thousands, if not reach a million vehicles.

Some Musk Watchers on Wall Street are skeptical.

“How quickly can he expand the fleet?” Asks Garrett Nelson, an analyst at CFRA. “We may have a dozen vehicles in the first instance. It is very small.”

Seth Goldstein van Morningstar says that Musk is classic musk: too much promising, too fast.

“If someone in Austin can download the app and use a robotaxi, it will be a success, but I don’t think that will happen until 2028,” he says. “Testing takes a while.”

The tendency of Musk to push the stock high with a little hyperbool is known to investors.

In 2018 he told Tesla shareholders that he “had secured” financing to buy all their shares with a huge premium and to take the company privately. But he was not only lacking in a written deployment of financiers, according to federal stock controls who fined him, he had not discussed the loan amount or other details with them.

More recently, Musk told CNBC in May that Tesla experienced a “big rebound” in the question. A week later, a car Trade Group in Europe announced that the sale had fallen by half.

Musk came under fire because he is said to be the power of the system used for his cars to control himself, to exaggerate, starting with the name. Full self -driving is a wrong name. The system still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road, because they may have to intervene and take control at any time.

Federal highway safety controls opened an investigation last year into FSD after various accidents, and the Ministry of Justice carried out its own probe, although the status thereof is not known. Tesla has also confronted lawsuits about the function, some resulting in settlements, others rejected. In one case, a judge ruled against the claimants, but only because they had not “consciously” proven Musk, made false statements.

Musk says that the robotaxis will run on an improved version of full self -driving and that the cabins will be safe.

He also says that the service will be able to grow through the country quickly. His secret weapon: millions of Tesla owners now on the roads now. He says that a software update over the air will soon enable them to make their cars in cabins without a driver and start a side company while they got stuck in the office for eight hours or be on vacation for a week.

“Instead of leaving your car in the parking lot, your car can earn money,” said Musk earlier this year, and called an Airbnb model for cars. “You can add or subtract your car to the fleet.”

Musk says that Tesla can also move quickly to use taxis now because of his decision to rely on cameras for the cars to navigate, unlike Waymo, which has gone a more expensive route by supplementing his cameras with lasers and radar.

“Tesla will have, I don’t know,” Musk in a conference call with investors, “99% market share or something ridiculous.” Given Waymo’s lead and potential competition from Amazon and others, dominating the market without a director can be a reach to that extent.

But then Ives, a Wedbush Securities -Analyst and Big Muskfan, says that this time Musk can actually occur because of Tesla’s ability to scale up quickly. And even skeptics such as Morningstar’s Goldstein acknowledge that Musk is doing things right now and then, and spectacular.

He prepared the car industry by having people buy expensive electric vehicles, brought his Starlink sateller service to rural areas and more recently performed a Gee-Whizz-Truc to land an unmanned SpaceX rocket on a platform on earth.

“Maybe his timelines are not realistic,” says Goldstein, “but he can develop futuristic technology products.”