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Tesla shares fell 8 percent on Friday, shaving nearly $40 billion off the automaker's market valuation after Elon Musk's much-hyped robotaxi event dissatisfied investors because of an absence of details on a planned fleet of autonomous “cybercabs.”
The stock's plunge resulted in Tesla being the worst performer within the S&P 500. Nevertheless, the group stays the most dear automobile company on this planet with a market capitalization of $687 billion.
Musk, the world's richest man, promised that the brand new two-seat vehicle – with no steering wheel or pedals – could be available for lower than $30,000 and could be in production by the tip of 2026 if it receives regulatory approval.
However, he didn’t provide details on the technology behind the robotaxis or how he would cut back the associated fee of self-driving vehicles.
“We found Tesla’s robotaxi event to be disappointing and surprisingly lacking intimately,” said Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi. Information about “recent products, offerings and timelines was missing, and product launches were largely consistent with expectations,” he added.
At the glitzy “We, Robot” event at Warner Bros Studios in Los Angeles on Thursday, Musk also unveiled a prototype for a 20-passenger robovan and predicted that the unreal intelligence-equipped humanoid Optimus robot “friends.” “His group could be “the best product ever” and price lower than $30,000.
However, the reveal focused more on design, branding and Musk's idiosyncratic vision of the long run and fewer on the technological advances Tesla will need to understand that vision.
After months of delays, Musk's presentation began nearly an hour late and resulted in lower than half-hour, with Optimus robots dancing in glass pavilions and serving beer to investors.
While the robots moved more fluidly than previous models, they remained under human control, in accordance with analysts at Morgan Stanley. “Our understanding is that these robots didn’t operate fully autonomously, but relied on teleoperations (human intervention), so it was more of an indication of degrees of freedom and agility,” they said.
Jefferies analyst John Colantuoni described the event as “toothless” and predicted that rivals comparable to Uber – which recently announced a partnership with Waymo, Google's self-driving automobile division – would profit.
He added that “Tesla has not provided verifiable evidence of progress” within the required technology, “making it difficult to evaluate the feasibility of the goals set out on the event.”
Uber shares rose 9 percent on Friday, while rival app Lyft rose 10 percent.
Musk said Tesla's shift to autonomous driving and AI could increase its value to as much as $5 trillion, about seven times its current market value. The group's shares had risen 45 percent in anticipation of the revealing because it announced “Robotaxi Day” on April 5.
But the Tesla boss has repeatedly missed targets for introducing self-driving taxis. He initially promised fully autonomous rides from Los Angeles to New York by the tip of 2017. In 2019, he predicted that 1,000,000 robotaxis could be on the road the next yr.
Another disappointment for investors was Musk's failure to unveil a less expensive electric vehicle, unofficially referred to as the Model 2, which shall be priced at $25,000 to revitalize its aging product portfolio.
