Adam Jonas, the Managing Director for Global Auto and Shared Mobility with Morgan Stanley, released a note earlier this month about Tesla’s future Robotaxi service and some possible expectations for its upcoming Robotaxi event on Thursday.
Let’s take a look at what he has to say about Tesla.
Robotaxi Event
Jonas predicts that Tesla’s event will serve as a showcase for the Cybercab, showing off its capabilities and design features. Attendees will be shown and given rides in the Tesla Robotaxi at the event, which will provide a set of baseline expectations for Tesla’s future service.
Dual Approach
However, he predicts Tesla will roll out Robotaxi in a two-pronged approach. In his eyes, Tesla will offer a fully autonomous app-based robotaxi/Cybercab service, but it will also offer a second option, a “supervised” autonomous/FSD-based rideshare service. He believes that the second item here—the rideshare service—is the biggest one that will impact investors. This human-powered fleet will essentially be an Uber competitor, which raked in 10 billion dollars in revenue last quarter.
Targeting
Jonas breaks down Tesla’s approach to rolling out Robotaxi and Unsupervised FSD in the future. As we previously discussed in an article on Tesla’s future, Tesla will likely target urban and metro areas for its initial rollout of Cybercab. Other areas may receive service from the supervised rideshare service.
Jonas estimates the FSD take rate will approach 30% this year with the now lower prices. Tesla may choose to keep the FSD price low to continue the high adoption of the service. This will help Tesla build out its human-based network faster until it can achieve a fully autonomous fleet that will work anywhere.
Morgan Stanley also believes Tesla will offer more favorable rates than Uber and its competitors, leaving more money in the driver’s pocket while Tesla grows its rideshare community.
Uber
Uber will be a direct competitor to Tesla’s in-house rideshare service, and Teslas likely account for approximately 5-9% of all Uber trips today. Tesla will have to ensure that its new owners who intend to do ridesharing will switch to Tesla’s service rather than continue with Uber’s well-established taxi service.
We’ll see how the future rollout of Tesla’s Unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi goes on 10/10, which is just a few days away. Be sure to check out our article on what to expect at Tesla’s event.
