Tesla Robotaxi Day & the Competition’s Response

**Travis Hoium** (0:02)
Is Tesla's Robotaxi inflection finally here? Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now.
Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoium, joined today by Lou Whiteman and Rachel Warren. And we've got to start with, I think, one of the biggest topics of the week, and that is Tesla. Lou, they have a Robotaxi event tomorrow. This seems like a pretty big deal. The stock was up last week when they announced this. There's a lot of excitement for Robotaxi's, and yet we don't really know many details. Is that where we're at with this?

**Lou Whiteman** (0:37)
Is there an event? Do we know? Yeah, I'm not sure. So this is weird. We don't have a time for this event yet. There's nothing on the investor relations page. The only mention I can find on Tesla's website is, there's a customer contest for this. So I guess it exists. If you take a ride share with Tesla in Austin last week, I think you are eligible to end up with an invitation. So here's the thing. I think this is a marketing event. I think that that's fine. We know that they have been building these cybercabs for a while. They had a separate event announcing that a few years ago when they introduced the thing and started building them. In every Tesla place in Atlanta, there's one of these just sitting prominently parked at the corner, which I think is probably not a coincidence. I haven't actually seen them driving around with the lifts and the Waymo's and all that around Atlanta. But what we don't know yet is have they received regulatory approval to operate them?
And do they feel that they don't need it because they're complying with norms? Like exactly, are they going to announce that these are gonna be in service?
That I think is much more interesting. And I hope there is a live stream because I'd love the answer to that question.

**Travis Hoium** (1:47)
Rachel, just give a little bit of background. So that event that Lou was talking about was the We-Robot event. That was almost two years ago at this point. Tesla also launched their autonomous vehicles, the Robotaxis, which were actually Model Ys. Over a year ago in Austin, they still only have a couple dozen that are actually operating at any given time. They recently added, I believe it's now 45 Robotaxis, so not Model Ys, but the actual new Robotaxi 2, the registration list that they have in Texas.
I think to Lou's point, in theory, Texas is a little bit different than California, where California kind of gives you a stamp and says you can go ahead and have commercial customers. Texas is a little bit more self-regulated, so it seems like they could, but we don't know exactly the details. What do you want to see from this event to know that this is more than just another announcement that isn't going to go anywhere for a while?

**Rachel Warren** (2:41)
I think one of the big questions is how close are we getting to deployment that isn't entirely within a very, very restricted geofenced framework where you still have a lot of remote human staff intervening to guide vehicles? I think that there's still a lot of questions about that. I mean, you got to go back as well. 10 years ago, Tesla projected it would deliver a million autonomous robotaxis by the year 2020 We might all know that that was a window that passed without deployment. Now I'll note, talking about where we are today going into this event, they do have their ride hailing network. It operates across seven US markets. It is within a very restricted geofenced framework. Essentially, what that means when we talk about this, it's a virtual boundary on a digital map. It restricts where the self-driving car is legally permitted to operate, where it's programmed to operate. So they've got their Model Y rides active across six of these geofenced regions. You know, Austin, Dallas, Miami, Orlando, Houston, Tampa. The operations in the Bay Area are very limited to human-monitored safety rides, and that's due to California-specific regulatory frameworks. And ahead of this event, you know, they've expanded to over 270 vehicles and registered, as you noted, Travis, 45 production-ready CyberCat prototypes. I think there's still a lot of questions about their vision-only approach. I mean, Tesla relies, as we've talked about on the show before, strictly on basically this end-to-end camera and AI setup. It really diverges from competitors who rely on multi-sensor LIDAR and radar. One final thing I'll note that's kind of interesting, you know, what's the long-term vision here? We will hear more about that. Musk has said in the past that Tesla tends to market and sell the CyberCab directly to individual consumers for under $30,000. And he's had this vision of it as a private business model where owners monetize their personal vehicles on the network. But of course, if consumer sales fail to scale that way, Tesla would essentially have its own very capital-intensive corporate-owned network. And that would really drain the balance sheet. So there's a lot of questions about how that vision has evolved, where it's going, how close the deployment is to getting a little bit closer to what the competitors are doing.