On Monday, an analyst from Cathie Wood-led ARK Investment Management shared a prospective aftermath of the Cruise expansion for Tesla Inc TSLA.
What Happened: ARK Invest analyst Tasha Keeney said in a newsletter that though Cruise is beginning to test its robotaxis in different cities will give it more ‘corner cases’ to improve the autonomy of its vehicles, the pace at which Cruise can launch public, commercial services at scale is more important. The analyst’s take comes on the heels of Cruise’s announcement from last week that it will start testing its vehicles in Nashville.
Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL unit Waymo and General Motors-backed GM Cruise each take up about 10,000 customer trips per week and have about 400 cars on the road. Keeney said that these numbers are important to watch for as they try to scale their services.
Keeney opined that Tesla could have an advantage over these rivals once it kickstarts its robotaxi business thanks to the data it has compiled with the beta version of its full self-driving (FSD) software so far. Further, the regulatory jumps procured by Cruise and Waymo over the past decade for autonomous transportation will pave the way for ‘the large and looming competitor,’ Keeney said.
Why It Matters: Though Waymo and Cruise are already providing rides, they are limited to certain cities and mostly certain hours of the day within these chosen cities.
In April 2022, Musk predicted Tesla would achieve volume production of Robotaxis in 2024.
In the company's second-quarter earnings call last month, Musk said that its dedicated robotaxi products will be a revolutionary design made in a revolutionary way. "It’ll be by far the highest units per hour of any vehicle production ever," Musk said.
Analysts at ARK see robotaxis turning into a “revenue generating machine” for the EV giant.
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