I wouldn’t expect any meaningful revenue (say even 1% market share in US) from in-house built L4 autonomous taxis this year or next year from Tesla in the US.
They don’t yet have a working product and will also need 10s of millions of true autonomous miles to demonstrate safety better than human.
Is there a reason or scenario to expect meaningful revenue for Tesla from a US L4 robotaxi in the next two years, given what they have demonstrated in Austin over the last 12 months?
I don’t see a likely scenario where that is achievable.
Maybe 2028 now?
If they can get L4 working and start accumulating true autonomous miles?
I suppose there is a moonshot scenario in which in the next year they improve their AI driver safety by 2-3 orders of magnitude and approach human-level safety and gather 20 million autonomous miles.
That would surprise me and many others.
(Tesla is in the march of 9s to safety, which looks like a marathon:
)
But a rapid path is not what they are demonstrating in Austin.
In Austin, they give human-driven taxi rides with a few hyper-cautious and restricted maybe unsupervised rides.
On the other hand, Waymo now has L4 commercial service in 10 US metro areas, and more in pipeline, and accumulates data from millions of true autonomous miles each week.
Waymo is also moving towards their next generation of vehicles and moving to highways and cities with winter weather.
Tesla is falling behind Waymo every day, by miles and entire markets and demonstrated L4 capability.
With Waymo advancing, we now have a point of reference for Tesla robotaxi, something to benchmark against.
To support the stock, Tesla could potentially do something else besides build a working, commercial L4 product, such as merge with SpaceX, or focus more on humanoid robots, or some other pivot.