Tesla Shares Plunge $50 Billion After Robotaxi Reveal Falls Flat With Investors

Shares of electric car maker Tesla (TSLA) fell roughly 8% Friday morning after the company unveiled its robotaxi plan. According to the Wall Street Journal, the stock decline wiped more than $50 billion off Tesla’s market value.

On Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed its two-seat robotaxi concept vehicle called Cybercab in Los Angeles. The vehicle has no wheel or pedals and is expected to be a fully driverless car.

At the presentation, Musk said he expects to be producing the Cybercab before 2027 and that it will sell for less than $30,000.

The presentation and the promises failed to impress investors, as Musk has a long history of missing deadlines by many years and making products more expensive than promised.

“As expected, like prior Tesla product unveils, the event was light on the details, and instead emphasized the vision underpinning Tesla’s growth endeavors in AI/AV [autonomous vehicles],” analysts at Barclays said. 

“Yet there were no updates indicating near-term opportunities. Tesla didn’t show its low-cost model planned for 1H′25 production,” Barclays added. “We also didn’t get any near-term updates on FSD progress, or data reflecting improvement in the system.”

Additionally, Musk said he expected to have a full-self driving (FSD) system running in the company’s Model 3 and Model Y next year in Texas and California. Back in 2015, Musk predicted the vehicles would have this system by 2017.

Analysts expressed skepticism, as the self-driving features in Tesla’s cars still present many flaws.

“Making the leap from where we are today to full autonomy (particularly through unsupervised vehicles with zero steering or pedals) is so gargantuan, technology-wise, that it feels overly ambitious in such a short period of time,” Jessica Caldwell, head of insights at car-shopping site Edmunds, wrote.

The event comes as Tesla is trying to rebrand itself as an AI, robotics, and autonomous driving software company. However, investors have grown more skeptical about the company’s future over the past years.

In addition, Tesla’s robotaxis and autonomous driving software could already be far behind Chinese competitors. Recently, Fortune reported that startups in China already have agreements with cities like Guangzhou, Wuhan, Shanghai and Beijing to deploy ts self-driving cars. Some of these companies have already started commercial operations.

Even in the U.S., Tesla is behind competitors, as Google started offering a robotaxi service to the general public in June.