Investor Gary Black believes Tesla Inc.’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) pullback in its self-driving ambitions is causing investors to lose faith that the company will eventually solve autonomy.
Gary Black Outlines ‘Fundamental’ Reason Behind Robotaxi Slowdown
In a series of posts on X, The Future Fund LLC co-founder opined that there was “some fundamental reason” behind Tesla slowing down its unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Robotaxi targets.
The company had outlined serving half the U.S. population with its autonomous vehicles by the end of last year, but then moved to say it was targeting “doubling fleet size every month” and finally to its “current planned growth rate of +10%/week,” Black said, referring to AI Chief Ashok Elluswamy‘s comments during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.
The investor then said that Tesla would need to slow down, “given the damage even one headline would cause if a Tesla operated by FSD hit someone,” but added that the stock continues to “underperform because investors are losing faith that FSD will ever be able to scale from its current roster of 90-100 unsupervised autonomous vehicles,” he said.
Black then compared Tesla’s operations with Alphabet Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Waymo, which has “4,000 unsupervised autonomous vehicles without safety monitors” and completes over 500,000 Robotaxi rides per week.
Tesla Management Concerned About FSD Safety?
In a response to user Jeff Lutz, who disagreed with Black, saying if there were issues, Tesla would not hire new workers, the investor said that Tesla’s “reluctance to scale” autonomy could be an indication that the company’s management was “concerned FSD may not be as safe as you think.”
Black added that Tesla hires and builds infrastructure under the assumption that it “will solve for the edge cases and ultimately increase efficacy to 99.999%.” However, the investor pointed to competitors also improving their tech.
“Having chosen the vision only route for economic reasons, $TSLA now has to stick with it and hope competitors can’t develop a safer self-driving technology by spending more,” he said.
Black also said that relying on Tesla management’s “assertions” that the EV giant was close to solving autonomy may be naive. “My ‘lessons learned’ after 30 years in this business is to not rely on managent’s assertions for anything,” he said, adding that the management was “paid to be bullish.”
Benzinga Edge Rankings show Tesla scores poorly on the Momentum and Value metrics, but provides satisfactory Growth and Quality. Tesla shares also fail to provide a favorable price trend in the Short, Medium and Long term.
Price Action: Tesla shares were down 0.07% to $332.59 during overnight trading on Tuesday.
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