Investor Gary Black says Tesla Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) heightened sales figures in the third quarter of 2026 could reflect a combination of higher gasoline prices linked to the Iran war and increased awareness of the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, but not as much as bullish supporters may think.
High Gas Prices Benefiting Tesla
In a post on X on Sunday, Black quoted a post by user FutureAZA who disagreed with The Future Fund LLC co-founder’s take that FSD was not a driving factor for Tesla sales. “I’ll accept that it’s both the 50% increase in gas prices since Feb and greater awareness of FSD that are driving $TSLA sales,” Black said in his post.
However, the investor then outlined that roughly 35% of Tesla’s sales came from FSD and that the FSD Unsupervised technology had secured approval in “a single digit %” of the country.
“I’m going to say it’s primarily higher gas prices driving increased global TSLA deliveries,” he said, also pointing to Rivian Automotive Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:RIVN) increased sales figures during the same period, saying that the automaker “blew past 3Q expectations but left its FY’26 guidance unchanged at 65K-70K.”
The automaker delivered 486,532 units during the third quarter of the year. However, Tesla’s deliveries were still down from last year’s record 497,099, fueled by the end of the $7,500 Federal EV Credit that was rolled back by President Donald Trump on September 30, 2025.
Tesla Vs Waymo
In a separate post on X, Black also said that while Tesla’s deliveries were “very strong” for two consecutive quarters, the company’s FSD “scale up has fallen far short of management’s guidance” and that investors would be focused on “efforts to scale up unsupervised autonomy in front of competitors.”
Black then compared Tesla’s service with Alphabet Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Robotaxi service, Waymo, saying that Tesla had secured approval across six metropolitan cities for unsupervised driving.
“Waymo has been authorized for public fully driverless rides in 15 U.S. metros,” he said, adding that it operated “roughly 4,000+ driverless vehicles nationwide,” compared to Tesla’s 589 in Texas.
Tesla’s Nighttime Robotaxi Woes
On Saturday, Tesla moved the cutoff time for its Robotaxi service in Austin from 10:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., saying the automaker was working to improve the FSD system better during nighttime conditions with poor visibility. “The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night,” Musk said.
Notably, unlike rivals like Waymo, which rely on a vision- and LiDAR-based approach to self-driving, Tesla’s FSD uses only cameras to perform self-driving duties.
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Photo courtesy: Rokas Tenys on Shutterstock.com
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