Tesla CEO Elon Musk late on Tuesday set a tentative launch date for the limited robotaxi service launch in Austin, Texas, for later this month. News reports had previously said the robotaxi service would begin on Thursday. TSLA shares advanced at the stock market open Wednesday.
Musk posted to X Tuesday night that Tesla will officially begin its autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service "tentatively" on June 22. The Tesla CEO also gave his reasons why the EV giant will not be rolling out the service this week.
"We are being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift," Musk wrote Tuesday. "First Tesla that drives itself from factory end of line all the way to a customer house is June 28."
Bloomberg had recently reported that the Tesla robotaxi service would begin on Thursday. But until Tuesday neither Tesla nor Musk had officially set a date.
Earlier on Tuesday, videos circulated on X of Tesla Model Y vehicles driving autonomously around Austin, Texas. Musk posted to X that the vehicles are "unmodified Tesla cars coming straight from the factory, meaning that every Tesla coming out of our factories is capable of unsupervised self-driving."
Tesla is a "known" autonomous vehicle, or AV, operator in Austin as of June 11, according to Austin's Transportation and Public Works website. The EV giant is listed as being in the "testing" phase of autonomous driving operation in the city. For comparison, Waymo is officially listed in the "deployment" phase.
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CFRA analyst Garrett Nelson on Tuesday wrote that he expects Tesla's launch of an unsupervised robotaxi service "to be largely anticlimactic and lacking the fanfare of last October's Robotaxi Day."
"Initially, we see approximately a dozen driverless Model Y's operating with Full Self-Driving technology in a geofenced area of Austin, Texas, with performance supervised remotely. We think the most important measure will be the number of incidents and interventions recorded by the vehicles in the coming months, and how quickly TSLA can dial back remote supervision and expand beyond the geofenced area to other markets," Nelson wrote.
Tesla Stock Rebounds As Trump-Musk Feud Wanes
Tesla stock pared early gains, hitting 335.50 intraday, before closing up 0.1% to 326.40 during Wednesday's stock market action. Shares jumped 5.7% Tuesday, reclaiming the 21-day exponential moving average.
On Monday, shares popped 4.6% to retake their 200-day line as President Donald Trump struck a diplomatic tone when discussing Musk with reporters.
"We had a good relationship and I just wish him well, very well actually," Trump said Monday.
The president added that he "may move" his Tesla vehicle "around a little bit," apparently signaling he will not be selling it. "I have a lot of locations," he added.
Musk wrote on X early Wednesday that he regrets some of last week's posts about President Trump. "They went too far."
Tesla stock dived 14.7% to 295.58 last week, plunging Thursday to round-trip an aggressive entry and undercut key moving averages — including its 21-day exponential moving average, the 200-day moving average and 50-day line — as Musk and Trump traded insults and threats online.
Tesla Bounces After Musk-Trump Blowup, But Maybe There's More To Thursday's Decline
TSLA stock's plunge last week tracked news of the Musk-Trump feud, with Friday's bounce possibly reflecting hopes for lowered tensions. Musk deleted tweets Friday night that had suggested Trump appeared in the unreleased FBI files on financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
"While the situation remains fluid, we believe the disagreement will not help Tesla demand, but could potentially (temporarily) alienate multiple sides of the political spectrum," Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote on Friday.
Bloomberg reported Monday that retail Tesla investors put more than $650 million into Direxion Daily TSLA Bull 2x shares last week. The fund delivers twice TSLA's daily return.
This was the largest weekly inflow since the fund made its debut in 2022, according to Bloomberg data.
Market In A Power Trend
TSLA stock is now down about 19% for the year, despite surging on robotaxi bets following the April 22 Q1 conference call. The stock is also down 33% from its all-time high of 488.54.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, a longtime Tesla bull, wrote early Wednesday that the robotaxi service launch is a "major endeavor for Musk and Tesla and we believe over the coming year we will see Robotaxi deployed in 20 to 25 cities in the U.S."
Baird analysts on Monday downgraded TSLA to a neutral rating, from outperform, with an unchanged 320 price target. The analysts wrote that Tesla stock has performed well since Q1 earnings, advancing more than 20%, primarily due to anticipation for the launch of the limited robotaxi service.
However, the firm said Musk's robotaxi ramp up rate predictions "are a bit too optimistic" and that this excitement has been priced into Tesla stock.
Tesla stock has a 21-day average true range of 5.49%. The ATR metric, available on IBD's MarketSurge charting tool, gauges the characteristic breadth of a stock's behavior. Stocks that tend to make large jumps or dives in daily stock market action, the kind that can trigger sell rules and shake investors out of a stock, have a high ATR. Stocks that tend to make more incremental moves have lower ATRs.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq are now in a power trend. Investors can buy stocks with ATRs of up to 8%, though they should be wary of being too concentrated in high-octane names.
Tesla stock has a 69 Composite Rating out of a best-possible 99. The stock also has a 93 Relative Strength Rating and a 59 EPS Rating.
Please follow Kit Norton on X @KitNorton for more coverage.
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