Tesla pushes back big robotaxi unveiling
Shares of electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla (TSLA) slumped Thursday on reports the company is delaying the unveiling of its robotaxi vehicle.
The shares dropped 8.4% to $241.03 on a Bloomberg News report that the unveiling of the robotaxi will be moved from Aug. 8 until October.
The Bloomberg report did not give a specific date for the new unveiling.
The share-price loss was Tesla's first after 11 straight gains. It was also the company's biggest one-day decline since a 12.1% decline on Jan.25, after a disastrous analyst earnings call.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was the biggest loser in Thursday's decline. The value of his 20.5% stake in the company fell nearly $16 billion โ from $188.24 billion to $172.34 billion.
The reason for the delay, Bloomberg said, was that teams working on the project "needed more time to build additional prototypes."
The report suggested the team had been told to "rework certain elements of the car."
Analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, a long-time Tesla bull, conceded the news hit the stock hard.
But, he told clients in a note, "We believe the timing of robotaxis, partnerships, and the ultimate autonomous and AI driven technology does not change at all for our bullish Tesla thesis."
Musk had trumpeted the original date to unveil the robotaxi in an April 8 tweet on X, formerly Twitter. The tweet offered no details.
Musk's tweet generated lots of excitement and boosted the company's stock price by 4.9% that day alone. It helped the shares rise nearly 60% from then through Wednesday.
With Thursday's loss, however, the shares slipped from being up nearly 6% for the year to down 3%.
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The robotaxi: Musk's personal tool to change the world
The unveiling was to let the public, investors, and analysts see how a robotaxi might look and work.
However, Tesla and Musk have a history of announcing big upcoming product events, which are sometimes followed by lengthy delays.
Musk has long insisted that Tesla is not a car company but an artificial intelligence robotics company. Tesla vehicles were ultimately going to prove able to drive themselves.
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The robotaxi is a key part of that campaign, with Tesla vowing to revolutionize transportation globally. It is so important that Tesla has emphasized its importance over another key goal: Developing a moderately-priced vehicle.
Tesla provides what it calls its base advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) to provide partial driving automation. For a sizable fee, it offers an enhanced ADAS system that provides partial semi-automatic navigation and other features. Its goal is to achieve full-service driving capabilities, or FSD, although FSD requires drivers to pay attention.
The technology is still a work in progress with a number of investigations ongoing involving multiple crashes and injuries.
Tesla delivered 443,956 vehicles globally in the second quarter, a 4.8% decline from a year earlier amid lukewarm car demand and intensifying competition.
Tesla leads tech stocks lower
Tesla's loss on July 11 was the worst among stocks in both the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 Index.
Both indexes, as well as the Nasdaq Composite Index, were down on the day. The S&P 500 was down 0.9%, the Nasdaq was down 1.95%, and the Nasdaq-100 was down 2.24%.
Each index had risen in 10 of the last 11 sessions, becoming strongly overbought. At Wednesday's close, their relative strength indexes were topping 80.
If you're looking for a trigger to stop this year's big rally, Tesla's drubbing might be it.
Nvidia (NVDA) was the second-worst loser among the so-called Magnificent 7 stocks, down 5.6% to $127.40. Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) dropped 4.1% to $512.70.
All of the Mag-7 stocks were at least 2% lower on the day. The other members of the group are Apple (AAPL) , Google-parent Alphabet (GOOGL) , Amazon.com (AMZN) , and Microsoft (MSFT) .
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