RoboTaxi, the official launch of Tesla's 'second growth curve', moving towards becoming the world's most valuable company
Two things happened over the weekend: the commercialization of RoboTaxi and the delivery of new cars with autonomous driving (FSD) to customers' homes. This means Tesla is transforming from a pure car sales company into an AI operations company.
There are several key points behind this:
- Transition from a car company to an "AI operations company":
We might have previously thought of Tesla as just an electric vehicle manufacturer, but with the launch of RoboTaxi, it has become a company that truly utilizes AI to provide services. This aligns with what Elon Musk mentioned in the 2016 "Master Plan II," from autonomy to sharing, and now it has finally reached the "sharing" stage.
- Initiating the next rapid growth cycle:
Shifting from selling cars to high-margin mobility services and software subscriptions, with expected gross margins of 70-80%. The valuation logic changes as it transitions from a traditional automaker to a tech/mobility service company.
- Austin is the "litmus test" for the profit model:
Although the initial cost of RoboTaxi is high and the pricing is symbolic, Tesla doesn't need to roll it out in all cities at once. As long as it can prove profitability in Austin and compete with rivals like Waymo and Uber, once profitability is validated in one location, the model can be replicated elsewhere, naturally driving up valuation.
- Unique cost and scalability advantages:
Tesla has a significant cost advantage over Waymo in operations. For Waymo, each additional vehicle or city operation means more losses due to its "heavy asset" model, which involves purchasing vehicles from other manufacturers and installing expensive hardware.
In contrast, Tesla's vehicle manufacturing costs are much lower. Moreover, Tesla produces more vehicles in a single day than the total number of RoboTaxis Waymo currently has. Additionally, all Tesla vehicles in Austin equipped with AI-4 chips could potentially become part of the RoboTaxi fleet in the future. This production capacity and the vast potential of the existing fleet give Tesla a natural valuation advantage in future scalability.
- Long-term "slow then sudden" growth:
As Cathie Wood put it, "slowly and then suddenly." Although the initial scaling (based on AI-4 chips) may be limited by operational groundwork, in the long run, the emergence of AI-5 chips will be the "moment" for RoboTaxi's true large-scale expansion, possibly aligning with the mass production of Cybercab to provide the necessary computing power for larger models. This means future valuations will see another leap.
Most of the content is sourced from Moneyxyz and observations and interviews by Lao Yu.
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