For years, Tesla’s robotaxi story has been easy to describe and hard to measure.
Elon Musk made promises, Wall Street argued about them, and the actual number of driverless miles stayed small enough to ignore. In July, Tesla’s unsupervised fleet had logged about 380,000 miles in total.
That changed over the summer. Tesla now has a growth curve it can point to, and one of Wall Street’s bigger Tesla bulls says the curve just bent upward.
If you own Tesla, or an index fund where it ranks among the biggest holdings, this is the number the stock now trades on. Car sales still pay the bills, but the Robotaxi is what investors are paying for.
That makes the pace of growth, not just the promise, the thing worth watching. A service that adds a few thousand miles a month is a science project. One that doubles every few weeks starts to look like a business.
However, a less flattering detail sits a few pages deeper in the same research.
Tesla’s (TSLA) Robotaxi service “has hit an inflection point,” Bank of America analyst Alexander Perry wrote in an Oct. 22 research note reviewed by TheStreet.
He kept a Buy rating and a $460 price objective, about 19% above the $386.47 price the bank used, while trimming his 2027 earnings estimate to $2.26 a share from $2.47.
Tesla’s Robotaxi miles doubled in about four weeks
The bank’s math is simple. Unsupervised miles grew from 380,000 on July 22 to 1 million on Sept. 3, then to roughly 2 million by Sept. 30, Perry wrote.
Weekly growth sped up from 17% to about 20% after Tesla added the two-seat Cybercab to its Austin fleet, the note said. Cybercabs now make up 45% of the Texas fleet, according to the bank.
Tesla’s own executives described the same surge on the Oct. 21 earnings call. “Accumulative unsupervised miles 8x in the quarter, as we had weekly double-digit growth throughout the quarter,” said Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja.
Production is no longer the bottleneck, Tesla says. “Right now, we’re building at the rate that the Robotaxi service needs the vehicles,” said Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering.
Perry credited the software. “We believe TSLA’s comfort in scaling its robotaxi service more rapidly is being enabled by running on a more advanced version of FSD [Full Self-Driving] compared to the consumer fleet,” he wrote.
Why Tesla’s base business still matters
Under the Robotaxi story, Tesla’s quarter was mixed. Revenue was flat at $28.05 billion, while adjusted earnings of 48 cents a share beat estimates, Electrek reported.
