TSLA short-term bearish on event disappointment; long-term bullish contingent on faster edge mapping execution.

you are going to get some give back on Tesla after the um event yesterday. Uh you know although long-term I think uh uh it's uh you know there's some reasons to be optimistic.

So okay, my 2030 estimates don't really include robo taxi. I see it as a bonus. Um, but I will say it's way too aggressive to say forget about it. This is my icing on the cake thesis.

Okay, so I call robo taxis icing on the cake. I underwrite Tesla as if robo taxis just don't work. That this is a great consumer car that people buy and they get full self-driving with and they freaking love it and we just get back to selling more Teslas.

Um, I will say the Cyber Cab unboxed has more potential than that. And so I do think it's too aggressive to underwrite it for 2030 at zero. I don't think you can underwrite a lot of revenue for robo taxis, but I will at you know maybe a 20% margin uh give them a fraction of uh what Uber does.

So, my forecast on Tesla, if I get to a 225 peg, uh, is 250 or $555 assuming we can get four million vehicles delivered and we have Optimus at five billion as well.

Yeah. Yeah, that's reasonable. 200,000 sales of the Tesla bot in four years. Yeah. Yeah, I I could go with that.

Semi-truck operating income. That might be a little aggressive too. In fairness, this might be very high. semi-truck failing uh could offset all bot and um robo rev, right? I don't think it's going to fail, but it's it's worth paying attention to that growth in FSD subscriptions.

That brings us up about 50 bucks. That brings my estimates up about 50 bucks for Tesla. again. If I if I now go in here and I kill the semi-truck, right, I go kill the semi-truck, I lose that 50 bucks again.

So, you need that execution. But that gives you an idea of of roughly how the numbers could be affected. I think that's a reasonable point of view.

So uh Tesla's down about 5% at the moment. It's really just giving back yesterday's move. We expect some give back after you have a seven or 9% day like you did yesterday on Palunteer.

Super normal. It's exactly what we said in the alpha report this morning. And people think this is crazy because yesterday was great. It's not always perfect. They don't even fair about that, you know, but like some give back is totally expected, especially on Tesla because the Tesla event was a disappointment for the stock market in the short term, but I actually think longer term you can underwrite positivity that you couldn't underwrite

especially on Tesla because the Tesla event was a disappointment for the stock market in the short term, but I actually think longer term you can underwrite positivity that you couldn't underwrite before.

I do worry that some of those numbers could be just too optimistic still and I think my numbers are very reserved already.

It's not a software day. It's a hardware day, apparently, with the exception, of course, of Tesla.

Okay, let's do that quick note on Tesla and put these thoughts together here. And we also have some notes out of Elon now. So, let's pull those as well because Elon added a little bit.

Elon said, let's see, Cyber Cab. Cybercab uses no rare earth metals but maintains the same range. Extremely hard to achieve. That's bullish, too. That's great because you're trying to avoid this uh how would you put it necessity of relying on China electric brakes.

We talked about those yesterday. Hiring for the supercomput teams. Okay. So, nothing much else after what we saw from the event. We've got the biggest thing there was the rare earth pitch.

You know what would be interesting would be seeing kind of Whimo's ramp and maybe charting Whimo's ramp. Uh because let's see here. Uh uh okay that I'm going to try to pull up the data on.

I'm going to try to get Whimo's growth rate and then I want to try to compare that to like well Tesla's there's not much of a growth rate because we've mostly been at you know somewhere between 20 to 40 cars.

I mean maybe now we're at like 60 cars but we're still under a hundred. kind of have like the law of small numbers thing going on where percentage-wise those gains look really really big but obviously small fleet size but I'm curious how long and I think technology will accelerate the ramp but I'm curious how long Whimo you know how many years have they really been cooking here that would be interesting like just fleet size like is this been a 10-year project

But uh so okay, so the numbers for Whimo for fleet size, they actually really started pushing ah it's lumpy though. July of 2024, they had 700 vehicles. December of 2025, they got to 2500 vehicles. and now they're at about 3791 vehicles in May.

Uh, and they're, you know, they're expanding from there. So, if I make a quick growth chart out of that, I I wouldn't be surprised if Elon can move faster than them. Uh, but let's cheat it out, especially since you're able to to ramp these much uh more inexpensively.

December 25 and then we get May of 26. Okay. So, we're just gonna make this graph now that I have the data. 700 2500 3791 ramp. Uh, so this is the ramp sheet for Whimo. Whimo versus, you know, Tesla ramp.

You know, we could argue that we're probably, you know, what would what would we say here? We're probably, you know, summer 2025, you know, call it 20 and then I'll just call it like July 25, you know, whatever.

And then maybe over here we are at you know September 2025 we're maybe at sorry 2026 you know fleet size is authorized to be a lot larger but if we add the 40 cyber cabs you know we'll probably call it plus or minus 100 right now.

So again, the law of small numbers in this case will make this a little bit more misleading. But let's try to chart this just over the same time frame here. See what that looks like.

Two lines. That's not useful, is it? So this is Tesla. Oh, because it's right because they're not relative to each other. You can't chart 20 next to 3,000. Of course, that's fine.

So, this is really Whimo, Whimo's trajectory. Wish we had more data points here going back to July of 2024. It really should, but it doesn't actually show it all the way. Stupid thing.

Should really give me, you know what? Let's just assume we're going to interpolate here. We'll fill that in. There we go. We need to fill in a number to actually complete the graph.

So, we're filling in 1500. Then, let's go ahead and fill in here. And we'll just go to like 40 and 60, something like that, right? And so, we'll call these italicized numbers the interpolated graph.

Oo, big words. Big words, Kevin. Uh, yeah, it's, you know, this hockey sticking is is going to be classic Elon, and I think he'll be able to manufacture a lot faster.

So what and and once the the issue is not manufacturing though the issue is uh scaling the what what I argue the mapping and I don't think it necessarily has to be mapping itself.

Uh I think what it is for Tesla is a um let's get every edge case out of this. So, I'm going to call this uh edge case mapping is going to be the part that slows Tesla down the most.

On a manufacturing uh point of view, uh Giga Texas can do 125,000 per year of these. Uh if you produced these full steam ahead for the next 2 years, you'd have 20x the cars Whimo does so fast it'll feel like it's overnight.

But the limit isn't manufacturing, it's the uh edge case mapping. Uh, so we need to see those, you know, what the the tests they're doing in like St. Pete, Dallas, Utah, or or I I'll just put Nevada because we're seeing Nevada more, right?

These areas uh need to show an initial successful ramp of these cyber cabs and uh then you can discount the uh edge mapping risk. Okay, that becomes really bullish fast. So we're kind of like at the point where we know they could pull it off, right?

So there's execution risk has been removed. Execution risk is gone. The real risk now is uh speed of edge mapping is the next risk and that can be tracked by looking at these cyber caps in different areas.

Right? No, there's no wage price spiral based on uh uh the wage growth. Wage price spiral comes from wage growth. we're not seeing like explosive wage growth. Um, so yeah, that's that is interesting.

Uh, I find that actually exciting for Tesla. Again, short-term bearish though because you're coming off of a disappointing event, right?

Damn, Ser 8% today. Uh yeah, you're getting hardware popping off today. Okay. Huh. Trying to think, you know, because they did say at the event yesterday, no mapping. Let me pull up my notes yesterday because they said no mapping.

Uh cyber cab crew. Um, okay. We will do. Let me pull up these notes. I'm trying to think if there was anything else. There was the 50% shorter manufacturing line. They think they could do it faster. They did set up enthusiasm.

Cyber Cavs are currently operating. We've got I'm trying to find where the because somebody said they saw him in St. Pete. Let's see if we could find just on X, for example. Cybercap spotting cybercab uh St. Pete or I'll just put Florida.

Yeah. See here somebody wrote think I saw a cyber cab in Florida today. Yeah, >> I think it is. >> But that one has a steering wheel. Ah. Ah, damn it. Ah. So, they're this is the validating process.

Ah, see if they if they could just drop the cyber cabs in Florida and you're uh you know you're already dealing with that edge case testing uh or or resolving that because they're driving driverless.

That'd be great. But they're not. See, this is this is the edge case training I'm talking about. Damn it. Ah, that's that's the that's the risk factor is that slowdown. So, wherever you see them, this is South Florida.

Let's see if this one has a wheel, too. Bro, catch up to it. Don't let it get away. Here we go. That's a steering wheel. That's a steering wheel right there. Look at that. Ah, so they're hiring.

This is how they're training, how they're getting the data. So they deal with the edge scenarios with the training wheel. Yeah. Somebody says engineering vehicles. Yeah. This is this is the training they're doing them.

I live in Dallas and I've been seeing them with steering wheels. Yeah. It's that so that's the training part. This is what I call the edge case training and that took a year in Austin alone.

That was only Austin. was labor intensive and it took a year.

And there's another why why do you have to put music in it? Why do you have to do that? Penllis County. I guess I can hail a Tesla cyber cab in Penllis right now. No, you can't.

Orlando, Florida. All right. Okay. Enthusiasm a little less than hope though. H somebody says, "Uh, how does it work in states with driver needing insurance separate to the vehicle?"

I think they're just not going to go to states where you have, you know, the regulatory concerns. They're just going to stay away and avoid those areas for now. That'd be my guess.

All right. Do you think the milk's still okay? Anyway. All right. So, where were we? We are going to yap about Teslur and we're going to look at uh edge mapping and the forecast for Tesla.

Uh, I do think that to explain that we should touch on uh do a little whiteboard on that because I I I don't know that that's super understandable to just say edge mapping because that sounds like mapping, right?

Edge validating maybe is the word. I call it edge mapping. I'm okay with that. Okay. So if we now draw this out, how would we draw that? We would say there's full map, you know, probably your your Whimo.

So we'll put Whimo. Uh and then we'll go Tesla. And then of course we have LAR and full map uh plus vision. Okay. And then radar as well. And these are pricey pricey pricey. The Tesla is dirt cheap vision only.

We know that. But the risk factor is uh the edge mapping edge map which is mega mega pricey and time that's the question. Okay.

Okay. All right, let's do it. It's the morning after the Cyber Cab event that Elon Musk did not show up to and there are some bullish and some bearish things that we have to evaluate for Tesla and the Cyber Cap. most importantly this process that I call edge mapping and I think that's going to be the critical component going forward for Tesla.

So I was thinking about this a little bit with the event we heard yesterday listened to yesterday listened to it multiple times. A key that stood out to me was the reiteration by the cyber cab crew that they do not map that they use a vision-basedonly strategy.

And so this is where I'm introducing a concept or or uh what what I believe what they're doing. So I'm calling it this. I don't know if this is what it's called but I think this is exactly what they're doing.

I think what they're doing is their vision-based edge mapping. And there are some comparisons to Whimo here that we have to know because it's going to factor into what we think about a Tesla future price target and the stock, which we'll also talk about in just a moment.

So, uh, let's let's think about this. Whimo is deemed to be way more expensive for the vehicle, which is a fair assessment by Elon Musk. We think the unbox process for the Tesla Cyber Cabin, frankly, it's a no frrills car, no glass roof on the inside, no back seat, no glove box, it's a monitor, flat dash panel, plastic like back of cop car kind of shell in the back you could hose off.

Great for fleet. Like this is, you know, pretty no frrills. So, just put it straight that way. And the unboxed uh manufacturing process is supposedly going to reduce the overall assembly line length by 50% and then make it faster.

We don't know how much faster. We know installed capacity is about 125,000 per year to manufacture cyber cabs. That's the estimate Tesla's giving us, which is great and that'll be important in just a moment.

So, we do expect that cyber cabs are much less expensive. So, I put $1 sign. So, it's kind of like, you know, cheap fast food versus, you know, a three dollar signed meal or maybe even a four dollar signed meal, right?

Uh, obviously, Whimo uses a whole suite of sensors, LAR, vision, radar, and full mapping of the areas that they are operating in. Tesla on the other hand uh doesn't utilize that strategy.

They utilize a vision only strategy, but it introduces the big concern for Tesla, which is uh expensive $3 sign expensive, not on the car, but expensive human edge mapping.

Edge mapping is basically where you have a supervising driver. And they think this is exactly why they've also updated the FSD software in Tesla vehicles. uh if you're not familiar with it, every time you disengage FSD now, they have a persistent popup, which means it doesn't go away until you vote.

And what they want is every time you disengage FSD, you press, oh, I'm disengaging FSD because I'm parking. Tesla don't really care about that that much. It helps a little bit for parking, but less important.

Uh other, they don't really care about that much either. Safety, your critical alerts or navigation alerts, that's what they care about. And so you could hit critical. They want to fix all of those edge case scenarios.

And navigation useful as well. All of these are useful in their own right. In fairness, parking is useful. Navigation's useful. But killing all of those edge case scenarios with critical interventions of FSD is really, really expensive to do with only Tesla employees.

So they've basically enlisted every single Tesla driver to deal with those edge case scenarios.

And so a lot of people I see in comments, they're saying, "Hey, I see cyber cabs in Houston. I see them in Texas. I see them in Vegas." Great. The problem with these vehicles in these other states where edge mapping has not been completed yet is Tesla is actually manually edge mapping.

You could see in this Florida shot here, a clear steering wheel in the vehicle. And so I think what they're doing is they'll deploy, you know, maybe 20 of these with human Tesla drivers and they'll basically use the cybercap to go edge mapap themselves the areas they want to expand to.

That's an example of a uh Florida one. There are here's another uh South Florida example. I think the last one was Orlando. And in this example as well, you could see a steering wheel here.

So I don't think it's a surprise. I don't think they're hiding uh this and kill that music there. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but what it is is it's slow and that's the issue.

Do I really think it's that expensive to hire 20 people to drive these vehicles with these, you know, steering wheels here? No. The problem is time. And that's probably the biggest issue that we face right now in edge mapping.

I think manufacturing we're good. I think on the technology were good but only once the timeconsuming edge mapping has been completed. And the part that uh I really think a Tesla investor should pay most attention to right now is that it took Austin 12 months to get to basically full self-driving robo cabs right on a steering wheel and pedalless vehicle.

That's Austin. What you really need to see now is you need to see those dots compressed to like three month validation cycles for cities. That would be ideal because I think we're going to hockey stick past Whimo's robo taxi manufacturing.

And so what we have is we have some estimates that we've put on a spreadsheet. So Whimo reportedly had 700 uh robo taxis on the road July 2024. 2500 on the road by December 25 and 3,700 on the road by May of 26.

I'm just interpolating and throwing in a 1500 here so I can actually get a chart. But this gives you the the Whimo ramp graph, if you will. The Tesla Cyber Cab has, you know, really moved up like 20 to 100 roughly.

Uh, and these are like actually driverless vehicles. So, you have a little bit more of a hockey stick bend here. Not that this is really particularly useful because these are

I believe that the situation for Tesla is we are now at a critical inflection point on how fast we can edge case map. Tesla is in the edging phase. And what we're really looking forward to is their ability to accelerate edging.

So, getting from edging to completion. That's what's critical here for Tesla.

In Austin, it took 12 months. Maybe in South Florida, it'll get down to eight months. the faster those ramps go. So basically time to you know time from we just started testing in Vegas and we just started testing in uh you know Houston or whatever to we are now launching fully selfdriving robo cababs or cyber cabs. That's your inflection point for Tesla.

That's when things get really bullish. Why? Because they can actually manufacture a whole lot faster than Whimo.

You could potentially get to 100,000 at Tesla.

But this inflection point is entirely dependent on how fast they could get through the edging phase. Once we know that, that's when you could really underwrite Tesla stock uh in my opinion more cleanly.

So, if I go to my Tesla stock analysis, I actually think, you know, I've I've previously removed Cyber Cab as as just a safety net. You can, in my opinion, add it back in after yesterday's event.

Yesterday's event is a shortterm negative catalyst because people are going to see it as buy the rumor, sell the news because honestly, they dropped the ball on the like Elon should have been there.

If Elon just had a damn presentation, put his pants on, got up on stage, and said, "Look, we don't map. We do vision only. It took us 12 months to do it in Texas, in Austin. We think we could do it in eight months in Houston.

We think we could do it in four months in Orlando." And guess what that means? That means every subsequent city we go into, Vegas, Denver, Utah, this that boom boom boom here's a map on on the background on the charter whatever we can now get these things from edging to done in three months.

If he went up there and said that and then said, "This means by the end of 2027, we could have a 100,000 vehicles on the road because we have now compressed the time it takes to edge and we're good to go." This stock would be up 20% today.

Now what does uh you know cyber cab revenue actually look like? If you underwrite this as maybe taking 10% market share from Uber which has you know obviously a global operation at a 20% margin.

Hey, it adds maybe $1.2 billion of operating income. It's that's good. It adds maybe $50 to the stock for a 2030 valuation.

It's not actually where most of the money I think comes from. uh the unboxing process. I actually think selling the cyber cabs and then letting fleet operators do it is the most profitable thing for Tesla.

I think Tesla should validate the technology and sell it. I don't think they should be in the business of operating these cabs. Let other people take the depreciation. Sell these.

Take the money upfront. Sell them the full self-driving. Put them on a full self-driving subscription and literally manufacture high margin cyber caps. Sell high margin FSD. Don't operate the bull crap of driving people around.

Just validate it and sell the damn car. I think that's the future.

Now, I'm already underwriting, you know, 4 million vehicle sales over here. So, I think there's a lot built into this $65 price target for Tesla for 2030. It requires uh the semi-truck to ramp to operating income of 3.5 billion.

FSD subscriptions to roughly double on operating income. Tesla bot, I want to see 200,000 bot sales. I think I it's actually conservative by 2030. Uh and I want to see the unboxed uh or or cyber cap robo taxi revenues of about a billion bucks.

That could end up being higher if we just sell these to others and we actually get that inflection point. But I actually think the stock would have done really well if they did what I just said.

Like if you're in South Florida, if you're in Orlando, if you're in Houston and you're like and you're seeing full self-driving cyber cabs actually get deployed there, you should be tracking when did they start, when did they deploy.

As soon as that compresses from one year down to three months, that's when we get to escape velocity for robo taxis.

Until then, it's a very time consuming process to map out all of the edge scenarios. And I think that's what they just went through with Austin. And that is the biggest test for Tesla stock.

That's the most important thing for Tesla stock going forward.

Tesla now down six. So really essentially unwinding all of yesterday's surge. Look at that. All of it.

We've got the edging on Tesla. Talked about that.

In Texas, it was an event that was held for Tesla influencers, those on social media who agreed to sign non-disclosure agreements and Tesla did not stream the event. And it basically comes down to this.

They offering they will start offering commercial rides in cyber cabs as part of the robo taxi network. Exactly how many, what the fairs will be, etc. That has not been clearly extated by Tesla at this point.

And the fleet number is unclear. Is it going to be a couple? Is it going to be a dozen? Is it going to be two dozen? Nobody's sure right now. And as I mentioned, the federal government is doing an audit into exactly why Tesla believes it has gone through the processes necessary to ensure the safe operation of these vehicles.

What does Wall Street think about the cyber cab event or non-event last night? Dan Levy at Barkley says without any new incrementals on growth scaling targets, we believe the event could prove to be less significant a catalyst than some investors had expected.

Meanwhile, Ben Callow at Baird says the event is an important milestone for Tesla. And yes, it is a milestone if they are allowed to do commercial rides with the cyber cab. They're doing that right now.

Will that continue once the federal government does its investigation here? It's possible they could come back and say, "Okay, what you said is going to be happening is meets up to it's up to par, but we have the final say is what Nitsa is saying here."

As you take a look at shares of Tesla, bit of a sell-off today is not surprising, guys, given what we've seen since July 28th. It's just been on a a steady move higher. Three things driving it.

Cybercab, Optimus robot enthusiasm and obviously people talking about the potential for a merger with SpaceX or SpaceX taking out Tesla at some point in the future.

our Philau watching Tesla today.

Tesla's down six. That was also in the alpha report this morning.

yesterday we called Tesla running up uh and software running like Palunteer.

And I can't plug the Sprinter into the Tesla charger. Maybe one day. I I still think they need a Tesla Sprinter van, but it's just never going to happen. It's sad. It ain't going to happen. It just ain't going to happen. It's sad.

Coming up, Tesla shares are down 6% on pace for their worst day since July 23 after the surprisingly kind of lackluster Han debut of the long- aaited Cyber Cab in Austin.

So, that's the last thing. I wonder if anybody's touched on that. Let me see here. Let's listen in here for a moment and I'm going to see if anybody's talked about the Trump social >> and the kind of uh human side of this equation, if you will.

Does that explain some of the people you've brought on board here? Why is it that you turn to politicos like former Obama administration alumni for this effort? >> Well, first it's it's always an incredible situation when you can be able to have people who have been in really difficult situations that have managed, you know, at the highest levels of power.

Uh not only >> next >> I I I have no idea. they did have their engineers uh addressing some questions and talking with those influencers who were invited to this event. Um and at the end of the day, it was it was a soft push in terms of saying, "Okay, now we're putting this out there for commercial rides, at least in the Austin market, and we might see it in Dallas and in Houston as well."

Um and again, the the other question becomes here, what does the federal government say about this? Because Zuks, which also has a vehicle that does not have a steering wheel, it received a an exemption from the federal government to start commercial rides.

That has not happened with Tesla. So, how does this play out over the weeks and months? It'll be interesting to watch.

Yeah, we touched on Tesla early. I think it's more than just watch it play out. You got to you got to watch the spread between how long it takes for them to to get from training to um to actually self-driving. That's all it comes down to.