TSLA is a high-risk/high-reward bet on autonomy; despite data advantages, it lags competitors in safety and scale, requiring proof of execution.

And I do believe because of those innovations in AI, we're going to get, um, it It's going to even accelerate the adoption and some of the use cases of these autonomous solutions.

So, the first company I'm going to pick is going to be one that's typically very um you you get both sides of the story on this one, right? It's very conflicting to some, and that's going to be Tesla.

I mean, Tesla is is betting its long-term valuation on pretty much AI and autonomy, right? With FSD and then the robo-taxi um kind of solution. And more importantly, later on, maybe in another episode, we can talk about the robotic solution as well.

They're trying to build all this at scale. And this is what many would say kind of a high-risk, high-reward name. Uh main reason its valuation is pretty high right now, and obviously with AI innovation, there's a lot of competitors in the space.

But regardless, regardless, this is a stock I really do enjoy for its tech. I I am going to be honest, my wife loves her Tesla, Rachel. She commutes about 60 to 70 mi one way for work.

And nonstop, only thing she gets out of the driveway, puts on the FSD, and she says, "I am not buying another car because this thing literally takes me from point A to point B." Um and it saves her all on that on that time.

Um but Tesla, right? Q2 2026 revenue hit a record 28.2 billion. Unfortunately, profits fell to 57% year-over-year as the company is spending more on the search on robo-taxis, on the search of um semi it it it's semi-truck development on also the increase of research and development for the Optimus robot, um which free cash flow actually turned negative this quarter.

A 1.1 billion deficit compared to a positive free cash flow of 146 million a year earlier, and 1.4 billion dollars the quarter before.

So, we are seeing kind of the shift in free cash flow as the company is accelerating a lot in in the robo-taxi world, and like I mentioned, the robotics. If any of you fools are on X, you most likely the past few weeks you guys have seen um robo taxi seems to be appearing in a lot of new locations.

We're starting to see um parking lots being filled at Tesla facilities with robo taxis. So, obviously all that is creating some form of expense for the company, but the opportunity of when they get turned on is something Tesla bulls are super excited about.

Uh Tesla's robo taxi mileage is is is is growing more than 10% week over week according to management in their recent earnings and most likely with the new robo taxis coming in, that's going to grow dramatically.

FSD is adopting and accelerating active subscriptions. It reached about 1.5 million, up 56% year-over-year and more than 55% of North Americans new deliveries now include FSD. So, where previously people didn't even know that their new car could drive itself, it seems like Tesla's doing really good at marketing FSD and to have more than half of new buyers include FSD subscription, I think shows a long long way.

Um now, some things that uh to worth noting before I pass it your way uh Rachel is Tesla it does not plan to partner with Uber or Lyft. This creates a form of risk or reward. The reward is if they actually do really well with this, they open up a huge market.

Uh the risk is you have competition, right? You have Uber and Lyft to be able on this robo taxi wave um and and and those have some massive ecosystem.

Uh the other things that we're seeing is at the moment, Tesla is still running behind some of the big players like Waymo on fully driverless around the United States. Even though that is scaling, it is important for investors to know that at least in the moment, they are still lagging compared to some of the other players out there.

Uh so, this is why I brought uh Tesla. I feel like when we talk about autonomy, it's almost a crime to not bring Tesla and FSD to it, Rachel.

Yeah, you know, this is as you said one of those companies where you sort of feel very strongly either for or against it, especially when it comes to the autonomy race. And a lot of that goes back to the the camera only versus the lidar debate, right?

I mean, this has kind of been one of the key sticky points that I think for a lot of Tesla investors and you know, bulls and bears alike.

It be you go back, Tesla pulled radar from its vehicles in 2021, it dropped ultrasonic sensors in 2022, and went all-in on cameras. You know, Musk has famously called lidar, which has sort of been the standard for the other competitors, he's called lidar a fool's errand and said the companies relying on it are doomed.

And so, it's interesting because, you know, Tesla is philosophically at least at odds with many of the other serious players in the space. Obviously, Waymo, but there's others like Baidu, and you know, they all use the camera plus lidar plus radar sensor fusion specifically for any kind of redundancy concerns.

And so, I think this is something to pay attention to. I mean, we saw an argument from Waymo's co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov earlier this year saying that camera-only systems can match human driving performance, but the safety curve for vision-only flattens out too early to meaningfully beat humans.

So, that's something where I think there are still more questions than answers.

You know, we saw that the NHTSA had opened an engineering analysis in 2026 into Tesla's FSD's camera degradation detection system. So, I think that they have a lot that they need to answer there for to ensure that, you know, their vehicles are truly safe as they get out on the road and as they get into larger geofenced areas.

Now, it's interesting because Tesla's Austin robotaxi geofence has actually grown larger than Waymo's. In June of this year, it expanded to cover the entire greater Austin metro area. That's about 245 square miles.

And you know, expanding a geofence, there's one industry analyst that described it as you're essentially drawing a bigger box on a map. And the fleet operating inside that geofence has hovered around several dozen vehicles depending on the month according to Texas's DMV registration data.

And so, that's been very interesting. Obviously, they're expanding into new areas. The requirements depend on the market. For example, Tesla's San Francisco Bay Area service, they still have to have an in-car or safety monitor just based on state regulations.

So, the biggest kind of gap for Tesla is expanding the markets in which it's deploying. And also doing so in a way that shows that its technology can really meaningfully and safely engage with the competition.

So, there's a few ways, you know, Tesla can close that gap. I mean, Musk has tied any kind of meaningful fleet scale up to the FSD version 15 software rewrite. And that reportedly grows their underlying driving driving model from roughly a billion to about 10 billion parameters.

They have some really aggressive goals for later this year into 2027.

You know, Tesla's kind of advantage is the fact that they have millions of customer-owned vehicles already on the road. They're continuously generating real-world driving data at a scale that, you know, very few, if any, purpose-built robotaxi fleets could match.

And so, the idea, if you're a you know, a Tesla bull, is that combining that camera-only hardware, that's also dramatically cheaper to manufacture than a lidar-equipped vehicle, that that data advantage and the camera-only advantage could help them catch up with competitors in the race.

I still think Tesla has a lot to prove there personally. Um right now, they're still behind in terms of safety data, fleet size, the unsupervised operating history as well compared to the competition.

The bet here is that their manufacturing scale and their fleet data volume can close that gap faster than the sensor heavy competitors can. So, if you're someone that's watching Tesla, you own the company, you're thinking about owning them to capture the autonomy angle, that's the bet you need to consider.

Definitely Rachel. I I I I really did enjoy that last point that one of the big strengths for this company is once everything gets cleared out. And I do feel it's important to kind of continue to get this lidar versus vision only system.

And as more robo taxis come out, more data points come out, and then we will finally be able to either keep this case open or close pretty much of which is better.

But once it closes, you mentioned one of their big assets was the manufacturing print. Just like I I mentioned, if you go on X, you see these robo taxis just filing out and coming out of the supply chain line.

If those truly just open up, the amount of data that could be collected and the amount of market they can take is something Tesla bulls are very, very excited about.

In today's episode, we took a closer look at three companies that can benefit from this autonomous world. I mean, obviously we had to talk about Tesla.