Key Takeaways
- Tesla shares rose 5% as its robotaxi service reached San Antonio and Elon Musk said Cybertruck orders outrun production.
- Tesla is turning away truck buyers to make room for the Cybercab.
- Uber gets another driverless rival in Texas, and Rivian could win refunded Cybertruck buyers.
- The stock already prices in robotaxi revenue that hasn’t shown up yet.
Tesla (TSLA) stock is up 5% today after its robotaxis reached San Antonio and Elon Musk said Tesla will refund Cybertruck deposits it can’t fill.
That puts Uber Technologies (UBER) up against a driverless rival in another Texas city, and hands Rivian Automotive (RIVN) a pool of electric-pickup buyers with their deposits back.
Musk would rather build Cybercabs
Musk said Friday that Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production around mid-2027 to make room for more Cybercabs. On Monday, he posted: “The Cybertruck order rate far exceeds our production rate. We will try to make as many as possible before shutting down the line in about 8 months, but will have to return deposits for a lot of people.” Tesla won’t miss much: its “other models” line, Cybertruck included, delivered 8,295 vehicles in the third quarter, under 2% of the total.
Rivian’s R1T is the obvious next stop, but its record third-quarter deliveries of 19,248 came mostly from the new R2 SUV, and its car business still lost $80 million at the gross profit line. Its fourth-quarter delivery report in early January will show whether Cybertruck buyers switched.
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The robotaxi has to carry the stock
San Antonio makes seven robotaxi cities, short of the “dozens of major cities” Musk expected by the end of 2026 on Tesla’s January call. Outside Austin’s 400-plus cars, the fleets are tiny: 24 in Fort Worth and five in Miami, TechCrunch reported. That’s a rounding error next to Uber, which handled 4.1 billion trips in the third quarter, up 16%, and expects about 700 fully driverless partner vehicles on its app by year-end and over 2,000 in 2027.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s operating margin fell from 16.8% in 2022 to 2.6% in the third quarter of 2026, and analysts don’t expect earnings to top 2023’s $3.12 a share until 2028:
A sliver of truck deliveries and one new city shouldn’t move those estimates. Investors are paying for the robotaxi instead:
Tesla traded at 168x forward earnings at Friday’s close, against a five-year average of 108x, and today’s jump takes it even higher.
Trading the Cybertruck for the Cybercab is the right call. But at this price, I wouldn’t chase today’s jump until robotaxi revenue shows up in the results, which Musk says should be noticeable by the second quarter of 2027.
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