Driverless cars are as real as this image
In Elon Musk’s telling, the world is always one year away from cars that drive themselves.
However in the real world, there are increasing signs that it’s not coming and might not for a long time.
I’ve been writing about this for years and I think the market is finally coming to the same conclusion (as TSLA shares sink 20% this year). Certainly, Apple appears to be as it’s now pushing back its plans to sell and EV to at least 2028 from 2026.
Apple first promised a truly driverless car in 2014 but now they’re not even working on that. Instead, they’ve downgraded their hopes to something that’s in-line with what Tesla’s currently do, which is Level 2 — far from the Level 4 or 5 envisioned.
The company has already sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into the project and the Bloomberg report says it could be scrapped altogether. Globally, billions have been poured into driver-less car technology and there’s no sign that it’s getting close. Perhaps there is some AI iteration that gets there but with the breakthroughs in AI, I suspect that R&D money will instead be put into applications that show more progress.
Time to downgraded the Magnificent Seven into the Super Six:
TSLA shares
Morgan Stanley has $76/share of the company riding on robotaxis.