Let's not over-simplify this. It is not as if I don't understand the advantages of city life and not needing a car, I lived in Manhattan for 10 years. But guess what, I still bought a car because I wanted to go places the trains don't go. But the real question is not about what's practical, it is about scale, and how much it will be worth to Tesla to R&D and build these autonomous vehicles for the 1 million (or so) city-dwelling millennials who want something cheaper than UBER. Did you watch the videos? The amount of speculation is a bit over the top. The interviewer and the guest are both assuming there will be MORE cars on the road than there are now solely because of the addition of autonomous vehicles (if fewer people want to own cars, and they only need one once/week, why would there be more cars on the roads?), then they discuss how cheap it will be to take a taxi, because they are EVs, and because there is no driver to pay. Well & good, BUT - they are assuming all the savings will go to the customers, not to the shareholders. The moderator is fantasizing about taxis that only cost $.50 mile or even less. I don't think it adds up. 1) Truly autonomous city driving is still pretty far off. Just like the recent accident showed the cars need to know a real person is sitting there ready to take the wheel or else it won't go into autonomous mode. A lot more R&D is needed before these are real. 2) The cars have to charge overnight, so to operate 24-hours you need TWO cars, one running and one charging (unless you develop battery switching which I have not heard Tesla talking about), so you just doubled the cost of running one "taxi". 3) How big will the demand be, really? Will smaller regions have enough customers to make it profitable? The issue is scaling the business too have the right number of cars to meet the demand at different hours of the day - UNLESS the customers are willing to wait for a car, which is not a top reason why you take a car. Most want to take a car (instead of public transit) when they are in a hurry. Right now there are not many cities in the entire world where you can get a taxi right away (New York, London, etc.). Even in Los Angeles you have to hail a ride and wait, often for 15 minutes. Not everyone will want to wait. And then in the suburbs there will be rush hours to work when 10,000 need a car, for 1 hour each day, and the rest of the time the demand will be far lower. So, either you build a lot of extra cars so rush hour is covered, or (more likely) more people will have to wait their turn to get a car at rush hour. Even in NYC there are times of day when you cannot even hail a cab for 20 minutes sometimes - they are all taken. Also - keep in mind that one issue with the taxi business is that you cannot decide where to take the passenger. Sometimes (5:00 pm) there will be 100,000 cars all leaving the city, and no one wanting to ride them back into the city - that means a lot of dead-heading plus a lot of waiting for the people in the city who want a car to take home (or else you have twice as many cars which go unused 22 hours a day). IOW: it is not the answer to every personal transportation issue. It is really limited to big cities, and to the right customers who are willing to wait for a car rather than take the subway. Just because they are cheaper to operate, it does not make the business any easier to manage or scale. Plus - do you think New York is going to let all those medallions become worthless? It took the city 50 years just to get its first Target because they didn't want to put the small store owners out of business.
It won't do any good if Chinese consumers boycott all American cars (including those made in China). It's not like they have no better alternatives. Porsche Mission E (Taycan) alone can replace all "high end" Tesla's even without any anti-American sentiment that the Trump administration is riling up fast. Hope you had finally exited before the collapse at $250. I suspect that before too long, the speed of TSLA price fall will only be slowed down by air resistance. Still expecting a bloodbath before year end.
I wonder how many rolls of TP Tesla could have bought for the 20 MM "well spent" SEC fine? https://electrek.co/2019/05/24/tesla-cost-cutting-effort-toilet-paper/
On May 22 Citigroup Reiterated their sell rating and changed the price target from 238 to 191. The last filings say they bought 284,000 more shares, increasing their holdings by 640%.
On May 6th BOA resumed their under perform rating. The last filings state they added 252,000 shares, an increase of 110%.