Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, responds to Uber and also announces that he wants to launch self-driving taxis by 2020. In fact, if the ride sharing app, which is preparing for its IPO on the Stock Exchange, raised a billion of dollars of funding from a consortium that includes Softbank, Toyota and Denso, precisely with the aim of developing the self-driving car, Musk said he can announce "with a good degree of certainty the launch of autonomous 'robotaxis' within the 'next year".
The visionary entrepreneur made these statements on Monday 22 April, during the presentation of Tesla's future projects: from the ultra-fast futuristic train Hyperloop to SpaceX space shuttles to colonize Mars, Musk relaunched the old dot of the driverless car, hypothesizing that could become a business for whoever owns one. And at the same time an opportunity for Tesla to compete with Uber, through the creation of a very similar platform.
"The utility of a vehicle will be multiplied by five", assured Musk, who has in fact in mind to create an app on the same principle as Uber, and that is to book a car to be accompanied somewhere, with the difference however that that car will not have a driver but will drive itself. "Since the beginning of 2020, drivers will no longer have to put their hand on the wheel": the ambitious announcement has not, however, warmed up the mood of the markets, given that Tesla stock dropped nearly 4% on Wall Street yesterday.
Another important drop after that of a month and a half ago, when the stock lost 6% following the announcement (later partially retracted) of a lowering the prices of Model S and Model X cars and the closure of almost all physical points of sale to focus only on online. In this case, the loss of the stock was also influenced by the accident that also occurred yesterday in a Model S car which suddenly caught fire while it was in an underground parking lot in Shanghai, China. Now Ellinghost analysts have downgraded Tesla to "sell": they recommend selling the shares.
