ARK Invest says Tesla’s addressable market for a robotaxi fleet is $10T

ARK Invest’s Tasha Keeney weighed in on Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) We, Robot event held last week at the Warner Bros. Studio in Los Angeles. The event included the introduction of the Robovan, Cybercab, the latest Optimus humanoid robot, and a wireless charging platform.

Keeney said although helpful to its scaling efforts, the Cybercab should not be a prerequisite for Tesla’s (TSLA) robotaxi platform, as all cars equipped with Hardware 3 and 4 will be capable of full autonomy with over-the-air software updates. Keeney said ARK’s research indicates that Tesla (TSLA) is likely to launch a full-scale robotaxi network in 2025 or 2026.

One of the significant takeaways from the event was said to be Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk’s statement that the company is likely to offer robotaxi rides for as low as $0.30 to $0.40 per mile at scale. “For comparison, the average cost per ride-hailing mile in Western ride-hailing markets is ~$2.4 compared to that for a personally owned vehicle at ~$0.70 cents per mile,” highlighted Keeney. She noted that lower costs should make robotaxis extremely competitive with human-driven ride-hail platforms, attracting a much larger user base. ARK’s research suggests that Tesla (TSLA) is targeting a market much larger than that of Uber and Didi, over $10 trillion globally.

ARK’s bullish view on Tesla (TSLA) is that the company’s extensive data lake, sourced from customer vehicles, has given it a significant edge over competitors like Waymo (GOOG) which lack data scale and manufacturing capacity. While Tesla (TSLA) will not be the first to offer an autonomous platform, ARK thinks that it is likely to be the first to scale.

Shares of Tesla (TSLA) are down about 8% from where they stood before the robotaxi event. Uber Technologies (UBER) is up 7.7%.