TESLA Unsupervised FSD Will Change Everything in 2026.
TESLA Robotaxis do not crash — they only hesitate and unsupervised FSD will roll out to owners in ~7 months. The driving experience will be transformed.
The full global million-scale robo-taxi is tied to v15, but unsupervised for personal cars + early robotaxi fleet will have meaningful financial and share price impact.
FSD take-rate and margins are actually already improving, This will continue and add 0.5-1.0% margin. They will also improve car sales which will further improve profits and margins.
Optimus production starts August (hundreds to thousands in Q3/Q4 this year) with v3 reveal in July. This can also shift the stock narrative if the demos and deployments are strong.
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Ouch. Mass scaling of Robotaxi is about a year away. This is way behind your prediction from last summer of by Q3/Q4 2025.
On the more bullish side, a lot of Cybercabs have been coming off the line already, no steering wheel or pedals, driving themselves out of the Gigafactory and it isn’t even May 1st yet. Yes the ramp up will be slow, but slow production ramps for a product that isn’t sold to consumers and can only go into Tesla robotaxi fleets is still a lot of vehicles. This transition was argued about for many years and Elon got his way, they aren’t producing a Model2 version with steering wheels and pedals as a safety margin. So the pressure is on to get them working unsupervised in fleets or have them pile up in lots on the balance sheet. Theres a lot of pressure on Tesla to get it to work.
How does something like this affect other automakers like Toyota, Honda, Ford, Chevrolet, etc, and people who want those cars? Unless they really get in gear and begin offering competing EV products.
I agree that Brians predicitions about FSD are a bit off.
Some things have visibly improved. Like % of drives with no critical disengagement according to Tesla FSD tracker. That numbers have risen to about 98-99% in the last few months. That is good improvement. But we still have a lot of disengagements.
City distance to critical disengagement is currently about 1046 km or 650 miles. That is good, but we need much better numbers for real FSD.
I disengaged this AM, on the way to work, at the same spot as always, to avoid a crappy patch job for three pot holes. My only real complaint is it does not deal with potholes well. That and my complaint below.
I also have another place I always disengage and frequently report. FSD wants to move me to a lane that ends 150 feet after the stoplight. It moves me right and invariably, whoever was behind me ends up cutting me off when I need to move left at the merge. I wish I could train it to remember the right way to deal with that intersection.
My car has NOT updated to 14.3.2 yet. I am still on 14.2.something.
Oh my, no Brian, you are completely off. Sorry to say, you are systematically off when it comes to Tesla.
Elon said unsupervised FSD for customers at the end of 2026, which means it will come in middle of 2028. Which is fine.
He also said that the production ramp of Optimus will be extremely slow (S-shaped curve), meaning perhaps a few hundred robots in 2026. Not tens of thousands.
And about robotaxi. It’s not just infinite loops, it’s (surprisingly!) also a question of navigation and mapping which is not OK. Just look at http://www.teslafsdtracker.com. Safety critical interventions are low (but non zero) whereas other interventions are pretty substantian (for FSD 14.X one every 25 miles). If they get 100 unsupervised robotaxis in 2026, then this is fine.
Personally, I think that robotaxi will probably require HW5. Possibly even HW6. Remember that Elon Musk was convinced that HW3 would be sufficient? Well, after a couple of years of banging his head against the wall, he changed his mind. I have a feeling we are in the same position now.
I say all this as a long term Tesla bull.