Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas in new
$TSLA note: "I'm callin' it. Autonomous cars are solved. Do I mean six or seven 9's to the right of the decimal? No. Perfection? Never. But enough to pull the safety driver at scale in major metros."
"From our discussions with
@Tesla, it appears the only thing preventing Tesla from pulling the driver is its own abundance of caution. Our understanding is that there is no other explicit regulatory approval required to pull drivers in Texas. A passive optical-only AV system would seriously challenge the conventional thinking of many in the robotaxi community. Tesla truly believes that radar and LIDAR do not make its cars any safer. It is our longstanding opinion that if you solve autonomy for cars – you solve autonomy for many other form factors of AI-enabled robotics (aviation, marine, weapons, etc).
Tesla will have around 8 million vehicles in the global 'parc' by year-end. 12% FSD penetration (paying monthly subs and upfront purchasers) implies 1mm active paying users. If we were to apply the $99/month subscription fee to all users (including upfront payers for comparative equivalency) implies approx $300mm of quarterly FSD revenue or $1.2bn annualized FSD revenue at a year-end exit rate. Assuming an 85% margin would imply approx $1bn of EBIT... accounting for 15 to 20% of total company EBIT. Highly profitable, highly reoccurring."