What goes down could go up, so Thursday’s dramatic dip in the Tesla stock price could be a temporary blip. For that matter, the company continues to hold the frontrunner position in EV sales within the challenging market of the US by an epically wide margin, so what’s not to like? Still, the sudden nosedive is calling renewed attention to shortcomings in the Robotaxi space.
Questions Linger Over Robotaxi
Tesla stock has persisted in and around the high 300’s for a while now, off its December 2025 peak of $498 but substantially higher than where it stood in 2010, when the company’s initial iteration as Tesla Motors launched an IPO at $17. That’s not a typo. The IPO was $17. And that was before stock splits. Its split-adjusted IPO price was jusy $1.13 per share.
Tesla stock is still sky high, but Thursday’s nosedive has sparked some alarm. At the closing bell on Thursday, Tesla was down to its lowest since last August, trading at $320.
The downward drift followed a Q2 earnings report from CEO Elon Musk, which featured notes on the number of unsold vehicles year-to-date (22,000 so far) and crashes related to the company’s driver assistance technology (more than 200, for those of you keeping score at home).
That was hardly reassuring news, and Musk did not lighten the mood when he dove into a progress report on the company’s Robotaxi driverless ride-hailing service (see CleanTechnica’s complete Tesla Robotaxi coverage here).
“Our goals are very ambitious for Robotaxi, but we do need to be cautious about causing any accidents or causing any harm to anyone,” Musk said in widely cited remarks.
“We’ve opened up a number of cities in Florida and in Texas and obviously in the Bay Area. So we’ll continue to scale, I think, very, very rapidly on — with it looks like more than 10% a week in terms of miles driven. So it’s a very high compound growth rate,” he elaborated.
Promises, Promises
As for why the assurance of a high compound growth rate did not reassure investors, that’s no mystery. Musk has been over-promising on Tesla’s Robotaxi business from the beginning. In January of this year, CleanTechnica editor Zachary Shahan outlined the gap between vision and reality:
“Elon Musk said last July that the company’s new Robotaxi business would cover about 50% of the US population by the end of 2025, and then when it was obvious that wasn’t happening, there was big hype around a commitment that they’d be rolling out completely driverless cars (no human supervisors) before the end of the year. It’s now more than 3 months beyond the end of 2025 and there’s no apparent progress on this.”
“There might be only one driverless Tesla in Austin, but certainly seems to be fewer than 10. That is not covering at least 50% of the US population unless you expect people to travel to Austin from around the country to try out the revolutionary Tesla Robotaxi,” Shahan emphasized.
Tesla did extend the launch of the Robotaxi into Florida earlier this month, initially in Miami, with Tampa and Orlando following just this week (in time for the analyst call). However, it didn’t take long for things to go south.
“A driver spotted a Tesla robotaxi going the wrong way down a one-way street a day after the company rolled out its driverless taxi service in Tampa,” News Channel 8 TV in Florida reported on July 22.
“The dashcam video, submitted by Jon Francisco, appears to show a Tesla robotaxi going north on North Armenia Avenue at the intersection of West Cypress Street in West Tampa,” continued Channel 8 reporter Sarah Rains.
Tesla Continues To Dominate The US EV Market, For Now
CleanTechnica readers were also quick to note shortcomings in the Florida launch, particularly in regards to Orlando. If you have any insights to contribute, drop a note in the comment thread.
Robotaxi troubles or not, Tesla remains the single largest seller of EVs in the US, capturing just over 50% of the US market in Q2. That’s quite a feat considering all the reputational baggage Musk has heaped upon the company in his capacity as head of Trump’s DOGE budget-cutting office, among other extracurricular activities, though it is significantly down from the 80% share Tesla claimed in 2019 at its peak.
After 2019, other automakers began to crowd into Tesla’s market share, and still the company continues to maintain its leadership position. As for the coming months, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to see Tesla continue clawing back a bit more of its market share over the next few quarters, as other EV makers curtail their 100% EV plans in favor of plug-in hybrids and conventional hybrids.
That may or may not persist beyond 2027. While General Motors and Ford did pull back on their EV plans last year after the $7,500 federal EV tax credit died a premature death, both automakers have persistently affirmed their intent to focus on EV affordability in the coming years, with Ford on track to produce a to-be-named midsized electric pickup truck and GM — well, who knows? As of this writing, GM is still pitching the 2027 Bolt as “the most affordable EV in America,” though rumor has it that GM plans to retire the Bolt, again.
Tesla is also going to face competition from other all-electric startups. While Lucid has failed to gain traction, Rivian has already established a solid footprint and it has somehow managed to secure billions in Energy Department loans to build another factory in Georgia. Another all-electric startup, Jeff Bezos-backed Slate Auto, expects to launch its first deliveries later this year.
Another startup to watch is TELO Trucks, which is marketing a city-scaled electric pickup truck inspired by the pint-sized “Kei” cars of Japan. The automaker was rather quiet earlier this year, but on July 14 TELO announced that its forthcoming MT1 EV — which is about the size of a Mini Cooper — successfully towed a 5,800-pound Pebble Flow full-size travel trailer with an assist from Pebble’s “Easy Tow” system.
Then there’s Dacora. The New York startup is pitching a hand-crafted, retro-styled luxury EV featuring a wooden hood (you get to pick which wood). The dashboard, also made of wood, does this weird thing where it — well, let us let Dacora tell it:
“This is not a touchscreen. It’s a more personal, intuitive relationship with your car — activated by subtle movement, guided by muscle memory, and tailored to the way you think, not the way machines do. In your Dacora, driving becomes more than routine — it becomes an awakened experience,” the company states somewhat loftily.
Interested? Reserve yours here for a refundable deposit of $50,000.
Photo: The Tesla Robotaxi service is launching in more US cities, but investors were not amused after CEO Elon Musk presented the company’s Q2 report (screenshot, courtesy of Tesla).
