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Tesla’s latest earnings report was very bad news for the company. In the second quarter, it made $1.1 billion in net profit, less than the $1.2 billion it reported a year earlier. Vehicle sales were up, but profits remain about a quarter billion short of expectations, and the automaker’s cash flow is negative for the first time in over two years.
But the real blow has been the slow rollout of its Robotaxi service. Elon Musk has staked his automaker’s future on fully autonomous vehicles, promising investors it would help push Tesla’s valuation to an eyebrow-raising $30 trillion — approximately the gross domestic product of the United States, for perspective.
And importantly, he promised to get this done quickly. Before launching Tesla’s first Robotaxi service in Austin last summer, Musk estimated that over 1,000 of the self-driving cabs would be roaming the streets “within a few months.”
Now, a year later, Tesla doesn’t even have a hundred Robotaxis in operation. And its efforts seem to actually be regressing. According to a new chart the company released Wednesday, the Robotaxi network racked up fewer miles from paying customers in the second quarter than it did in the first.
The chart, which may be the most dismal single aspect of the entire earnings cycle, misleadingly displays this data as cumulative miles to make it appear like the Robotaxi service is steadily growing.
But TechCrunch broke it down, finding that in the first quarter, Tesla’s driverless cabs carrying paying passengers drove around 1.1 million miles, but fell to just 700,000 miles in the second — cratering by over a third.
The misleading chart isn’t the only way Tesla has tried to dress up its stalling efforts. A day before releasing the earnings report, it announced that it was expanding to two more cities in Florida, Tampa and Orlando — without sharing the size of those fleets, Electrek noted.
It should tell you something that Tesla has gone to great lengths to keep the size of its operation under wraps. In June, Bloomberg reported that its fleet size across all cities was just 59 robotaxis. Only third of those are fully unsupervised; the other vehicles have a human safety monitor sitting in the front seats.
It’s also tried to play up its seemingly spotless safety record. Before the report, the official Tesla account on X bragged that there were “0 notable incidents across over 380,000 miles traveled by Robotaxi.”
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