Cathie Wood says ARK Invest’s long-term outlook for Tesla does not yet include what she sees as one of its biggest potential opportunities in AI.
In a Morningstar interview, the ARK founder unveils a long-term price forecast for the electric vehicle maker and says even the big projection excludes upside from humanoid robots.
“Our 2029 forecast is $2,600. That forecast has nothing for Optimus, so humanoid robots. And we’re beginning to understand that while we were too aggressive on autonomous mobility, so robotaxis, we may be too conservative on the humanoid robot opportunity. So stay tuned for that update.”
Wood says the path to autonomous driving has followed a familiar technology adoption curve.
“The slow, slow, and then all at once is very typical of technologies that really are hard to crack. I think Elon Musk genuinely thought that by the late teens, 2018, 19, he would be in there with robotaxis. We had just experienced a massive breakthrough in AI, the transformer architecture in 2017. It has taken time for Tesla, Elon, and team to perfect the autonomous opportunity with the latest AI breakthroughs. Now we’re there, now we’re there.”
She argues that the bottleneck has shifted away from technology and toward regulation.
“And so we don’t think technology is the problem anymore. Regulations have to catch up. In the United States, we have 50 regulators, well, more than that in transportation, but 50 state regulators. We think that this government is going to elevate the regulatory regime to a federal status. And that is because autonomous vehicles, of course, cross from state to state. So it should be a national transportation regulation.”
If federal alignment materializes, Wood believes Tesla could achieve broad deployment.
“If we do get that, we believe that Tesla will be in more than certainly more than 25%, but probably up to 50% of all the cities in the United States, the major cities and beyond.”
Wood frames the $2,600 target as tied to autonomous mobility, with additional potential upside from robotics still to be reflected in ARK’s models.
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