What could Tesla’s robotaxi business in the US be worth? This cockpit starts with what one robotaxi earns and costs, scales that up to a fleet, and puts a value on it today that you can compare with Tesla’s share price. Move the sliders to test your own view. The sections further down show what matters most, how wide the range of outcomes is, and how the model works. Built on the Laniakea Research robotaxi economics report.
This interactive cockpit models Tesla's robotaxi (Cybercab) business as it could look once a large fleet is in place (base case: around 2040). It builds up the profit of a single robotaxi from its costs, fares and utilization, scales that to a fleet sized as a share of the 300 largest US urban areas, applies a terminal P/E multiple, and discounts the result back to a Present Value (PV). Use the sliders to stress-test the assumptions, see which ones move the valuation most in the Tornado chart, and compare the PV with Tesla's current market capitalization. It is built on the Laniakea Research robotaxi economics report and its financial model.
How much of Tesla’s share price the Laniakea base case accounts for. The shading runs from dark green at the robotaxi line to dark red where the share price is 40% of the price or more above it: 0% · 20% · 40%+. Context, not a forecast.
Pick a claim and watch the cockpit test it two ways: first as if it were our base case (the sliders move to what it needs), then as one possible future among 10,000 in our simulation, with our base case kept in the middle. You can pause, skip or stop at any time.
More claims, from both sides, are coming.
What Tesla’s robotaxi business would be worth today in each case, at today’s market inputs and our discount rate. Your own settings appear as a separate bar when they differ from all four. The dashed line is Tesla’s whole market value.
Each type sets the vehicle cost, battery, efficiency, maintenance, insurance and electricity assumptions of the research report; the remote-operator ratio, fare, market share, timing, operating hours and valuation inputs stay as you set them. The colored stretch on each slider track shows how far it sits from the base case: green raises the valuation, red lowers it, deeper colors mean a bigger effect.
How much of Tesla’s value should robotaxis explain?
Your market share and timing settings decide how many robotaxis must be on the road at every point in time. Here that path is set against real counts, so you can see whether reality is keeping up with your assumptions.
News tied to your assumptions. Labels describe what it suggests for the assumption, not for the share price. Tap an assumption to jump to its slider.
Each bar shows how far the value today moves when one assumption is set lower or higher, with everything else unchanged. Red means a lower value, green a higher value. The longer the bar, the more that assumption matters.
Impact of moving each input to a low and a high value (others at their current setting) on the PV valuation ($ Trillions). Bars show a lower value in red and a higher value in green than the current case; the range used for each input is in its label. The dashed line marks Tesla's current market cap.
Everything above rests on what a single vehicle earns. These figures are for one Cybercab robotaxi over a full year at your current settings, before any fleet-level scaling.
One day of the whole fleet at your current settings. Demand follows a typical daily pattern (morning and evening peaks) that averages out to your operating hours. The totals at the end of the day are exactly the model's per-car figures times the fleet, so the counters reconcile with the unit economics above. Costs that depend on driving (electricity, maintenance, taxes, depreciation, remote operators) follow the miles; insurance and the charging and cleaning stations accrue evenly through the day, so profit dips slightly below zero in the quiet early hours.
Cities are placed on a rollout that follows Tesla's current plans: the six driverless cities that are live today, the cities Tesla has named next, then the remaining large US urban areas in order of size, ending with the full fleet in your chosen year. Fleets inside a city grow slowly at first and faster later. Everything before today is reported; everything after is an assumption of this model, not a Tesla commitment. The map draws the 58 largest areas, each dot stands for a group of cars, and the dots share the simulation's clock. Hover or tap a city for details.
Nobody knows the exact numbers, so the model runs 10,000 scenarios, each with slightly different assumptions around your settings. The chart shows how often each value came up: red bars are below today’s market value, green bars above it. Switch on the Advanced view to see and change the ranges.
Illustrative only. 10,000 simulated outcomes. Each draw picks the inputs from skewed ranges around your current slider settings, keeps related inputs consistent (a lower fare supports a higher share, costlier cars cost more to maintain), lets the year the full fleet is in place vary between about 2038 and 2042 in the base case (timing is one of the biggest uncertainties), and keeps the risk premium fixed at your slider value, because it already prices in execution risk. The spread reflects the assumed ranges below, not data. A draw in which the fleet loses money is counted as zero value. The chart's right edge is the 99th percentile; the last bar collects everything above it.
The value built up step by step, from one ride to the whole fleet.
A quick look at what the cockpit can do.
Only one business: a Tesla robotaxi network in the United States, covering the roughly 300 largest urban areas, where about two thirds of Americans live. It estimates what the profits of that fleet, once it is fully built, are worth today.
Everything else Tesla does is left out: car sales, energy storage, Optimus, robotaxis outside the US and so on. So the value shown is not a value for Tesla as a whole, and the cockpit never says what Tesla shares "should" cost.
A ride with a human driver costs about $3.25 a mile today (about $15 for the average 4.6-mile trip). Owning and running a car costs about $0.82 a mile, or about $1.02 including parking. The base case prices robotaxi rides at the cost of owning a car, so that switching makes financial sense for ordinary households, not just for people who use taxis today.
Even at $0.82, the base case leaves a profit of about 60% of revenue, because a Cybercab is expected to cost only about 33 cents per paid mile to run, including the empty miles between rides. If you think riders would pay more, or that competition will push prices lower, move the fare slider: it is one of the inputs with the biggest effect on the value.
$25,000 is Tesla's stated target for volume production. The running cost adds up electricity (5.5 miles per kWh at 13.5 cents per kWh), a 50 kWh LFP battery that lasts about 2,000 full charges (roughly 550,000 miles, or about 7 years of robotaxi use), maintenance about 40% below a Model Y, insurance, cleaning, charging stations, remote support and road fees.
For comparison, a robotaxi built on a conventional car with an expensive sensor kit, costing well over $100,000, costs several times as much per mile to run. These are estimates for a vehicle that is not yet in volume production: the vehicle and operating cost sliders let you test more pessimistic numbers.
Driverless cars still need people in the background who help when a car gets stuck, answer riders and handle incidents. This slider sets how many cars one such person can look after.
Today's driverless services manage a few dozen cars per support person. The base case of 256 reflects a mature system in 2040 where help is rarely needed: support then costs under 1 cent per paid mile, against about $2.55 a mile with one person per car. Try 50 to see a near-term level: the business stays profitable, but less so.
The market is the money Americans spend on getting around that robotaxis could plausibly replace (owning cars, taxis, ride-hailing), which we estimate at over $2 trillion a year. The base case assumes Tesla wins 30% of that in the covered cities by 2040, about 20% of all US travel.
Each robotaxi drives about 220 miles a day: 14 hours in service, about 29 paid rides, and 40% of its driving empty between rides. Covering 30% of the miles in those cities then takes about 12.4 million Cybercabs. Network effects can let the leader of such a market win a large share, as Uber did in US ride-hailing with roughly 70%. The market-share slider is where you express your view on competition.
Waymo is the most established driverless service today. Its cars cost far more because of their sensors and conversion, which makes each mile more expensive.
Tesla's bet is on cameras only and building its own low-cost vehicle at scale. That approach is riskier, but much cheaper if it works. Competition shows up in the cockpit through the market share and fare sliders: lower both to model a crowded market.
ARK Invest's Tesla model (October 2026) values the robotaxi business at about $13 trillion in 2031, the average of its simulations. Our base case is about $1.15 trillion today. Most of the gap comes from two assumptions and one difference in what is measured.
Fares. ARK keeps fares close to today's level, about $1.61 a mile on average in 2031, so Tesla keeps most of the cost saving. We assume competition brings fares down to about what owning a car costs, $0.82 a mile, so riders keep most of it.
Speed. ARK has about 8 million robotaxis on the road by 2031, worldwide outside China and including customer-owned Teslas. We have 12.4 million in the US by late 2039.
What is measured. ARK shows the value at the end of 2031. We show what it is worth today. ARK's figure is an enterprise value: 19 times EBITDA, the yearly profit before interest, tax and depreciation. For a robotaxi network that runs mostly on cars owned by others and carries little debt, that is close to the value of the business itself, so it compares with our value at the end of the rollout. One difference: 19 times profit before tax is about 24 times profit after tax, while our cases use 35 times profit after tax. On the multiple, our cases are the more generous ones.
The “ARK Invest 2031” preset (or “Apply ARK Invest’s view” next to Reset to Base Case) puts ARK's main assumptions into this cockpit: full fleet by the end of 2031, about 8.1 million cars driving about 525 billion paid miles, $1.61 a mile (the fare that reproduces ARK's $753 billion net revenue and $701 billion profit before tax), ARK's all-in cost of $0.28 a mile (so the same 83% margin), no inflation as in ARK's model, and 19 times profit before tax like ARK's EBITDA multiple. It shows $13.31 trillion at the end of 2031, the same as ARK, or about $5.4 trillion today at our discount rate. The “How the cases compare” chart shows it next to our three cases. “Reset to Base Case” brings back ours.
Neither view is a forecast. The “Is the rollout on track?” check shows how far ahead of today's real fleet each setting is. Source: ARK Invest, 19 Oct 2026 and its published model.
That is not yet proven at national scale. Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service city by city, and fully driverless operation across the US still has to show it is reliably safer than human drivers.
Approvals may take longer than hoped, and a serious accident could halt expansion for months or years. The year slider is the place to express this: moving the full fleet from 2040 to 2045 shows how much a five-year delay costs in today's value.
Step by step: profit per car per year, times the size of the fleet in the end year (2040 in the base case), minus 21% tax, times a P/E multiple of 35. That gives what the business would be worth in 2040. This is then discounted back to today at about 19% a year, because money far in the future is worth less today and the plan is risky.
The 19% comes from a standard method (CAPM): the 10-year US Treasury yield (5.29%), plus Tesla's beta (1.76) times a 5% market risk premium, plus an extra 5% for the risk of this particular business. All of these can be changed in the Advanced view.
A P/E multiple says how many years of today's profit investors pay for a company. 35 is in the range investors have paid for large, still-growing technology companies.
The simulation tests 25 to 45. Because the value is proportional to the P/E, a 20% lower multiple means a 20% lower value.
Nobody knows the exact outcome. The "How sure can anyone be?" section runs thousands of scenarios, each with slightly different assumptions around your settings, and shows the range that 8 in 10 of them fall into. Our base case is our view, not the truth: the range shows how wide the reasonable outcomes are.
No. The cockpit is a scenario tool built on stated assumptions, not a forecast, a price target or a recommendation. It is meant to help you see what your own view means in money terms.
Laniakea Research holds positions in Tesla and SpaceX and may benefit if their share prices move. We show this next to every result so you can weigh our base case with that interest in mind.
When you change the assumptions, we record your settings and the resulting value anonymously, with the date and your country, to improve the cockpits. We do not record your name, IP address or any cookie or device ID, and nothing is recorded if your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal. Details are in our privacy policy.
These answers use the figures and assumptions in this cockpit. For background on the business, see our research. Not investment advice.