Admittedly, I don’t really pay much attention to Tesla’s stock price, or any company stock prices. However, because of the work I do, I see headlines about stock price trends here and there. I didn’t realize until today that Tesla’s stock price has been trending downward for a while, but as I just got wind of that, I had a look at the Tesla stock price chart. Yikes — looking at the 6-month trend (above), Tesla’s stock price has dropped nearly 20% in the past 6 months! I figured it had been holding steady as investors waited to see if Tesla could deliver on its robotaxi dreams and hype. After all, the company is supposed to be scaling up on that any day now. Instead, it seems just from looking at that medium-term trend that investors are losing faith in the promises. Or perhaps they’re just concerned that the sales slump is too much and is overriding anything else. Regarding robotaxis and self-driving, aside from the fact that Elon Musk’s targets for that have been consistently missed for that for nearly a decade, it’s perhaps noteworthy that after the software improved considerably, the company still hit a big pothole and is more and more delayed with a massive milestone Musk had predicted. He said last July that Tesla robotaxis would cover around half the US population by the end of 2025. Then “robotaxi service” was launched in Austin, Texas, with human safety drivers in the cars to monitor and take over as needed. Then they were supposed to be getting removed as the service scaled up at the end of the year … but something just isn’t going right and almost nothing has changed in 2026. Tesla’s service area is still very small — not covering 50% of the US population at all — and the company still has humans in the vehicles in case Full Self Driving runs into problems. We’re now basically 3 months into 2026 and, effectively, it may as well be December 2025 or even September 2025 when it comes to Tesla’s apparent progress in this regard. Yes, a magical update could be right around the corner that’s going to change everything. That’s been the case for several years. That’s what the hype and dreams around Tesla’s stock price seems to all be about. It appears investors are just losing hope, especially as other companies have been expanding their robotaxi rollouts — see Waymo and Pony.ai, for example. Looking at Tesla’s one-month stock trend, it’s down more than 10%. That said, looking back one year, the stock is still up more than 37%! And the company’s vehicle sales have just been down, down, down in the past few years. So, it’s likely much money is still largely being invested based on the idea that Tesla will succeed in its robotaxi (and robot) ambitions. At this point, it’s hard to see how that stock price and market cap can be based on anything else. Without some potential boom in sales based on Full Self Driving (and perhaps, theoretically, robots), Elon Musk doesn’t even have a story to tell for how the company could reach 2 million vehicle sales a year, let alone 20 million (a previous 2030 target). Even as the EV market has grown, Tesla’s vehicle sales have shrunk. It will be interesting to see Tesla’s 1st quarter 2026 results and what kind of hype is used next to try to distract from what are likely to be continuously dipping vehicle sales. And if Musk says again that we’re just a few months away from a widespread Tesla robotaxi rollout, will investors eat it up again, or have they heard this pitch one too many times?
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