The Tesla Robotaxi app is displayed on a mobile phone with the company's branding seen in the background in this photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on September 4, 2025. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images
As Tesla’s Full Self-Driving fleet approaches 10 billion miles, Morgan Stanley issued a mostly positive research note on the company’s autonomy ambitions — albeit with some important caveats.
The note suggested that the road to a widely-available driverless Tesla is hitting a few bumps. “This symbolic milestone reinforces Tesla’s autonomy lead, but with capex doubling and FCF [free cash flow] turning negative, investors will need clearer evidence that unsupervised autonomy is around the corner to support the stock’s valuation,” Morgan Stanley said in an April 10 note titled “1Q26 Preview: Countdown to 10 Billion FSD Miles.”
07 March 2026, USA, San Jose: A test car of the Tesla robotaxi Cybercab is on the road. The vehicles will not have a steering wheel or pedals when they are launched on the market. Tesla boss Elon Musk sees autonomous driving as the future of the electric car manufacturer. Photo: Andrej Sokolow/dpa (Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images)
dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
“Expanded model parameters and improved data collection should help unlock unsupervised FSD (V15),” Morgan Stanley said.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk stated on X earlier this month that the "10x parameter" model won’t arrive until version 15, referring to Tesla’s much larger AI neural network for FSD, which has roughly 10 times more parameters than the current “small” model being used in FSD v14.x. Musk said: “Our rate of advancement with the small model has been so fast that the large model has not yet caught up. V15 will be the large model.” Musk has made bullish statements about every version of FSD. Most recently saying that “Version 14 of Tesla self-driving feels sentient.”
FSD is the core AI/software stack that powers Tesla’s Robotaxi (Cybercab) service. Robotaxi is essentially the commercial application/deployment of advanced FSD in a ride-hailing network.
Initial hype for Austin’s Robotaxis has cooled. “Excitement built following the first sightings of an unsupervised robotaxi in Austin, Texas, but the subsequent roll-out has admittedly gone slower than expected,” Morgan Stanley said.
Robotaxi is now entering a more sober phase of incremental progress. “Bears argue that this is a signal that Tesla’s technology doesn’t work. We believe it is far too early to draw that conclusion," Morgan said. "Instead, we believe the issues that Tesla is still working through (pickup and dropoff) are actually quite solvable, but are robotaxi-specific functions which take time to develop given more limited data collection." The note added: “We remain optimistic that Tesla will be able to demonstrate improvements in this area of their robotaxi operations, which should translate into more unsupervised vehicles on road throughout 2026.”
With Tesla on pace to surpass 10 billion cumulative FSD miles, Morgan Stanley noted “the consequential task of scaling an unsupervised robotaxi fleet." Tesla owners are driving 18.5 million miles with FSD every day, putting the company on pace to surpass the 10 billion cumulative FSD miles, cited above, by late May. (That number was updated on Friday to over 19 million miles per day.)
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