Just caught something interesting about Tesla that most people are probably still sleeping on. Yeah, the Q1 delivery numbers disappointed — 358,000 units when Wall Street was looking for 365,000. Second miss in a row. Stock's down 29% from its peak, EV competition is brutal, tax credits are gone. All the bearish stuff checks out.

But here's what's actually got the big money excited right now: the robotaxi play.

Bank of America came out and reinstated coverage last month with a $460 price target. That's about 33% upside from where TSLA was trading. Their analyst, Alexander Perry, basically says the robotaxi opportunity is the real story — not the quarterly delivery shortfall. Tesla's only running robotaxi services in Austin and San Francisco right now, so they're way behind Waymo's 11 cities. But there's something clever happening here.

Most robotaxi companies use cameras, lidar, and radar stacked together. Tesla went all-in on cameras only. Harder to pull off technically? Sure. But way cheaper to deploy. No expensive sensor arrays, no need to pre-map everything with lidar before you launch in a new city. That's a real cost advantage.

Morgan Stanley ran the numbers and came up with something pretty striking. They estimate Tesla's cost-per-mile at $0.81 for robotaxi rides. Waymo's sitting at $1.43. Traditional rideshare is $1.71. That gap gets even wider as Cybercab production scales up. And here's the feedback loop that matters: more robotaxi miles means more real-world driving data, which trains the AI better, which improves Full Self-Driving for regular car buyers, which drives demand back into the core auto business.

Musk has talked about rolling out to dozens of major cities covering maybe 25 to 50% of the U.S. by end of year. Morgan Stanley thinks Tesla could grab 25% of U.S. autonomous driving trips by 2032 — Waymo's at 34% in their model, so there's real market share up for grabs.

One thing that actually looked rough: the Energy Storage numbers. Megapack deployments came in at 8.8 GWh when analysts expected 14.4 GWh. That's a 40% miss, first year-over-year decline since 2022. Analysts are calling it timing noise on big utility contracts, which is probably fair, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

Morgan Stanley's full-year forecast is now 1.60 million vehicles — still down 2.2% year-over-year. But their longer-term model assumes mid-teens volume growth through 2030 on new launches like a potential Model YL and updated Cybertruck. The robotaxi economics are what's really moving the needle for the bulls right now though. If that cost-per-mile advantage holds up and the rollout actually happens, this could reshape how people think about Tesla's growth story.