Here's how analysts are reacting to Tesla's long-awaited robotaxi event

Investing.com -- Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA ) shares dipped in premarket US trading on Friday after the group unveiled its long-awaited "Cybercab" robotaxi, although analysts flagged that CEO Elon Musk provided few answers to crucial questions surrounding the technology.

The Cybercab model, which has no steering wheel or pedals and seats two, will likely go into production before 2027 and will be available for less than $30,000, Musk said. However, the tech tycoon, who entered the event in Los Angeles riding in a Cybercab, noted that the service would still need to clear a variety of regulatory hurdles.

Tesla also showed off a prototype for "the Robovan," an autonomous vehicle capable of seating up to 20 people, as well as an updated model of its humanoid robot, called “Optimus.”

Here's a look at how some analysts reacted to the event:

"We believe the event may disappoint elevated expectations. Elon Musk showed a vision of what the future can be at the Warner Brothers Studio lot, and Tesla continues to control the narrative on autonomous driving. But we don't believe much new was learned as details were light. When this future occurs remains unclear, and we believe further out than indicated." - UBS

"Investors we spoke to at the event thought the event was light of real numbers and timelines. These typically come at Tesla events. This one seemed focused on branding and marketing Tesla's vision, rather than giving concrete numbers for us to model out. As such, we would expect shares to trade lower. We had said prior to this event that a -5% move would be viewed inline with expectations, but a -10% move could signal disappointment." - RBC Capital Markets

"Yet there were no updates indicating near-term opportunities. Tesla didn’t show its low-cost model planned for 1H’25 production – something we thought Tesla could unveil. We also didn’t get any near-term updates on [full self-driving] progress, or data reflecting improvement in the system – which could possibly convince people that Tesla had 'cracked the code.'" - Barclays

"[Tesla] did not provide verifiable evidence of progress toward [Level 3 conditional] autonomous technology, which makes it difficult to assess feasibility of the targets outlined at the event given there is no precedent for achieving higher levels of autonomy using a vision-only approach (instead of a sensor-fusion approach)." - Jefferies

"The [Cybercab] design is very impressive up close and this lays the foundation for one of the future growth drivers for Tesla as we believe Cybercab could represent a major opportunity to boost Tesla's overall profits and margins over the next few years as this ramps." - Wedbush

"Musk stated that the Cybercab would be in production 'in 2026, or before 2027', but we note that Tesla has historically struggled to meet timelines and that the regulatory process for commercial robotaxi services has taken years, and that Musk has been persistently overly-zealous on full self-driving deployment." - Bernstein

Source: Investing.com