/ December 11, 2025 The credibility of Elon Musk’s autonomous driving promises faces another high-stakes examination. The Tesla CEO has committed to deploying driverless robotaxis in Austin by year’s end, marking the fourth such announcement in 2025. This goal carries immense weight for the company’s $1.5 trillion valuation, as analysts estimate approximately $850 billion of that figure is predicated on the future success of robotaxis and humanoid robots. A Three-Week Countdown to Proof During a recent xAI hackathon, Musk declared that the challenge of unsupervised operation is “pretty much solved.” He stated that within about three weeks, Tesla’s autonomous vehicles should be navigating Austin streets with no human inside—”not even in the passenger seat.” This would see the deadline met just two days before the new year. Supporting this ambition, data from teslafsdtracker.com indicates significant progress. The latest Full Self-Driving (FSD) software iteration, version 14.1.7, now averages 9,487 miles between instances requiring critical driver intervention. This represents a dramatic leap from earlier versions, which managed only a few hundred miles between interventions. Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Potter views this as a breakthrough, maintaining his $500 price target for Tesla shares. Wall Street’s Persistent Doubts Despite internal progress, skepticism on Wall Street remains widespread. Competitor Waymo has operated fully driverless vehicles in Austin for some time. Gordon Johnson, an analyst at GLJ Research, highlights that Waymo’s vehicles achieve over 17,000 miles between interventions. Furthermore, Waymo solidified its market position by entering a partnership with Uber in March 2025, establishing a tangible lead. The financial stakes of Tesla’s autonomy project are underscored by Deutsche Bank analysis, which attributes $850 billion of the firm’s market capitalization directly to robotaxis and robotics. Given Tesla’s current price-to-earnings ratio of 313 and a forward P/E of 200, the failure to achieve full autonomy would fundamentally undermine this valuation logic.