Tesla deliveries surge to quarterly record on last gasp of EV tax credit

Ahead of Tesla’s earnings report next week, Morgan Stanley has released a note estimating that the company will scale its Robotaxi fleet much more slowly than CEO Elon Musk has said. The firm thinks the automaker will have 1,000 vehicles in its Robotaxi service by the end of 2026 — 500 fewer than Musk estimated a few months ago Tesla would have by the end of 2025.

More key to Tesla’s success, however, will be removing the safety monitors from those rides, which Morgan Stanley says will be a “precursor to personal unsupervised FSD [Full Self-Driving] rollout.” Musk, of course, had also promised to remove safety drivers in Austin by the end of 2025, but driverless rides are still in the testing stage.

This week Amazon received approval to build a hybrid big-box store and fulfillment center outside Chicago that’s roughly twice the size of a typical Target. Why would the e-commerce giant want to wade into a costly and cumbersome physical store, especially after earlier brick-and-mortar iterations like Amazon Go have failed?

There are at least two reasons. First, despite e-commerce’s rapid growth, the vast majority of retail purchases still happen in physical stores, according to Census Bureau data:

Second, Amazon’s own customers regularly shop at competing big-box retailers: Consumer Intelligence Research Partners found that 93% have also shopped at Walmart. And as Amazon pushes further into groceries — a category still dominated by in-person shopping — CIRP estimates that basically all Amazon customers buy groceries elsewhere.