Tesla daily insight, 16 Jun

Reuters exclusive on 15 Jun: to win FSD approval in Europe, Tesla gave Swedish and Dutch regulators safety statistics it had published itself, claiming FSD is 7 times safer than human drivers and could save 32,000 lives. Independent road-safety researchers flatly called it 'misleading marketing'. The comparison method is invalid. It sets a narrow measure of crashes ('new cars with FSD in crashes severe enough to deploy the airbags') against broad data covering 'all vehicles in the US (including trucks and motorcycles, which have very high crash rates)', and it assumes every vehicle in the US is replaced by an FSD Tesla.

This escalates the consumer-side safety doubts already reported on 13 Jun (cars hitting posts and scraping garages), and moves the fight to European regulators. FSD in Europe is a country-by-country grind (approved so far in the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and others). This exposé will slow approvals and deepen regulators' distrust. Add last week's L4 self-certification, which shifts liability to Tesla, and regulatory and litigation exposure keeps building. This is real ammunition for the bears.

TSLA rose 1.5-2% on Monday to about $412.42. The driver was Trump announcing a US-Iran memorandum of understanding (effectively ending the conflict), which sent oil down 5% and turned market sentiment towards AI and tech. Several outlets (Blockonomi, CoinCentral, TradingView) all stressed that the rally does not reflect better EV demand.

A reminder not to mistake macro sentiment for a fundamental turning point. TSLA is still down 10% year to date. Its valuation rests on the AI and Robotaxi narrative and is extremely sensitive to macro risk appetite.

Well-known Tesla bull Ferguson has publicly opposed the recent SpaceX merger idea. He says TSLA should be worth $3,640 today (with Robotaxi contributing $957 a share), citing Musk's past remarks that Robotaxi's terminal value is about $5 trillion and Optimus's about $25 trillion. He attacked the 'mental gymnastics' of selling out for a tenth of the value.

This is a counterweight to the 'Tesla-SpaceX merger' narrative that heated up last week. The core dispute is whether a merger would give Tesla a transfusion or dilute the option value of a standalone Robotaxi and Optimus. The bulls are already split on this, and a merger is not necessarily a net positive for TSLA.

Barclays says Q2 deliveries are 'tracking to a beat'. A weekly Reddit briefing shows Q2 through May up about 28% YoY, with European sales for January to May about 95,000 units higher than a year earlier. GLJ had earlier forecast about 426,017 units. China's new-energy vehicle penetration hit a record of about 63% in May.

Short-term delivery momentum is confirmed to be improving, but caution is warranted. Much of the increase comes from inventory clearance, zero-interest financing and promotions (in China, 5-year zero-interest loans offset the 5% purchase tax), and GLJ says plainly it is 'not evidence of demand reaccelerating'. A delivery beat and gross margin quality need to be judged separately. The 22 Jul earnings report is the test.