Tesla’s self-driving Beta software now available to anyone in North America
Yahoo Finance Live anchors report that Tesla’s self-driving Beta software is now available to those in North America.
Video transcript
BRIAN SOZZI: Happy post-Thanksgiving, and welcome back. The opening of Wall Street is a few minutes away, but first, a few hot tickers on the Yahoo Finance platform. We're watching shares of Tesla. This ticker has been hot, really, on our platform in the past five days, this time following an announcement from Elon Musk that its full self-driving beta software is available to anyone in North America who requests it.
And, Jared, this is not a cheap option. This is a $15,000 option on a car that is already approaching six digits, six figures, if you go that route. $50,000-- that's the car. You could buy a car for essentially what it costs to drive it, no hands, on a Tesla.
JARED BLIKRE: Yeah, it sounds like auto needs to be disrupted here, and it is. I think the model of the future is going to be a sharing model. But we're here today.
These options are really interesting. You know, can you make an entire car as a service? I think you can. You can make those heated seats a service in the field.
BRIAN SOZZI: Oh, you're not in that camp. All the cars--
JARED BLIKRE: I'm not promoting it. I'm a reader of trends here. This is what's happening. I mean, OK, albeit if you get enough pushback from consumers, maybe it doesn't happen.
BMW felt a lot of heat from that. But full self-driving, I think that's going to be something that's gonna have to be an add-on service. Do you think it should be included?
BRIAN SOZZI: I don't think it should even exist. I look at the--
JARED BLIKRE: Well, that's another discussion.
BRIAN SOZZI: --highways. I look at the highways. I look at the infrastructure in this country. And I know I'm not alone in this. In no way it is set up to hop in a Tesla, or any car for that matter, and drive with no hands. It's just not.
JARED BLIKRE: Well, based on the ads that I'm still being served on Twitter, I do not trust AI just yet. I know that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. In all seriousness, we're several years away from that. So I'm not advocating that just yet.
But for people who want to try it out in limited circumstances on those country roads or in shopping mall-- I don't know how it's set up. Maybe there are some, maybe, test sites in Nevada, where you have those nuclear warnings.
BRIAN SOZZI: [LAUGHS]
JARED BLIKRE: Is it safe? I would pay $15,000 in a month to, you know, to create my own obstacle course, you know, if I had unlimited funds. You know, I'm just speaking off the cuff here.
BRIAN SOZZI: And, you know, Tesla shares have been coming back, which is somewhat surprising given all the chaos that's happening in Twitter. But like we talked about at the top of the show, they are making cars in China, of course. Now, if Apple is going to be impacted by lockdowns in China, you best believe we might hear from Tesla before they report their next earnings report, telling the Street about the impact from lockdowns China is likely to just employ in the coming weeks.
JARED BLIKRE: Yeah, that's a huge thing. By the way, I'm annotating on the YFi Interactive as I talk here. Tesla is at a huge level. You can see this prior resistance from early-- actually late 2021 now acting as support. This is a huge distribution top. So-- well, I should say it's too early to call it a top.
But if price were to sink below the current price-- let's say 175 below that-- could be in for a Tesla winter here. We talk about--
BRIAN SOZZI: I get it.
JARED BLIKRE: I'm just talking-- I'm just talking technicals here. Without regard to anything they're doing in the fundamentals of the business, this is a dangerous-looking chart. A lot of charts look like this. By the way, the chart for crude oil also has this huge top on.
So I'm thinking, you know, with respect to China, you were talking about how Tesla is leveraged to China. So are a lot of other companies, especially Apple. We saw the demonstrations with Foxconn. It's gonna be very difficult for China, the way relations have been frosty with the US, to be able to dial that down. There's huge cooperation, huge interest there. And any kind of breakup over the long term-- I'm talking super long term-- is gonna be super messy.
