Key points:
- Tesla shares drive 4.9% higher.
- Full Self Driving to hit Europe, China.
- EV maker narrows YTD losses to 7.3%.
EV maker has enjoyed two strong sessions with about 10% of fresh gains — a needed boost to shares, which are floating underwater for the year.
- Tesla stock
TSLA added 4.9% on Thursday after the electric-car maker announced plans to roll out its Full Self Driving technology (FSD) in Europe and China. The road to launch (pun intended) won’t be easy — Europe and China are notorious for their hard-to-secure regulatory approvals when it comes to innovation, especially imported innovation. Ideally, Tesla plans to get it going in the first quarter of 2025. - FSD was first touted back in 2016 when CEO Elon Musk said that this AI-infused tech could “drive autonomously with greater safety than a person. Right now.” This claim didn’t age well — there have been some incidents with fully autonomous driving, prompting the company to require drivers to be sitting behind the wheel and paying constant attention to all that’s happening on the road.
- Thursday’s gain helped pull Tesla stock out of a recent consolidation, which kept a lid on share prices at $220 a piece. Shares closed above $230 for the first time since the end of July. And, what’s even better, the daily pop is back-to-back with a previous-day increase of 4.2%, logging more than 9% in an otherwise bad week to be a tech stock. Tesla pared back some of its year-to-date loss, bringing it to 7.3%.