The Tesla Roadster from electric vehicle giant Tesla (TSLA) has been an object of light, forgettable derision over the last few years. But the recent kerfuffle between Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman may have lit a little extra fire under Tesla, which has stepped up its design work on the Roadster lately. This did not help things much with investors, though, who sent shares down over 4% in Thursday afternoon’s trading.
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Reports suggest the Roadster is now about two to three years away from production, a fact made all the more galling by the revelation that Tesla had basically stopped all work on it for over a year. Further, reports suggest that the Tesla Roadster will not be a four-seater after all, despite that being the prototype version that Tesla showed off all the way back in 2017. Now, the car will be a two-seater and feature butterfly doors, along with a “…typical sports car profile.”
Tesla also made some new hires to advance the concept, bringing in “…at least five engineers” who were tasked with “aerodynamic prototypes.” Musk himself noted, “We’d all love to work on the Tesla Roadster soon. We are working on it, but it has to come behind the more — things that have a more serious impact on the good of the world.”
The 100 Million Tesla Supercomputer?
That was when Elon Musk came out with something that might have been even weirder. Apparently, Musk asserts, all those sold Teslas out there could ultimately come together to create what amounts to a giant, highly-distributed, and occasionally mobile supercomputer. Musk noted that the “100 gigawatts of inference” that could be generated by “bored” Teslas could represent a major untapped source of processing might.
With an annualized production rate of three million vehicles coming into play in the next 24 months, he noted, and the Cyber Cab program kicking in as well, this could represent one serious boost of computing power. If such a concept were put to work, say, mining cryptocurrency, it could also represent a major economic boost in and of itself.
Is Tesla a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on TSLA stock based on 14 Buys, 10 Holds, and 10 Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 55.63% rally in its share price over the past year, the average TSLA price target of $395.54 per share implies 11.28% downside risk.
