Update, August 19, 2026: Delaney’s Dec. 16, 2025 point was pace, not a city list. Tesla later opened unpaid-to-paid unsupervised service in more Texas cities in spring 2026 and reached Miami in July 2026 — still far smaller than Waymo’s multi-city paid fleet, and far short of Musk’s late-2025 “hundreds of cars / many cities” talk. Tesery’s Austin ~20-car count is the right scale for that winter.
On December 16, 2025 Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney reiterated a Neutral rating and a $400 Tesla price target, and said the number that mattered for Robotaxi was not another city name. It was how fast Tesla can scale driverless operations — and whether that work is profitable. Same-week coverage of the note (including Electric Vehicles Now and TradingKey) quoted him: the focus from here is scale speed, including whether Tesla’s software/hardware approach lets it grow faster than competitors, “and on profitability.” That is a sell-side research note. It is not a Tesla launch, not a city permit, and not proof the fleet is already large.
The same mid-December week Tesla was testing empty Model Y Robotaxis on Austin public roads. Those two facts sat next to each other on the same tape: a handful of empty test cars in one city, and a bank asking when that becomes a business.
Key facts
- Who: Goldman Sachs auto analyst Mark Delaney, Dec. 16, 2025 note.
- Rating: Neutral, $400 12-month target — not an upgrade on the empty-car clips.
- The metric he named: speed of scaling driverless operations, plus profitability.
- What Tesla had on the road that week: Austin Model Y Robotaxis, some with no occupants, after a June 2025 invite-only start with a safety monitor. Musk’s Dec. 14 X post said testing with no occupants was underway. CNBC and TechCrunch reported it Dec. 15.
- What this is not: A paid multi-city Robotaxi network, or a finding that Tesla had already beaten Waymo on scale.
City names vs the metric
December 2025 write-ups listed Houston, Dallas, Miami, Las Vegas and Phoenix as names Tesla watchers expected next after Austin and the Bay Area. A name on a slide is not a live geo-fence. Delaney’s sentence puts the burden on how fast unsupervised miles and cars show up, and whether the unit economics work. Tesla’s own later 2026 city calendar (Dallas/Houston first, then Florida) is the scoreboard for that sentence — not the December rumor list.
Paid Austin rides in late 2025 were still a small Model Y service. Musk’s Dec. 9 comment that monitors would come out “in about three weeks” is Tesery’s xAI-hackathon note. Christmas Eve passenger-seat rides are a later Musk / Ashok story.
FAQ
Did Goldman say Tesla Robotaxi was already profitable?
No. Delaney named profitability as the other half of the test still ahead.
Did the $400 target mean Goldman turned bullish on Robotaxi that day?
No. Neutral / $400 was a reiteration. The note praised progress and still left a gap to the then-trading price.
Were the empty Austin cars the scale Delaney wanted?
They were a test milestone. Scale is many cars, many hours, in more than one city, with a cost structure.
For owners: a Goldman note does not change FSD (Supervised) on your car. Empty Robotaxi tests in Austin are a different stack from the owner-supervised software.
Featured photo: Tesla Model Y (file photo of the vehicle type used as Austin Robotaxi in December 2025, not a Goldman desk). Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Related: Empty Austin Robotaxi tests, mid-December · Musk’s three-week monitor timeline · Christmas Eve empty-seat ride · Austin fleet was still ~20 cars
