• ARK Invest’s Tesla robotaxi model treats autonomous ride-hailing as the company’s primary value driver.

• Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet in Austin has recorded 17 reportable incidents with NHTSA between its June 2025 launch and March 2026, though none resulted in major injuries.

• Of the 17 low-speed collisions, five were attributed to the FSD, and the remaining to other factors.

ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood has incorporated parking violation fines into the firm’s Tesla Inc (TSLA) valuation model after the unsupervised Robotaxi she was riding in received a $75 ticket during a live nine-minute video released Monday.

Seated in the front passenger seat of a fully driverless Tesla navigating Austin streets with no safety monitor, Wood said, “We got $75 ticket,” adding, “Wow this..is something we hadn’t thought of before. We’re gonna have to put this into a new line item in our model for Tesla — tickets.”

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However, the Tesla bull went on to compare the experience favorably to her prior Waymo rides, noting the Tesla’s performance while acknowledging the ticket as a real-world friction point for scaled autonomous fleets.

ARK’s Bullish Take

ARK Invest’s Tesla robotaxi model treats autonomous ride-hailing as the company’s primary value driver. Robotaxis are projected to contribute ~60% of Tesla’s expected enterprise value and more than half of EBITDA by 2026, powering the firm’s $4,600 per-share base-case target.

The ride itself served as a live demonstration of ARK’s bullish stance. Wood reiterated her core thesis that falling transportation costs will drive explosive demand. “When the cost of transportation falls, we’ll get more of it,”she said and endorsed Elon Musk’s “slowly, slowly… then all at once” adoption curve.

She also highlighted Tesla’s decade-plus training data advantage, vertical integration, and lower cost structure as reasons the company is positioned to dominate the robotaxi market, potentially leaving competitors like Waymo at a distant second place.

Tesla Safety Concerns

Tesla uses its full self-driving camera-only technology to enable robotaxi operations. In March 2026, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) escalated its investigation into approximately 3.2 million Tesla vehicles to an Engineering Analysis—the final step before a potential recall—after linking nine crashes, including one fatality and two injuries, to FSD’s failure to detect or alert drivers to reduced-visibility conditions such as sun glare, dust, or airborne obstructions.