By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
Well, Tesla shares, they’re closing lower today. The company facing new pressures out of China with Xiaomi saying it will unveil a new EV that could rival Tesla’s Model Y. For more, bring in Yahoo Finance senior auto reporter, Pras Subramanian. Pras.
00:19 Pras Subramanian
Yeah, so, you know, I’m not saying today’s move was all because of that car because it’s, you know, they Xiaomi had announced it. But the, the YU7 as they’re calling it, is a Tesla Model Y competitor. The SU7 sedan in, in, in China, the Xiaomi uh sedan, has been selling like hotcakes. They anticipate 300,000 unit sales this year because it, people love the car. Looks like a Porsche Taycan and a McLaren mixed together, super sporty. Uh, links with the Xiaomi phones like seamlessly, which the Chinese market loves. And that’s sort of where Tesla is behind the eight ball, right? They don’t have a, a, a phone that integrates with the car, the minute you walk in, all these different things that, that Xiaomi can offer. And that’s what the, the Chinese consumers like. And we’re seeing even the new refresh Model Y sales are building up but not as, as high as maybe they would like at this point. So we’ll see if this new YU7 uh, will can take it to the new uh, Model Y.
02:23 Speaker A
All right. So maybe some EV pressure. What about the robo taxi rollout? Some latest there.
02:29 Pras Subramanian
This, this is interesting. So uh, late last week, um, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas put out a note talking about how he ha, had a meeting with some Tesla,
02:41 Speaker A
With their IR, right? With Tesla IR.
02:44 Pras Subramanian
Yes. With Tesla IR in Palo Alto with like clients. And then, and the topic of robo taxis came up and a few details were emerged. And basically uh, Jonas wrote about how uh, it’ll be a small unsupervised test in Austin. We heard about Austin, the date not set yet. Only 10 to 20 cars will be, be being tested at, at a time, which is, seems very small. And then uh, they used teleoperation uh, for when a, a human driver is needed to intervene. So basically, an operator somewhere in Texas or California can remote in and take control of the car if it’s say, stuck behind uh, uh, uh, you know, a stopped car, things like that. So you can, you know, help the, the, the actual user. Now, this happens as, you know, the big bets on Tesla are based on that robo taxi ambition. And you give Waymo with 250,000 rides a week already. So they’re sort of behind pretty significantly when it comes to robo taxis. That’s unlocking that trillion dollar value of Tesla is because of that.
04:58 Speaker A
So only unsupervised robo taxis in Austin. That starts this summer, correct?
05:05 Pras Subramanian
That’s what Tesla says, we haven’t, I need dates yet.
05:10 Speaker A
Right. Yes. So we’ll see.