July 11 (UPI) — Tesla has delayed plans to roll out its robotaxi until October, the company said Thursday. Shares in the electric car company slid 8.4% and continued to drop more than 2% in after-hours trading.
In all the stock fell more than 27 points to just under $236 a share.
The taxi service was originally slated to launch in August, but Tesla said it needs more time to work on prototypes, Bloomberg reported.
Company CEO Elon Musk has said since 2015 that Tesla will launch a robotaxi, which would compete with Waymo and other companies that are putting driverless ride share services on the road.
Musk doubled down on the Tesla robotaxi just minutes after the announced delay.
“The actual Robotaxi event and prototypes [will be] even better and more eye-popping,” he said.
The stock drop took Tesla into negative territory for the year after a steady run in the first several months of 204. Musk has maintained his decade-long robotaxi vision for his company.
“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” Musk said on an earnings call in April when shares had slipped a bit.
The company is scheduled to report second-quarter results later this month.
Self-driving vehicles are part of Musk’s overall growth strategy, but rely on autonomous technology that has been spotty at best, has continued to raise multiple safety concerns and been blamed for a host of deadly accidents, including the available Autopilot system on some Tesla models.
For years, Musk has mused about the possibility of users dispatching self-driving cars to pick up passengers and route them to their locations using the Tesla app.
The date that Tesla unveils a product does not necessarily align with its release. The company announced Semi, its fully electric heavy-duty truck in 2017, for example, but the vehicle didn’t become commercially available to the public for another five years.