NEW YORK, December 29, 2025, 02:24 ET — Market closed.
- Tesla shares last closed down 2.1% at $475.19 in thin, post-holiday trading.
- Robotaxi regulation chatter picked up after Waymo vehicles stalled during a San Francisco blackout.
- Traders are watching Fed minutes due Tuesday and Tesla’s early-January deliveries update for the next catalyst.
Tesla (TSLA.O) shares fell 2.1% in the last session, closing at $475.19. The stock traded between $473.82 and $488.90 and saw volume of about 58.8 million shares.
The decline came as investors weighed renewed safety and regulatory scrutiny around robotaxis, a theme that has become central to Tesla’s growth narrative.
That matters now because Tesla’s valuation hinges increasingly on self-driving services as well as other longer-dated bets, while year-end trading can magnify swings when volumes are light.
Wall Street ended nearly unchanged on Friday, snapping a short rally as investors looked for fresh catalysts in the final week of the year.
A San Francisco power outage on Dec. 20 has become a new reference point in the autonomy debate after it left some Alphabet-owned Waymo robotaxis stalled at intersections when traffic lights went dark, video posted on social media showed. Waymo paused service and resumed a day later.
Waymo said its cars can treat non-working signals as four-way stops but sometimes ask for a “confirmation check” from remote staff. It said its vehicles traversed more than 7,000 darkened traffic signals, but a spike in those checks slowed response times and contributed to congestion.
Robotaxi operators often rely on “teleoperation,” which means remote human monitoring and control, to handle unusual situations. Safety experts have argued that the way companies use remote operations needs clearer oversight as fleets scale.
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles and the California Public Utilities Commission, which issue permits for robotaxi testing and commercial service, said they are looking into the Waymo incident. The DMV said it is developing rules to ensure remote drivers meet standards for safety and accountability.
For Tesla, the episode highlights a broader question: how regulators will police systems marketed as increasingly autonomous. California’s DMV has accused Tesla of overstating self-driving capabilities and recently deferred an order that would have suspended Tesla’s sales and manufacturing licenses in the state, giving the company time to address the issue.
Tesla has said its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) features require active driver supervision. Autopilot can help with tasks such as accelerating, braking and staying in lane on highways, while FSD can handle some city-street functions such as lane changes and responding to traffic signals.
The DMV said Tesla now labels passenger-vehicle FSD as “Supervised” and uses an unsupervised version of the software inside some factories. It also said Tesla uses FSD for its Austin robotaxi service with human safety monitors and remote support. Reuters
Waymo, which has a fleet of more than 2,500 vehicles, operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Metro Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta, and said it is rolling out fleet-wide updates to improve how its cars navigate in outages. Amazon’s Zoox is also expanding, while General Motors’ Cruise halted operations after regulators revoked its permit following a 2023 accident.
“We’re just simply catching our breath today after the holiday,” said Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at Carson Group, describing the broader market’s pause after a short run-up. Reuters
Before the next session, traders will track any developments from California regulators on emergency-response and remote-operations rules for robotaxis, which could shape expectations for how quickly Tesla and rivals can scale driverless services.
Investors will also parse minutes from the Federal Reserve’s December meeting due Tuesday for clues on the interest-rate outlook. Rate expectations can sway high-growth stocks such as Tesla by changing how investors value future earnings.
Tesla’s next company-specific catalyst is its quarterly production and deliveries update, which it has typically released in early January in recent years, alongside an announced date for its fourth-quarter earnings webcast later in the month.
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