TD Cowen Reiterates Buy on Tesla, $460 PT

TD Cowen analyst Itay Michaeli reiterated a Buy rating and $460 price target on Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) on August 14, 2026.

“We hosted autonomous vehicle expert Alex Roy on our recent Internet Bus Tour; Roy discussed key debates around the emergency and scaling of autonomous vehicle (AV) rideshare and the potential for licensing to automotive OEMs.

Waymo and Tesla Are Best Positioned To Scale In US AV market Per Alex Roy, Waymo is in an extraordinarily strong position as the current leader (in terms of rollout scale as well as overall safety), but still faces some risk given the bulky implementation of their AV hardware.

Roy believes Waymo’s key challenge is shrinking the size of the lidar & camera apparatus to a level that would appeal to car consumers, so that Waymo can license the technology to major OEM brands.

Meanwhile, while Roy views Tesla’s efforts as focused on improving the safety level of its software stack, he thinks that Waymo & Tesla will likely intersect at some point as younger generation of consumers will likely view Tesla’s safety level as “good enough,” even if it’s not as safe as Waymo.

Per Roy, AV rideshare customers are not likely to closely scrutinize the precise safety measures of the leading autonomous services, though he acknowledges that it’s difficult to measure Tesla’s safety levels given they don’t disclose apples-to-apples data relative to Waymo.

Multiple Emerging AV Players Could Succeed Given Early Stage of US AV Rideshare Market While Roy believes the US market will ultimately adopt a “winner take most” dynamic (with Waymo and Tesla the most likely to succeed), he noted that several other players could emerge over time; Roy reiterated that he thinks a major US player is likely to achieve significant national scale in the next 5 years or so.

Roy believes Zoox could reach adequate safety levels to scale its rideshare service.

In addition, Roy cited the Lucid / Nuro partnership with Uber, as well as Wayve and Mobileye, as potential emerging players that could achieve an adequate safety level to eventually achieve major scale in their AV hardware efforts.

As noted above, Roy believes that AV hardware implementations that are minimal to the point of being “invisible” hold an advantage when it comes to eventually licensing AV technology to automotive OEMs.”

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