On Thursday, Tesla’s stock dropped to its lowest level in over a year as a result of Deutsche Bank expressing concern about the electric carmaker’s growing emphasis on its autonomous vehicle offerings during lean times.

In response to the brokerage downgrading the stock to “Hold” and lowering its price objective from $189 to $123, shares of the Elon Musk-led company slid 2.7% to $151.26.

The brokerage’s comments come after a Reuters story from earlier this month stating that Tesla opted to keep working on Robotaxis on the same vehicle architecture as she shelved its long-promised low-cost car, which investors had believed would spur development.

Prior to the August introduction of Robotaxi, Tesla has been advocating for a wider usage of its fully autonomous advanced driver assistance software.

According to the brokerage, achieving complete driverless autonomy would be a major operational, legal, and technological problem.

“The delay of Model 2 efforts creates the risk of no new vehicle in Tesla’s consumer lineup for the foreseeable future, which would put downward pressure on its volume and pricing for many more years,” Emmanuel Rosner, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, stated.

While it continues to attempt to resurrect Musk’s massive pay package from 2018, Tesla earlier this week laid off more than 10% of its global workforce as profitability suffers from price reductions to increase demand for its electric vehicles.

The business has requested that its investors confirm that they still support Musk’s $56 billion salary, which was decided upon in 2018 but was denied by a Delaware judge in January.

After losing 37.4% of its value so far this year, Tesla’s shares hit their lowest point in almost 15 months on Thursday, ranking it as the second worst-performing stock on the S&P 500 index.

If losses continue, its market capitalization is expected to drop by around $17 billion, to roughly $478 billion. The business is still valued higher than any other automaker worldwide.

(Adapted from EconomicTimes.com)

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