After nine years, the new Roadster tickets are finally on sale! Morningstar maintains Tesla (TSLA.US) target price of $450: Supercars are not valuation logic; FSD, Robotaxi, and Optimus

The Zhitong Finance App noticed that recently, Tesla (TSLA.US) posted on social platforms announcing that the new generation Roadster will be released on October 1. This is the first time since the prototype debuted in November 2017 that Tesla has given a public event time with a specific date and an official invitation.

As its highly anticipated supercar is about to be unveiled, Morningstar's latest statement on the Roadster incident is quite clear. Keep Tesla's 3 star rating and the $450 fair value estimate unchanged, with an economic moat rating of “narrow” and an uncertainty rating of “extremely high”.

For the Roadster itself, Morningstar's motto is the “halo model”: Tesla discontinued production of the Model S and Model X at the beginning of the year to free up production capacity for the Optimus humanoid robot, and the Roadster will take over the brand role of “showcasing Tesla's strongest engineering strength.”

However, Morningstar expects to sell only about 2,000 vehicles a year, which is almost negligible compared to the company's annual delivery forecast of nearly one million vehicles. The bank stated that “our predictions already assume the Roadster will be put into production”, that is, the incident did not constitute a reason for the valuation to be revised. Morningstar's real basis for maintaining a fair value of $450 is still based on three pillars: FSD software subscriptions (approximately 1.3 million subscribers), the Robotaxi network, and the Optimus humanoid robot.

“Aura model”

A representative fact is that none of the latest research reports covering Tesla included Roadster's sales volume or profit in the valuation model. Most agencies characterize it as “an attention and narrative catalyst rather than a profit catalyst”.

The Information estimates that even with 10,000 vehicles x 250,000 dollars, the revenue of about 2.5 billion US dollars is only 2.4% of Tesla's consistent revenue forecast for 2026 (about US$105.2 billion).

According to NeoData data, as of September 2026, 38 institutions' target average price for Tesla was 377.40 US dollars, and the rating distribution was 44% purchase/increase, 46% holding, and 10% holding/selling.

The essence of the disagreement has nothing to do with Roadster, but rather with autonomous driving and robotics narratives. Looking at many, the latest target price given to Tesla by Wedbush analyst Dan Ives is $600; Piper Sandler's (target price target price of $500) segmented valuation model suggests that the value of Optimus and “inference as a service” may exceed the sum of the rest of the business; Morgan Stanley's bull market scenario targets as high as $840, but Robotaxi accounts for about $120 (30%) of its $400 benchmark price.

On the bearish side, Wells Fargo offered $130. The core concerns are capital expenditure exceeding $25 billion in 2026, increased competition in the automotive industry, and high uncertainty about the FSD/RoboTaxi commercialization schedule.

For investors, the implication given by the institutional opinion is that whether Roadster can make headlines does not determine Tesla's valuation; what determines the valuation are the three old questions: whether FSD can be implemented, whether Robotaxi can be scaled up, and when can huge capital expenses be exchanged for cash flow.