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Tesla shares slid in today's trade as third quarter deliveries fell short of expectations. Investors, though, are of course now turning their attention to the company's Robo taxi event next week. CEO Elon Musk has touted the future of vehicle autonomy for years. Any details could potentially provide a lift to a stock that's flat on the year. Yahoo Finances, Akiko Fujita joins us now with more among those folks who is optimistic about that autonomous future, Tom Drian, who we spoke to earlier today, Akiko.

Yeah, interesting for him to talk about, you know, how he expects it to be a significant part of Tesla's valuation. As you said, Elon Musk has long touted vehicle autonomy as the future of Tesla at the company's investor day earlier this year. He said the technology would increase the company's valuation tenfold. There's been plenty of speculation about what exactly this announcement will be. In the past, we've heard Musk describe his Robo taxi vision as part Uber, part Airbnb, fully autonomous cars, allowing Tesla drivers to share their vehicles on an app, tapping into a wider network to cash in. Musk has also talked about the potential for a car specifically designed for autonomous taxi service. The reality is there's already a handful of companies that have beat Tesla to the market on this. You've got Google's Waymo that's been the market leader, offering more than a hundred thousand paid autonomous rides per week. The company's been offering fully autonomous taxi service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and LA. Today it announces expanding to Austin in a limited capacity. Another competitor, GM's Cruise has had a rougher ride. The company suspended its fleet after a string of high profile accidents. And just this week, Cruise agreed to pay a one and a half million dollar fine for failing to report one of those accidents. And then there's Zooks, which is owned by Amazon. The company is planning to enter the ride hailing market next year in Las Vegas. Their vehicle has no steering wheel, no pedals, no driver seat, as opposed to its competitors that retrofit cars meant for human drivers. Zooks is offering a ride that's built solely for autonomy. Co-founder and chief technical officer Jesse Levinson says that also makes these rides safer than its competitors.

We're able to have two or in some cases four of almost every important critical component in the vehicle. So that means we have two braking systems. We have two steering racks, two batteries, two motors. We actually have four sensor pods, one on each corner. And what's really cool about our vehicle is if any one of those components has a hardware or software failure, not only is it still safe, but we can actually keep driving and take the customer to their destination.

In addition to safety, there are questions about the business model for Robo taxis, what that means for profitability for these companies. Chris Robinson with Lux Research says autonomous taxi rides today cost roughly half that of traditional ride shares when measured per mile. But it still costs two to three times more than car ownership. He points to the high overhead costs, all of those factors you see on the screen there, as one reason why he thinks this technology may not be as disruptive as some analysts have suggested, guys.

Akiko, I also want to ask you about regulation, which is something that Tom Drian of RBC brought up as well as potentially a limiting factor. That and sort of the way that some cities are constructed might that might be tougher to navigate than others.

Yeah, and this is where it's interesting to see what Tesla actually comes up with on specifics because you look at regulation right now, it is very fragmented from city to city. But the reason why those like Tom and other analysts have brought that up in the context of Tesla is because Elon Musk in the past has talked about not necessarily geo fencing the area. When you think about somebody like Waymo today, they actually go out and digitally map these roads and these routes with a human driver behind the wheel before actually deploying those autonomous vehicles. Tesla doesn't necessarily see that vision. They've talked about sort of learning through driver data. And that would require, some engineers have said, a lot more guard rails in place here in terms of security. The risks are higher according to some engineers, but of course we're going to hear what Elon Musk has to say next week about how exactly he plans to deploy these Robo taxis, what the timeline is, and what exactly that technology is going to look like, because right now what he said in the past is very different from what Waymo as well Zooks has offered up so far.

We shall see. Akiko, thank you so much.