Tesla’s Purchase of Solar City Causes Drop for 5th Consecutive Week, But D20 Still Enjoys Broad-Based Gains

With 18 price gainers and only two losers, it was a broad-based gain this week for the Driverless Transportation weekly stock index (D20). The D20’s 1.8-percent jump more than tripled the Dow and S&P 500’s 0.5 percent gains.

Approaching its all-time peak at 163.5, the D20 closed over 160 for the first time since Jan. 1.

Renesas Electronics (TYO:6723) jumped 11 percent in price this week, moving from ¥571 to ¥634 per share on rumors that they are buying Intersil and that they have teamed up with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) to develop 28nm microcontrollers (MCUs) for autonomous vehicles.

One of the two losers this week was Tesla Motors (TLSA), which lost 10.1 percent of its value and dropped to under $200 per share for the first time since June 2016.  It was the fifth consecutive weekly price drop for Tesla, as uncertainty swirls around the profitability of their purchase of Solar City and its soon-to-be announced quarterly production figures.

Visit the Driverless Transportation D20 Stock Index page to learn more about it and its component stocks.

Up-and-Comers:

Drive.ai, founded in 2015, has begun to reveal its product and business strategy.  The core of its founding group of eight come from Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence lab, and it is around the AI concept of deep learning that Drive.ai will base its autonomous driving system.  Their first product will be a retrofit kit for existing cars that includes their autonomous driving system.