'Tesla is going to come roaring back': Silicon Valley entrepreneur
- Tesla's stock prices fell more than 8 percent today after news broke that the National Transportation Safety Board said it is investigating a Tesla car crash in California.
- But Silicon Valley veteran Jason Calacanis says Tesla will make a comeback.
- "Tesla is going to come roaring back," he says. "They're the greatest cars on the road."
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, a dot-com-era veteran, said Tesla will recover from today's losses.
"Tesla is going to come roaring back," Calacanis, founder and CEO of Inside.com, told CNBC Tuesday on "Closing Bell."
"Everyone who loves Tesla products can't shut up about them because they are the greatest cars on the road," said Calacanis, who says he drives a Model 3 every day in self-driving mode and calls it "extraordinary."
Earlier today, the tech and automotive company's shares fell more than 8 percent, after the National Transportation Safety Board said in a social media post that it sent investigators to find out more about a fatal Tesla crash in California last week.
The Twitter post said that two NTSB investigators were sent to conduct field investigations for a fatal crash of a Tesla car on March 23, near Mountain View, California. "Unclear if automated control system was active at time of crash," the tweet read. "Issues include: post-crash fire, steps to make vehicle safe for removal from scene."
Tuesday's 8.2 percent decline is the stock's lowest price since February 2017. In the last month the stock price has gone down 20.5 percent.
"There's been no shortage of negative news on Tesla over the last several weeks," Romit Shah, an analyst at Nomura Instinet Research, told CNBC Tuesday on "Power Lunch."
He cited issues such as executive departures, ongoing model production problems and investor concerns over cash flow as just some of the difficulties plaguing the tech giant.
"The crash is probably going to highlight some of the uncertainties around the safety of electric cars, especially as Tesla starts to introduce more and more autonomous features," Shah said.
Safety surrounding self-driving cars has been under increased scrutiny since last week's death of an Arizona pedestrian who was killed by an Uber car in self-driving mode. On Monday, the Arizona governor suspended testing of autonomous cars in the state.
On Tuesday, chipmaker Nvidia also said it was suspending tests of self-driving cars worldwide, sending stocks plunging.
Meanwhile, Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, purchased up to 20,000 autonomous Jaguar SUVs in an expansion of its autonomous-drive riding-hailing program. The partnership between Waymo, formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project, and Jaguar Land Rover is worth more than $1 billion.
But Calacanis and Shah said Tesla will get over setbacks created by the crash, even with the increased competition.
"Self-driving is, obviously, going to take a little bit of a pause as we adjust and investigate some of these crashes," Calacanis said.
Shah added that he thinks Tesla's results next week will show the company is making progress in fixing problems.
"Tesla, if you're willing to look out a couple of years on revenues, it's not an expensive stock," Shah said.
"In the next several months they're going to get over the hump," he said. "And when that happens, they're going to be profitable."