Tesla’s (TSLA) stock surged almost 10% to a record high Monday, breaching $500 per share for the first time.

The sharp development in the electric car maker’s stock came in the wake of a bullish call from Oppenheimer expert Colin Rusch, who knock his price target on Tesla to $612 a share, up from $385 already and representing one of the highest on Wall Street.

An essential principle of Rusch’s bull thesis was established in his conviction that Tesla stays well in front of its competitors in autonomous innovation.

Troves of data gathered from countless vehicles on the road have empowered Tesla to make a database for future developments in autonomy, Rusch said.

“They’ve got 600,000 cars on the road collecting data from all of their sensor suites, collecting what we consider ‘corner cases’ – you know, the odd lots, the unusual circumstances that a car might run into on the road,” Rusch told Yahoo Finance’s The Ticker on Monday. “And we think that data is, you know, going to help them redesign their autonomous system.”

Tesla has previously touted its use of information to improve existing features like Smart Summon, which CEO Elon Musk said in October had been used more than a million times.

“This illustrates the value of having a massive fleet because it allows us to collect these corner cases and learn from them and use fleet learning and become rapidly better, just as Navigate on Autopilot did on the freeway,” Musk said during a call with analysts about Tesla’s third-quarter results in October. “This is just the beginning as we collect more data and Autopilot and Full Self-Driving functionality gets better.”

Rusch, for his part, concurred with the advantages Tesla got from the scale.

“They have 600,000 cars versus the next competitor that’s between 600 to 1000 cars out there collecting data,” Rusch said. “We think that’s a key advantage.”