Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript April 22, 2026

Tesla, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.41, expectations were $0.3539.

Travis Axelrod: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Tesla’s First Quarter 2026 Q&A Webcast. My name is Travis Axelrod, Head of Investor Relations, and I’m joined today by Elon Musk, Vaibhav Taneja and a number of other executives. Our Q1 results were announced at about 3:00 p.m. Central Time in the update deck we published at the same link as this webcast. During this call, we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. These comments are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our most recent filings with the SEC. During the question-and-answer portion of today’s call, please limit yourself to 1 question and 1 follow-up. [Operator Instructions] Before we jump into Q&A, Elon has some opening remarks. Elon?

Elon Musk: Thank you. So I think we’ve got a very exciting year ahead of us with 2026. We’re going to be substantially increasing our investments in the future so we should expect to see significant — a very significant increase in capital expenditures, but I think well justified for a substantially increased future revenue stream. And obviously, Tesla is not alone in this. I think you’ve seen most, if not all, certainly the major technology companies substantially increasing their capital investments. And we’re going to be doing the same. I think it’s going to pay off in a very big way. So we’re investing in and improving our core technologies, battery powertrain, AI software, AI training, chip design, manufacturing — laying the groundwork for significantly increased manufacturing production.

We are also strengthening our supply chain across the board, batteries, energy, AI, silicon, everything, and laying the groundwork, like I said, for what we expect to be a significant increase in vehicle production in the future and, of course, a very significant increase — well, actually releasing Optimus. But increasing our internal production for testing and then probably being able to have Optimus be useful outside of Tesla sometime next year. As you’ve heard me say a few times, I think Optimus will be our biggest product — not just Tesla’s biggest product ever, but probably the biggest product ever. And I remain convinced of that conclusion. So on our vehicle side, it’s always, I think, worth noting that a Tesla car is incredibly — incredible value for money, and they’re all autonomy-ready depending on what part of the world you’re in.

The supervised full self-driving is getting extremely good. We have just started production of Cybercab, and we’ll begin production about SemiTruck soon. And I should say, whenever you have a new product with a completely new supply chain, new everything, it’s always a stretched out S-curve. So you should expect that initial production of Cybercab and Semi will be very slow, but then ramping up and going kind of exponential towards the end of the year and certainly next year. And in fact, we’ll be ramping up production of all vehicles and all factories to the best of our ability through the balance of this year. On the energy front, the United States and the whole world will need a lot of energy storage to meet growing electricity demand. Demand for our Megapack is very strong, and we’re excited to begin production of Megapack 3 later this year in our new world-class factory outside Houston.

For full self-driving and Robotaxi, version 14.3 was a major architectural update. And we have a whole pipeline of major improvements to full self-driving that, we believe, will lead to unsupervised full self-driving being available anywhere in the world that it is legal to do so. And then there’s a version 15, hopefully later this — hopefully by the end of this year, but certainly by early next year. And that will be a complete overhaul of the software architecture, and will run on AI4. That’s — and at that point, we’re really just increasing the safety level of FSD above human safety level, even more. Meaning I think even within version 14, we’re significantly safer than human, but v13 will take that to another level. We’ve expanded Robotaxi to Dallas in Houston using the same software source in the Bay Area.

Q&A Session

And the limiting factor for expansion is really rigorous validation, making sure things are completely safe. We don’t want to have a single accidental injury with the expansion of Robotaxi. And we have, to the credit of the team, not had a single one to date. And Optimus, we’re preparing Fremont for starter production later this year with Optimus. Again, totally new supply chain, totally new technology. So therefore, the production S-curve is always very slow in the beginning, but we’ll ramp up to significant numbers next year. And we’re constructing a second Optimus factory in — at our Giga Texas location. And that will probably start production around summer next year. The V3 Optimus design is almost ready to demonstrate. I think we want to just make sure it’s like polished.

Like it works functionally, but there’s some aesthetic elements that need to be finalized. And I think probably middle of this year, we should be able to show it off. We’re also a little hesitant to show V3 off because we find our competitors do a frame-by-frame analysis whenever we release something and copy everything they possibly can. So I think there’s some value to not showing new technology until it’s close to production. The — congratulations to — again to the Tesla AI chip team for taping out AI5. That’s going to be a great chip. I think probably the best AI inference chip for edge compute that exists. And certainly, I think the best value for money. The team did a great job. And we already have a lot of momentum for designing AI6, and we’ve begun to discuss ideas for Dojo 3.

So this is all very exciting. We’ve also finalized plans for the chip fab — the research chip fab on the Giga Texas campus, and we’ll start construction of that this year. In conclusion, Tesla is working on a lot of large, ambitious projects. They’re all very challenging, but I think they’re going to be revolutionary. And that’s what the team does best, solve the hardest problems and build amazing products. And I’d like to thank the Tesla team for all the hard work and thank you to all of our supporters.

Travis Axelrod: Great. Thank you very much, Elon. And Vaibhav also has some opening remarks.

Vaibhav Taneja: Thanks, Travis. So 2026 has had an interesting start not just for us, but I think the world in general. On the autos business, we have seen a resurgence in demand in EMEA, in certain countries like France and Germany showing over 150% quarter-over-quarter growth in deliveries. In APAC, we witnessed growth in South Korea and Japan, again, in terms of deliveries. Even out here in the U.S., we have seen a slight growth in terms of [ quarter-quarter ] deliveries. On the order backlog front, we ended the quarter with the highest Q1 order backlog in over 2 years. Whilst the recent increase in gas prices has had a positive impact on the order rate, this improvement started before the uptrend in gas prices. This is due to the work done by the Tesla team in bringing more compelling and affordable vehicles to market.

10 years back, when we launched Model 3 in the U.S. with a promise of $35,000 starting price, which if you adjust today for inflation, translates to about $48,000 in today’s dollar terms, the starting price of Model 3 today is way less than that when the product is way more compelling from where it started. Given this setup, we’re focused on increasing our overall production volume, something that we already started in Q1. This volume increase is evidenced by the Giga Berlin reaching a record output of over 61,000 units in Q1. We plan to keep growing volumes further, not just in Berlin, but across all our factories. Our biggest limiter continues to be our battery pack capacity, and we are actively working on resolving that. Auto margins, excluding credits, improved sequentially from 17.9% to 19.2%.

Note that we have had certain onetime benefits from warranty true-downs around $230 million and some relief on tariffs. We have not realized any benefit from the recent Supreme Court ruling on IEEPA tariffs as there is still a lot of uncertainty around the final outcome. Both tariffs and sustained high interest rates continue to add to our automotive cost. Interest rate subvention costs are recognized upfront. If interest rates continue to rise, our cost of subvention will continue to impact auto margins. On the FSD adoption front, we continue to see improvement, reaching nearly 1.3 million paid customers globally. The bulk of the growth came from subscriptions, while upfront purchases only increased 7% as we remove the purchase option in some markets in Q1.

We recently received approvals for our FSD in Netherlands. This sets up us well for an EU-wide approval later in Q2, and we’re just gated by how the regulators go about it. Additionally, we’ve also received approvals in China. The broader approval is still not there, but we’re working with the regulators in the country, and we’re hoping that we can get approval by Q3. With these approvals coming through, we expect the broader adoption of the software in the existing fleet and incremental demand for our vehicles. With all this in mind, we have evolved our vehicle sales strategy, where we now emphasize FSD as a product and vehicle as only the delivery mechanism. As we have noted previously, the energy storage business is inherently lumpy tied to customer deployment time lines.

In Q1, we deployed 6 — 8.8 gigawatt hour of energy storage, a 38% sequential decline. However, we still expect 2026 deployments to be higher than 2025. We set yet another record with gross margins in this business over 39.5% due to some onetime benefits from certain tariff recognitions of more than $250 million from certain tariffs which we had paid in prior quarters. On a normalized basis, we continue to expect energy compression from here with increasing competition and tariff impacts. As previously discussed, tariffs in this business can have outsized impacts as most of the battery cells are procured from China. Our order backlog for this business is robust, and we’re doing our best to build not based on — not just based on existing demand but also unexpected demand.

Services and Others improved sequentially from 8.8% to 9.2%. This includes a collection of efforts meant to support our customers like service centers, used cars, spare supercharging, part sales, insurance and even our Robotaxi business. We’re making deliberate investments in the infrastructure to help the Robotaxi in the future. We grew the Robotaxi fleet quarter-over-quarter, and we expect to keep ramping the fleet as we accelerate and get into other geographies. On operating expenses side, we did increase sequentially from a full quarter stock-based compensation expense for the 2025 CEO compensation plan for which one milestone is still deemed probable. Additionally, our spend on AI-related initiatives, including expense on development of our own AI5 chip and new products like Cybercab, Semi, Optimus and Megablock, et cetera, continue to be at elevated levels, and we expect this trend to continue for the full year 2026.

Net income was impacted from mark-to-market charges on our Bitcoin holdings, which depreciated 22% as compared to the last quarter and the unfavorable impact of FX, primarily from our large intercompany ForEx. On free cash flow, we ended the quarter with just over $1.4 billion. As Elon mentioned, we are in a very big capital investment phase, which is going to start now and would last a couple of years. So based on that, our current expectation for 2025 — 2026 is over $25 billion of CapEx. And just to remind you, we are paying for 6 factories which we’re going to go into operation. Some have already started, some would go into operation later part of this year. We’re further increasing our investment in AI-related initiatives, including the AI infrastructure to support Robotaxi and the launch of Optimus.

We’ve already started placing orders for the research semiconductor fab in Austin and for solar manufacturing equipment. While this may seem a lot and will have the impact of negative free cash flow for the rest of the year, we believe this is the right strategy to position the company for the next era. We’ll make such investments in a very capital-efficient manner. We are actively working on our mission of building a future of amazing abundance. However, that requires not just a lot of investment, but an immense amount of execution. The future is going to be great, and the whole Tesla team is rising to the occasion to make this a reality. I would like to end by thanking the Tesla team, our customers, investors and vendors for having confidence in us on this journey.

Thanks.

Travis Axelrod: Thank you very much, Vaibhav. Now we’re going to go to investor questions, starting with questions from say.com. The first question is, when will we have the Optimus 3 reveal, which we already touched on. But the rest of the question is, when will Optimus production start since we ended the Model X and S production earlier this — the midyear? And then what’s the expected Optimus production rate exiting this year? And what are the initial targeted skills?

Elon Musk: Well, as I was saying, what we found is that when we’ve unveiled various Optimus versions, we found out our competitors literally do a frame-by-frame analysis and copy everything we’re doing. So I think we want to push the Optimus 3 unveil maybe closer to production. Start of production is — we’re assuming is somewhere around the late July, August time frame. And I mean just to inject some reality into these questions since these questions are not — if I were to describe those questions, it does not fully understand what happens with the production line. The last S and X production will be in early May. But you have to look at the entire upstream portion of the production line. So you start with sales, battery packs, motor production, all the parts production.

And so we’ve been dismantling the S, X production line from the more base-level parts — more basic level parts to — as you get to more larger subassemblies, you start dismantling the line from the small parts first, not from the final assembly first. So the final assembly line will — that will be dismantled next month and after the last of the S X vehicle is done. You can’t dismantle some gigantic production line like overnight. It takes at least a few months to do so. And then you’ve got to install a new production line, and you’ve got to provide all of the wiring and communication, test out the machines of the new production line for Optimus. So that also takes several months. So frankly, if we’re able to go from [ suffering ] production on one line, dismantling that entire line, reinstalling a whole new line and turning that on in a matter of 4 months, that is an insanely fast speed.

I don’t think any other company on earth has ever done that before, just to put things into perspective and inject some reality into the situation here. I don’t know what the production rate of Optimus will be this year. It is impossible to predict these things. The — when you have a brand-new product in an entirely new production line and you have 10,000 unique items, all of which have to go right into ramp production, it will move as fast as the least luckiest, lowest, dumbest part in the entire 10,000. And this is a Optimus — it’s a completely new product with completely new production line. So it’s just literally impossible to predict, except that I think it will be quite slow for us as we iron out the 10,000-plus unique items that have to be sold for Optimus to reach volume production.

Initial skills will be — obviously, we’re going to start with simple skills in the factory and then build up from there.

Travis Axelrod: Great. Thank you, Elon. The next question is, what milestones are you targeting for unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi expansion beyond Austin this year? And how will that drive recurring revenue?

Elon Musk: Well, we certainly hope to be — have unsupervised FSD or Robotaxi operating in, I don’t know — it does [indiscernible] states by the end of this year. Initially, we’re taking it very — we’re taking a very cautious approach to the rollout here. Like we haven’t had any injuries and certainly no fatalities to date with the unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi expansion. We want to keep it that way. And so I don’t — I think probably unsupervised FSD or Robotaxi revenue would not be super material this year. But I do think it will be material — it will be material probably in a significant way next year.

Travis Axelrod: Great. Thank you very much. The next question is, when do you expect FSD unsupervised to reach customer cars?

Elon Musk: I’m just guessing here, but probably in the fourth quarter. It’s difficult to release this like to everyone everywhere all at once because we do want to make sure that they’re not unique situations in a city that particularly complex intersection or actually, they tend to be places where people get into accidents a lot because they’re just — perhaps there’s — and like I said, an unsafe intersection or bad road markings or a lot of weather challenges. So I think we would release unsupervised gradually to the customer fleet as we feel like a particular geography is confirmed to be safe.

Travis Axelrod: Great. And the next question is, how will hardware 3 cars reach unsupervised FSD?

Elon Musk: Unfortunately, hardware 3 — I wish it were otherwise, but hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD. We did think at one point, it would have that, but relative to hardware 4, it has only 1/8 of the memory bandwidth of hardware 4. And memory bandwidth is one of the key elements needed for unsupervised FSD. And it’s just generally a thing that’s needed for AI. If you’re doing order aggressive transformer memory bandwidth, it’s the [indiscernible] point. So for customers that have bought FSD, what we’re offering is essentially trade in — like a discounted trade-in for cars that have AI4 hardware. And then we’ll also be offering the ability to upgrade the car to replace the computer, and you also need to replace the cameras, unfortunately, to go to hardware 4.

So to do this efficiently, we’re going to have to set up like kind of micro factories or small factories in major metropolitan areas in order to do it efficiently. It’s — because if it’s done just at the service center, it is extremely slow to do so and inefficient. So we basically need like many production lines to make the change. And I do think, over time, it’s going to make sense for us to convert all hardware 3 cars to hardware 4 because that’s what enables them to enter the Robotaxi fleet and have unsupervised FSD.

Vaibhav Taneja: And for what it’s worth, in the meantime, we are going to also release a V14 version for Hardware 3. This will be a distilled version of the same V14 software that we released for Hardware 4, and people should be able to start the drive from park state and basically have all the features that V14 for Hardware 4 has. And that’s expected to come end of June.

Travis Axelrod: Great. The next question is what enabled you to finish the AI5 tape out early? And were there any changes to the original vision? Last week, Elon said AI5 will go into Optimus and the supercomputer, but 1 month ago said it would go into the robotaxi. Has AI5 been dropped from the vehicle road map?

Elon Musk: Well, the reason AI5 tape-out finished early was because the team worked incredibly hard to make it happen. And just over time, we gathered a lot of momentum. But we did have to work every weekend for 6 months straight, including every holiday. So it was a lot of sacrifice by our team, and I was there, of course, myself, every weekend. And fortunately, we didn’t encounter any major — we didn’t make any major mistakes, at least that we’re aware of that required pushing out the tape-out. So the team just did a great job and worked incredibly hard is the reason. Yes, I do expect that AI5 will go into Optimus and into the data center because it’s looking like we’ll be able to achieve unsupervised self-driving with AI4 that is far greater than human safety levels.

So — which means it’s not — certainly not immediately needed in the car. At some point, I think it will make sense for us to switch to AI5 in the car, but that’s — but there’s not a pricing issue to do so. So — but at some point, the AI4 hardware is going to get like so old that it’s like, okay, the only reason they’re keeping the factory open is for AI4. We are planning an AI4 upgrade to use newer generation RAM. So it will go from 16 gigabytes to, I think, 32 gigabytes per SoC. It’s a total of 64 gigabytes, and probably a 10% increase in compute in sort of into [ trillions ] of operations per second and in memory bandwidth. So that’s AI4.1 or AI4+ probably goes into production middle of next year, I think, depends. It depends on — Samsung is doing the modifications for us.

So it sort of depends on when they’re able to finish that — finish those modifications and bring it to production.

Travis Axelrod: Great. The next question is now that FSD has been approved in the Netherlands and is expected to launch across Europe this summer, can you discuss your Robotaxi strategy for the region?

Elon Musk: Well, we’re probably jumping a gun here on Robotaxi in Europe since it is — it took us an immense amount of time just to get supervised self-driving approved in Europe. And these — we don’t control the regulators. It’s — we push as hard as we can, but that’s — it’s ultimately up to the governments in Europe and the EU to decide what to do. So yes, as it is, we’ve only been approved in Netherlands, we expect to be approved in a lot of other countries. And I think the supervised FSD goes to Brussels for EU review in May, yes. So — and obviously, the next thing beyond that is to aim for unsupervised self-driving or Robotaxi in Europe. I actually don’t know what the time frame for that is and would be somewhat at the most of the regulators as to when that approval would take place.

Ashok Elluswamy: And from a technology standpoint, what we deployed in Netherlands and Europe is the same exact architecture and the training procedure and so on, except we had more Europe data. And I suspect that same thing will be true for unsupervised FSD as well. Whatever we use to solve in the U.S. will work in other places and the rest of the world, too, probably that we were able to add the data from the local regions.

Travis Axelrod: Great. The next question is, given the recent NHTSA incident filings, can you update us on the Robotaxi safety data? If safety validation remains the primary bottleneck, why not deploy thousands of vehicles to accelerate removal of the safety driver?

Elon Musk: Ashok, do you want to take that?

Ashok Elluswamy: Yes. We are increasing the amount of our QA fleet, but we also want to use the customer fleet to give us the useful metrics back so that we can scale it safely. Like Elon mentioned, we are absolutely focused on safety. And so far, we have 0 incidents, and that’s why the NHTSA filing also shows. In addition to safety, we are also solving some of these so-called scaling issues. For example, you do not want the Robotaxi to be stuck, blocking intersections or don’t want to be dropping people off at slightly incorrect locations and so on. So we are simultaneously solving the long tail of safety by monitoring the metrics across the entire Tesla customer vehicle fleet, which is close to driving 10 billion miles on FSD in the next few weeks and also scaling up the amount of QA fleet that we have across the entire U.S. to accelerate our safety validation while also scaling the rest of the factors that can throttle the increase of unsupervised vehicles.

Travis Axelrod: All right. The next question is, is v14.3 still the last piece of the puzzle to enable large-scale unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi? Or do we have to wait until V15?

Elon Musk: Well, I think 14.3 is last piece of the puzzle for unsupervised FSD. Now the question is like degrees of safety. Like how — safety and convenience, I suppose. We have a lot of known improvements like major architectural improvements that we know would improve the probability of safety significantly. So I think it’s not going to make sense for us to deploy unsupervised FSD Robotaxi large scale when we know that there are major architectural improvements to the software that can improve safety. So I think we’re going to want to finish writing that software, validate it and release it before going to large-scale unsupervised FSD. Depending on what large scale means. I mean we are, of course, as I mentioned earlier, doing unsupervised FSD in 3 studies, and we’ll expand to, like I said, probably a dozen states or more later this year.

So it kind of depends on what your definition of large scale is. But I do think it wouldn’t be right for us to go to like very large scale unsupervised FSD when we know that there are software improvements in the pipeline that would improve safety.

Ashok Elluswamy: Yes. And I’d like to note that the version of Robotaxi that’s running in Austin and Dallas, Houston, et cetera, those are essentially 14.3 variants, and it’s obviously safe that, that’s why we’re able to launch in those cities, and we continue to expand based on the v13 — v14 base for a while until v15 lands. And v15 is going to be a major upgrade.

Elon Musk: Yes.

Travis Axelrod: Great. Thank you. The next 2 questions, we’ve already answered about Robotaxi rollout and the data that we’re observing. So we will end on the last question, which is what is Tesla doing to scale the energy generation business with solar? Residential roof deployments have stalled. Will Tesla move to regional solar and battery farms, perhaps coupled to superchargers? Will we deploy solar through utilities?

Micheal Snyder: Yes. The overall U.S. residential solar market is going through a bit of a correction after the loss of the homeowner tax credit last year, but we still see strong demand shaping up for the second half of the year. Tesla introduced a lease product this year that allows us to capture the tax credit ourselves and offer competitive pricing for homeowners. We have also debuted our own solar panel with superior performance in aesthetics as well as our own best-in-class mounting system that gives us a fully integrated home energy ecosystem. We believe — we strongly believe that solar and storage markets globally will continue to grow at both residential and utility scale, and we will continue to invest in that growth.

Travis Axelrod: Great. Thank you, Mike. So now we’re going to move on to analyst questions. The first question is going to come from Will Stein at Truist. Will, please feel free to unmute yourself when you’re ready.

William Stein: Can you hear me?

Travis Axelrod: Yes. Yes, we can.

William Stein: Considering the various parties involved in the Terafab project, I’m hoping you can provide some details for investors about which party is going to take responsibility for each aspect of that project, funding it, designing it, building it, operating, taking production and the like. I would love to hear some more details.

Elon Musk: Yes. So we’re still working out the details of the Terafab deployment. In the near term, Tesla will be building the research fab on our Giga Texas campus. This is something we expect to be probably a $3 billion-ish initiative and capable of maybe a few thousand wafers per month, but it’s really intended to try out ideas. The research fab, it was in terms of maybe — we have some ideas for improving the fundamental technology of how chips are made and some of some new physics we’d like to test out, but we also want to test out the ability to — to see if something is working in production. So you need kind of like a few thousand wafer starts a month to make sure that a production process is sound. And then SpaceX is going to take care of like the initial phase of the scaled up Terafab.

And that’s what we figured out thus far. Any kind of intercompany thing has to be approved by both the SpaceX and Tesla Board of Directors. It has got to go through a conflict resolution. It’s going to have a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of complexity because we’ve got to make sure Tesla shareholders are served and SpaceX shareholders have served and strike the right balance there. So it takes a while to work through the kind of independent director reviews on this. So that’s basically what we figured out thus far is Tesla doing the research fab, SpaceX doing the initial part of the large-scale Terafab. And then we got to figure out the rest.

William Stein: Yes. And what about Intel’s involvement?

Elon Musk: Yes. So Intel is excited to partner with us on some of the core manufacturing technologies. So we plan to use Intel’s 14A process, which is state-of-the-art and in fact, not yet totally complete. So — but given that by the time Terafab scales up, 14A will be probably fairly mature or ready for prime time. 14A seems like the right move. And we have a great relationship with Intel. A lot of respect for the CEO, the CTO and the new team there. So we think it’s going to be a great partnership.

Ashok Elluswamy: Yes. And the other thing on the research fab, I think we’ve said it before, we plan to do memory logic, everything in the same place, including mask because we want to have a quick iteration loop so that we can see and basically scale the technologies, which we are trying to bring up.

Elon Musk: Yes. I think this will be unique in the world, or at least I’m not aware of any a place where you have the lithography mask creation, the — and then logic, memory and packaging in under one roof in one building. That’s about the fastest I could possibly imagine doing [ recourse ] of research and development and being able to try out some pretty radical ideas, some of which have — it’s kind of long-shot stuff, but if some of these long shots pan out, it would be radical improvements in the way [indiscernible] work.

Travis Axelrod: Great. The next question is going to come from Pierre at New Street.

Pierre Ferragu: A quick one first on FSD adoption. So you have 180,000 new users, paying users this quarter. And I compare that to your overall installed base, it might be 15%. But then if I shrink that to the U.S. or to North America, where most of them are, it’s probably more like 30%, 35%. And I’m trying to — and I compare that you probably sold about 100,000 cars in North America in the quarter. So you’re winning twice more FSD users and you’re selling cars. And then if I add to that picture the fact that, I guess, it’s mostly Hardware 4 owners who subscribe to FSD, it sounds like most drivers in North America who have Hardware 4 would already be using FSD. Is that the right way to think about it and the kind of like success FSD is meeting today? Is that the right way to think about it?

Ashok Elluswamy: Yes. I think you’re thinking about it the right way, Pierre. And the other thing which I’ll share is that you can’t just look at 1 quarter versus the other quarter in terms of churn, but we are actually seeing churn of subscribers also coming down, which again is a reflection of the product is getting better. And obviously, if subscriptions are going up, that is a good metric. The other thing also to note is that we are seeing customers actually drive longer which, again, you could correlate it. That’s why you have lesser churn because people are liking the product. And if — I mean, I’ve said this before, if I just use my own personal behavior, right, I literally get in the car, I press a button and it just goes. Earlier, I used to park. Now I don’t even have to park. And that is the experience which we want everybody to [ grade, ] and that’s why you’re starting seeing it in the numbers come through.

Pierre Ferragu: Excellent. And if I maybe a quick follow-up, completely difference, it’s more on the Optimus architecture. And you talked about the partnership with xAI and Grok, and I was wondering if you can share with us anything about how the system to intelligence is going to be implemented? Is that going to be onboard on chips inside Optimus? Or if we should think that like your fleet of like 1 million Optimus being produced a year actually driving very significant inference demand in data centers as well for system to thinking.

Elon Musk: Well, we think we can put a lot of intelligence locally in the robot. And it certainly needs enough intelligence that if a robot gets disconnected like if it’s a bad cellular signal or there isn’t WiFi, Optimus can’t just get stuck. It needs to have enough local intelligence that it can still do useful things even if it loses connection kind of like the car. Like the car does not need any cellular or WiFi connection to be able to drive safely. Now I guess you can think of like Optimus needs kind of a manager to be told what to do, broadly speaking, like if otherwise going to keep doing the same thing it did before. So I think you need kind of an orchestration AI, which Grok would be good for orchestration. And then for Optimus’ voice, having a low-latency intelligent voice AI, Grok is actually very good for that.

So if you want to talk to Optimus and have kind of a Grok-level conversation, you kind of need to connect to a Grok-level AI for that. But I would expect the amount of interaction, apart from like the voice stuff and asking complicated questions of the robot that necessarily needs a large AI model to answer, the — Grok will probably have about as much interaction with Optimus as a manager would have with the people on their team. So meaning Optimus could probably work for several hours without any management oversight.

Travis Axelrod: Great. The next question is going to come from Dan at Barclays.

Dan Levy: Great. Elon, your chip suppliers generally generate pretty good economics on the chip they sell. Your approach has historically been on vertical integration, part of that has been to get better economics. So I know the longer-term goal of Terafab is to get the supply you need, but how much of Terafab is also motivated to get better economics on your midterm chip purchases? And how long is it going to take to ramp to get to a yield that achieves that type of economic parity?

Elon Musk: No. I mean Terafab is not some sort of mechanism to generate leverage over our chip suppliers. It’s just literally, we don’t see a path to having enough efficient quantity of AI chips down the road. As we scale production to high levels, just the rate at which the industry is growing in logic, but even more so in memory, it’s just doesn’t — we just anticipate hitting a wall if we don’t make chips ourselves. So that’s the reason for the Terafab. I think that we do have some ideas for how to make maybe radically better AI chips. And these are kind of research ideas there — which means like long shot, but if long shot pays off, it’s maybe a giant improvement. And it’s just easier to do that if we have our own research fab and are developing our own production technologies.

So — and if you look sort of long term at, say, having AI satellites, making chips for those, they’re just — there’s just no way in how the existing industry can keep up with that. It’s impossible.

Travis Axelrod: All right. And our next question is going to come from Mark at Goldman Sachs.

Mark Delaney: Yes. I recognize the importance of FSD and that FSD can help to drive vehicle sales and see some of the improvements in the FSD technology more recently with version 14. However, I’m also hoping to understand if the companies you on new vehicle models has evolved. And I ask given that you, Elon, posted on X recently that Tesla could develop a family vehicle, and there’s also been some past discussion about a compact vehicle.

Elon Musk: Well, I mean, Cybercab is compact. It’s actually — I mean, it’s very roomy, but it’s a 2-person vehicle. And we do think probably most of our production long term will be Cybercab because 90% of miles driven are with 1 or 2 people. So it would mean that you’d want to the vast majority of your production to be Cybercab. Then over time, it’s going to make sense for our whole lineup to be autonomous vehicles of different sizes. And I did talk a bit about this when we did the kind of AI Day in L.A. at Warner Bros. and showed like — this is our current lineup, and this is what some idea of what our future lineup will be, which is that it’s going to be almost entirely autonomous. In fact, long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster.

Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo. But I think it will be one of the most exciting product unveils ever. I’m not sure — I don’t think it moves the needle massively from a revenue standpoint. So — but it is very cool. I think it might be one of the most spectacular demos ever.

Travis Axelrod: All right. Mark, did you have a follow-up question?

Mark Delaney: Yes. My other question was on batteries, and the company mentioned battery is a constraint on its growth. Can you speak more to how Tesla expects to resolve this? And to what extent that might come from ramping up your own LFP and 4680 battery cell manufacturing? Or is this something that you would expect to resolve primarily with increased sourcing from suppliers?

Vaibhav Taneja: Yes. So at the moment, I think the limiter is not the cells itself. It’s the battery pack capacity. And we’re — like I said in my opening remarks, we’re actively working on resolving this. There’s more capacity being added as we speak, and I’ll let Lars add a few more — thanks — to it.

Lars Moravy: Yes. Thanks, Vaibhav. As you guys may have seen in Berlin, we started launching model battery pack with our in-house 4680 cells a few months ago, and that is ramping up nicely, adding to Berlin’s output and helping with the demand surge that we’ve seen in Europe as well. We’re adding additional capacity in our Reno facility, sort of retooling it as it’s been building packs now for almost 10 years. And in order to put in some more efficient lines and get additional output out there. And then we continue to have growth in China as well, ramping in-house LFP module production and battery packs associated with that. So all of those things are happening now in the next months and that’s really plans we laid out a few months back to increase that output with the growing demand.

Travis Axelrod: All right. Thank you guys. And our next analyst is going to be Colin from Wells Fargo.

Colin Langan: Great. You moved the safety driver in Austin, and you’re now expanding into Allison, Houston. What are the key safety metrics that you’re tracking that gives you confidence that Robotaxi is safe enough to expand? Is it sort of miles per intervention, miles per accident, per fatality? And where do you stand on that now?

Elon Musk: [ Ashok? ]

Ashok Elluswamy: Yes. We track basically all the metrics that you mentioned. We have a pretty large QA fleet spread across all of the United States, and then we look at any intervention that could happen and then sort of simulate both in practice and also in our simulators that are very, very good nowadays using neural networks as what would have happened. And then based on all these analysis, we then make the call to expand. And so far, all of the expansions have gone according to our expectations.

Elon Musk: Yes, a lot of the limiting — a lot of what limits wider deployment of Robotaxi are actually not safety issues, but convenience issues or the car basically gets paranoid and get stuck, like sometimes it gets — because it’s programmed for maximum safety. So the problem is that then it sometimes just gets scared to do things. So like get scared across railroads, for example, or it will get stuck at a light where there’s — the light number changes from red or I mean there was one kind of amusing situation where a whole bunch of Robotaxi got stuck in the Lifton land in Austin because, I kid you not, a Waymo had crashed into a bus. And so they could not turn left because the Waymo crashed into the bus. And so you have this like long line of like, I don’t know, a dozen or more hit Robotaxi that were waiting for the bus to move, but the bus was never going to move because the Waymo just crashes the bus.

So that obviously drives people crazy if there’s a whole bunch of Robotaxi is blocking the whole road. So it’s a ton of things like that. That’s the single biggest thing is just the car being scared to move or getting kind of stuck in situations like that. We’ve also had literal infinite loops where the car might want to make a turn into a road, but there’s construction and then it goes around the block, tries to turn into the road to construction, goes around the block, tries to turn on the road. And so you have to stop the infinite looping, literal infinite looping. So those actually — those are, by far, the issues that we have to resolve as opposed to direct safety issues.

Colin Langan: Got it. Great.

Elon Musk: And then your follow-up.

Colin Langan: Yes. Just last year, I asked about FSD and camera and the issues with sun glare, and you noted that there was a breakthrough with direct photon counting that address this issue. But a month ago, there was a NHTSA filing saying that they haven’t received an update when the solution was deployed in the number of vehicles. Is this — did it require a retrofit of the camera? Is this fully deployed? And I guess I was just curious since the filing mentioned it.

Lars Moravy: Yes. First, I want to say, we did change the cameras some months ago, and those are out. And the NHTSA is referring to like older vehicles. We always work directly with NHTSA on all of the issues that they raised with us, and they’re asking for quite a bit of information, and we’re complying with that in as timely manner as possible. And so we expect to resolve that in any of the other investigations in short order.

Unknown Executive: Yes. And we have also implemented stricter measures for the visibility of the camera. So in recent software, if the camera is not able to see things clearly because of residual buildup or what have you, then the FSD won’t be available for those cars.

Elon Musk: It just means you have to clean the inside of the windscreen.

Travis Axelrod: Great. That, unfortunately, is all the time we have today. We appreciate everyone’s questions, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter. Thank you very much, and goodbye.