Tesla Space #62: This robot sucks

X OF THE WEEK

Considering all the rhetoric around Elon’s DOGE and how he has brought in some young (but extremely capable) guys to work on it, I found this one from Farzad funny.

While I won’t pretend to know too much about US politics, we can be 100% certain that Elon will be stepping on so many toes (literally cutting funding of so many institutions and projects, mostly corrupt ones it seems), that it will cause even larger efforts to bring him down through media hit pieces.

Elon isn’t really helping either is he 😆 

TESLA (L)EARNINGS CALL

I will, as we always do, go over all the important details from the Q4 and 2024 earnings call Tesla held on Wednesday, both the slide decks and the Q&A session with Musk and execs, and even the recent Tesla 10-K filing. I’ll mix it all for you in a good summary. But first, here are all the resources if you want to explore them yourself:

• The shareholder deck, a 36-page pdf.

• The Q&A call audio, about one hour, starts at 6:16.
  And here’s great live with commentary from Rob Maurer (a bunch of you remember him don’t you)

• The written questions and answers which were discussed on the call, on the Say platform.

Let’s kick our summary off with two larger overview statements by Tesla:

Tesla writes this about Q4 and 2024:

“Q4 was a record quarter for both vehicle deliveries and energy storage deployments. We expect Model Y to once again be the best-selling vehicle, of any kind, globally for the full year 2024, and we have made it even better, with the New Model Y now launched in all markets. In 2024, we made significant investments in infrastructure that will spur the next wave of growth for the company, including vehicle manufacturing capabilities for new models, AI training compute and energy storage manufacturing capacity”

And for this year:

"2025 will be a seminal year in Tesla’s history as FSD (Supervised) continues to rapidly improve with the aim of ultimately exceeding human levels of safety. This will eventually unlock an unsupervised FSD option for our customers and the Robotaxi business, which we expect to begin launching later this year in parts of the US. We also continue to work on launching FSD (Supervised) in Europe and China in 2025."

Elon says: "I see a path to Tesla being the most valuable company in the world; There is a path to Tesla being worth more than the next top 5 companies combined."

ON PRODUCTION:

Tesla's Cost Of Goods Sold hit an all-time low in Q4 2024:
“In Q4, COGS per vehicle reached its lowest level ever at <$35,000, driven largely by raw material cost improvement, helping us to partially offset our investment in compelling financing and lease options."

Tesla also (again) shared the exact same statement about the new incoming models (which in my opinion so many seemed to miss yet again):

“Plans for new vehicles, including more affordable models, remain on track for start of production in the first half of 2025. These vehicles will utilize aspects of the next generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms and will be produced on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle line-up.”

Here’s the current installed vehicle production capacity per year for Tesla across its factories:

Elon said: "We are working hard to grow our vehicle volumes. Our current constraint are battery packs. We will make progress on addressing constraint. Things are really going to go ballistic in 2026 (in terms of growth)."

Tesla Semi: Semi Factory construction continued in Q4 and recently completed roof and wall enclosure of the main building area. First truck builds are scheduled to start by end of 2025 with ramp beginning in early 2026.

Cybercab: slide deck says: "Preparation is underway for Cybercab lines at Gigafactory Texas with volume production planned for 2026.” and “will continue to pursue a revolutionary “unboxed” manufacturing strategy”.

ON ROBOTAXI AND FSD

Elon Musk: "2025 is a pivotal year for Tesla. When people look back on 2025 and the launch of Unsupervised FSD, they may regard it as the biggest year in Tesla's history; It will be regarded as the most important year in Tesla's history."

In Q4 2024, Tesla owners cumulatively drove an average of ~9.8 million miles per day using FSD (Supervised), the highest daily average in the company's history.
So by now the whole fleet has driven over 3 billion miles on FSD

Elon: “The only people who are skeptical (of FSD) are the ones who haven't tried it." Well that’s not entirely true, but ok…

FSD IN US: Elon: “I think we'll have Unsupervised FSD in almost every US market by the end of this year, limited only to regulatory issues.”
“I'm confident we will release Unsupervised FSD in California this year, and maybe other regions of the US this year too.”

This is direct from Elon and shows their exact thinking before launching: “Like I said, we're just putting our toe in the water, then a few toes, then a foot, then leg, then make sure everything is cool. And we're looking for a safety level that is significantly above the average human driver. So, it's not anywhere like much safer, not like a little bit safer than human, way safer than human. So the standard has to be very high because the moment there's any kind of accident with an autonomous car, this immediately gets worldwide headlines, even though about 40,000 people die every year in car accidents in the US, and most of them don't even get a mention anywhere. But if somebody scrapes a shin with an autonomous car, it's headline news. — the only thing holding us back is an excess of caution“

FSD PAID SERVICE: Elon also says Tesla will be launching Unsupervised FSD as a paid service in Austin, Texas in June of this year. "No one in the car. Full service."

Elon also says Tesla owners will be able to add or subtract their car from the Robotaxi fleet in 2026, kind of like Airbnb.

ON HW3 UPGRADES: On the Tesla owners with Hardware 3: The owners that only subscribe monthly to FSD, those owners will not be getting a free upgrade, but those who have bought FSD outright, will. I’m expecting Tesla to clear it all up in a statement to make sure people know if they should expect an upgrade or not sometime soon.

Elon: "That's going to be painful and difficult, but we'll get it done. Now I'm kinda glad that not that many people bought the FSD package haha."

ON FSD LICENSING: "We are seeing significant interest from other car companies; We are only going to entertain situations where volume will be very high." the latter translated would be that they won’t deal with small automakers, not at first anyway, due to the complexity.

Tesla says that in Q4 2024, they recorded one crash for every 5.94 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology, their best Q4 number ever.

ON TESLA ENERGY

Elon says Tesla is building a third Megapack factory.

Tesla: "Both Powerwall and Megapack continue to be supply constrained as we open new markets and demand for energy storage products continues to grow. With construction completed, Shanghai Megafactory will begin ramping in Q1."

Tesla expects energy storage deployments to grow at least 50% year-over-year in 2025.

Here’s the freshly built Megafactory Shanghai, with Giga Shanghai behind it:

ON OPTIMUS

Elon says Tesla might start delivering Optimus units to other companies in the second half of 2026.

He also says that Optimus has the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue.

Important line in the slide deck: "Progress on Optimus hardware and software continued in Q4, including the latest generation hand, robust locomotion and training on additional tasks, ahead of planned pilot production in 2025."

And from Elon: “We plan to ramp Optimus production faster than anything has ever been ramped. An order of magnitude per year; That's the kind of growth we are talking about; It won't be long before we are making 100 million of these things per year."

Also — the training compute needs for Optimus are 10x what the car needs

SHORTER COMMENTS:

• Tesla now has a record $36.6 billion of cash and cash equivalents, up $3 billion from Q3. Free cash flow was $2B in Q4.

• Tesla says their 4680 cell production output is at a run rate of 125,000 Cybertrucks per year.

• Tesla reached 6,975 Supercharger sites built globally with 65,495 Superchargers.

• As of December 31, 2024, their total employee headcount worldwide was 125,665, down by 10.5% from 2023.

• Tesla expects capital expenditure to exceed $11 billion this year and in each of the following two fiscal years (back in October, Tesla expected between $8B-$10B for 2026)

• LITHIUM REFINERY: Tesla processed their first spodumene (lithium-containing concentrate) through the front-end of the lithium refinery only 18 months after ground-breaking: much faster than any plant they know of outside of Asia. The intermediate material was on-spec, and Tesla is on track to commission the plant in 2025.

• An interesting chart from Tesla showing what technologies in the Cybertruck will be used in future vehicles:

• Tesla also shared a pic comparing the old & new Model Y:
  

• Tesla shared a new pic of their 50,000 GPU training cluster in Giga Texas called "Cortex".

Phew. I think I covered most of what was notable here.
If you went through all this above to be in the know — kudos, you rock. ✌️ 

Guess what? I’ve got a bunch more Tesla news for you below.

TESLA, GLOBALLY

You know that Cyber Tunnel thing we told you about last week? Tesla has now released an official video from Boring Company about the cybertunnel as well.

You know how we’ve been speculating on how Tesla will get those trucks through it autonomously? Oh, it’s coming alright.

Tesla has just announced that new Tesla vehicles from the Fremont factory now officially drive themselves autonomously 1.2 miles to their designated loading dock without any human intervention. See the 2-minute video of the (sped up) route.

Tesla says “With a major highway in the way, we needed a faster & safer way to connect production with our end of line shop & outbound lot.” They call it a “One step closer to large-scale unsupervised FSD.”

We expect Giga Texas will be next very, very soon.

By the way, Tesla's FSD cameras are now also calibrated automatically as the vehicle moves through the manufacturing line (before, customers had to drive the car for a little bit after delivery for them to calibrate).

Quick bites:

• Watch tip: Tesla released a new video of its robot vacuum cleaner for its Robotaxis, caption reading “this robot sucks”

• Tesla's patent on the dry electrode with lithium metal was just granted

• A bill has been introduced in the state of Washington that would force Tesla to close numerous sales centers across the state and could impact in-state service offerings. If you live in WA, here’s what you can do to oppose it.

• What'll become of Tesla in Canada? Three major recent changes:

  1. Tesla raised prices (C$4,000ish);

  2. Canada's iZEV rebate funds ended (~C$5k, Teslas dominated)

  3. Canada now added 25% import tariff on USA-made EVs as a retaliation — which is, for now, paused it seems, so I guess we’ll just see. From what I’ve gathered, Canada is on a huge trend of discarding anything made in US anyway so this might affect Tesla as well.

  Supplying from Giga Shanghai impossible due to 100% tariff. What's next, and if the tariffs do happen will Tesla start supplying from Giga Berlin?

• Watch tip: in case you’re familiar with Tesla content creator heavyweights Sawyer Merritt, Farzad, Omar (@WholeMarsBlog), they launched a new podcast project called The Gigacast.

VEHICLES

Here are the 19 places in North America you can check out the New Model Y so far:

The Tesla Model Y was the #1 bestselling BEV in Europe in 2024, despite registrations dropping 17% from 2023, according to new data from Jato Dynamics.

The Model Y was also the 4th most registered car overall in Europe in 2024. Notably, behind significantly cheaper cars.

Quick bites:

• US customers who purchase a new Tesla Model 3 using a referral code will now receive a $2,500 discount (up from $500). The Model 3 has also been added to Tesla referral program in Canada.

• Tesla has reduced lease pricing for the Cybertruck AWD & Model 3 in the US by up to 17%, and 2025 AWD Cybertruck is now officially eligible to use the $7,500 fed EV credit, bringing down the starting price of the truck to $72,490 for those who qualify. Non-Foundation Series Cybertruck is also now available in Canada & Mexico.

• Tesla shows the new tail light and how it glows the red (remarkably so) on the ground.

• Jay Leno will be releasing a video of the new Model Y with Franz and Lars Moravy:

• Tesla now provides a discount of up to 10% on Tesla Insurance for customers who frequently use FSD (Supervised) in Texas and Arizona — “The more you drive with FSD (Supervised) enabled, the bigger the discount is on your insurance premium."

  

  this is an example of the message Tesla sends to drivers

MUSKONOMY

(SpaceX’s) Starlink

Per Bloomberg, Apple has been secretly working with SpaceX and T-Mobile to add support for the Starlink network in its latest iPhone software.

Scandinavian Airlines selects Starlink for inflight connectivity, rolling out the service in the end of the year, free for customers. I literally just flew 6 hours with SAS a few weeks ago and wow would this have transformed the experience…

Oracle has partnered with Starlink to bring high-speed broadband capabilities to its Enterprise Communications Platform.

The Boring Company

The Boring Company tunnel in Las Vegas has now moved more than 3 million people through the Convention Center's Loop since it came online in 2021. In May 2024, 2 million had used the service. That's an average of 4,150 people per day in the last 8 months.

You can experience the brand new Boring Company Vegas Loop – Westgate Station tunnel that just opened on video here.

Neuralink

Neuralink released a video of a robot arm with a pen writing this. We can only assume this was done by a person only using his/her mind, considering the caption was:
“🧠🦾🖊️”

X

has gained Amazon back as an advertiser on the platform (Elon seems to be ok with Jeff publicly as well, at least on the space ventures side), and Apple is reportedly on the way of returning as well.

Meanwhile, Elon broadened his lawsuit to include Lego, Nestlé and more brands, accusing them of advertising boycott. While the media alliance GARM was shut down right after the lawsuit, Musk is looking for billions in damages.

X also officially introduced XMoney in partnership with Visa, so users are able to fund their X Wallet via Visa Direct. Linda Yaccarino says this is “first of many big announcements about X Money this year.”