Tesla Space #70: a Supercharger for aliens 👽️

X OF THE WEEK

a self-explanatory one, this one.

$TSLA

… is down 5.56% since our last week’s newsletter (Monday’s close), and now at $245/share right as I send you this in the early market open. Tesla now at $762.5B market cap.

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TESLA, GLOBALLY

Q1 delivery numbers are in!

Tesla delivered 336,681 vehicles in Q1, a drop of 12.9% compared to Q1 of last year.
Total Q1 production was 362,615.

No real news there if you’ve been following closely.

The Model 3 and Model Y deliveries, which Tesla pools together in its reporting, are down from 369,783 in the first quarter of last year to 323,800 in the first quarter of 2025. That’s nearly 46,000 units less than last year – a drop of 12.4 percent.

But as we said, this part is not the real news there – whether it’s mostly due to the anti-Elon protests or due to the Model Y product line retooling for the refresh – your guess is as good as ours since we don’t have a data period without Model Y being under retooling yet. What actually caught my interest is the “Other Models” sales number on the list. 

Tesla writes: "While the changeover of Model Y lines across all four of our factories led to the loss of several weeks of production in Q1, the ramp of the New Model Y continues to go well."

The Other Models at this point consist of the Model S, Model X, and the Cybertruck. In Q1 last year, Tesla delivered 17,027 of these models, and the Cybertruck was only starting to ramp up with 2,803 of these sold in the US per Cox Auto back then, so it was mostly Model S&X. This quarter, Tesla only delivered 12,881 of these three models total - a 24 percent drop!

We can expect Model S & X to get a refresh later this year per a tease from Lars Moravy, and the Cybertruck has some problems of its own to overcome — we’re going to go over a bunch of possible reasons for the CT sales drop in our next video. Two main reasons are likely still the high price point (average transaction $87k) and the recall that took place for the cant rail replacement.

Tesla also announced they deployed 10.4GWh of energy storage in the quarter, up 156% YoY. You can see how large this Q1 was (in the green):

… and this is before the now-ready Megafactory Shanghai has ramped up!

Earnings call: Tuesday, April 22, 2025, at 5:30 pm ET.
Smallest of details… or perhaps not? Tesla didn’t use the word earnings call for this really — it says the Company Update is coming at that date. Does this hint at us getting more news than usual?

Per my super high-level math calculations, Tesla is indeed due to tell us more about the new vehicles they’ve constantly said they’re on track of production in the first half of 2025 for… and since the annual shareholder meeting would be slightly late for that, it’s either a great time to do that, or hold some other special event (granted, that could be coming too).

Now, retooling is done, and guess what? Model Y became the best-selling car (of any fuel type) in China in March.

🇸🇦 Tesla is opening in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia!

“Bujairi Terrace, April 10”.
The official Tesla account says “Will be fun” and if you are around, RSVP here

Update on Giga Texas “ecological paradise”

Tesla has released some official renders and plans of its ‘ecological paradise’ at Giga Texas, in a new filing — go see the 120+ page document here.

While I dig through all this and maybe report back next week, we also get details like this: “The average wage of all employees at Giga Texas is $38.74 per hour, with average annual compensation of at least $47,147 for all full-time employees.”

Elon in a news interview:

"They've burnt cars, fired bullets into dealerships and scratched swastikas into Teslas of innocent people; It's widespread domestic terrorism. What we have to do is get the people who are organizing and paying for these attacks and protests. We need to go after the generals, and we are going to do so. We're coming for them."

News anchor: "Do you know who those generals are?"

Elon: "We do."

Quick takes:

• Tesla’s VP of Software Engineering David Lau is expected to be leaving the company, according to Bloomberg (read: not fully confirmed yet).
  Lau has been at Tesla for almost 13 years and is largely responsible for the superior software experience we have in our Teslas, overseeing infotainment and information security to over-the-air software updates — as well as cloud services and manufacturing systems.
  Lau was among the company leaders who appeared on stage with Musk at the Industry Day event in 2023.

• Meanwhile, Drew Baglino who leaved Tesla a year ago, just announced his new startup, Heron, that develops next-gen transformers, raised $50M. Just 5 days ago, Elon called out on X the need for high voltage transformers for AI to be able to scale. I hope Elon leads the funding round there.

• Dan Priestley (head of the Semi program) came to X to fight the FUD shared yet again by Electrek about delays and price increases for Semi clients — says "No change to schedule. And multiple incorrect conclusions. The future is bright, electric, and cost-effective!”

• Remember when we showed JerryRigsEverything going a bit biased against Tesla? Here’s the final proof that we can’t rely on his takes to be objective anymore.

• Michael Guilfoy, Tesla’s Director of Cell Manufacturing, confirmed what we heard in the all-hands meeting — their 4680 cell became Tesla’s lowest-cost battery per kWh!

VEHICLES

New color: Diamond Black. Here’s a video on it — $1,500 for the new Y.

Tesla says it’s a "Deep jet black with variations of sparkle and refined flake appearance."

Solid Black and Deep Blue Metallic have also been added to the configurator.

Go an chime in to Lars’ post:

It’s quite obvious that Grok will be embedded to Teslas at one point, but it’s still notable that the official @grok account answered “omw” to this thread when one of the feature requests was Grok in the cars. omw means “On my way”, and the question came from an xAI employee…….

Quick takes:

• The Legacy Model Y inventory is now officially sold out across the US, and Tesla has removed it from its websites.

• Tesla also started canceling Launch Series Model Y orders in North America as that trim is no longer in production, encouraging people to choose other trims Non-launch MY deliveries should start right about now.

• Tesla also launched a model Y LR AWD trim in the uS that starts at $48,990 before incentives.

• Tesla has removed the $16,000 Cybertruck Range Extender from their online order configurator. It was supposed to increase Cybertruck’s range to 445+, with production planned to begin in mid-2025.

• Cybertruck owners can now adjust their CT ride height from the Tesla app.

• New in Tesla Shop: Cybertruck Off-Road Corduroy Hat — $50

• Tesla discontinued the old mobile charger. The new one, which the Cybertruck already comes with, is priced at $300. The higher price (used to be $200) comes with a new functionality — PowerShare. Keep in mind that it’s still rated at 32A though. Also the non-launch Model Ys come with this mobile charger by default.

• Tesla Cybertruck saves a father and daughter after getting hit by a drunk driver going 60mph. Police says: "If you had been in any other vehicle, the car would’ve flipped and been torn in half."

• Well that’s a clever way of advertising your painting business:

  

SUPERCHARGING

Tesla is planning to build a new UFO-inspired Supercharger in Roswell, New Mexico. Max de Zegher says Tesla “wants to build a few Superchargers cool enough to be worth of the trip itself.”

The site will feature 8 charging stalls, located under a CyberCanopy with RGB fixtures and a 20.88kW solar array.

For stuff we don’t usually get to see, here are the actual inspiration renderings from Tesla that were included in the permit:

There’s another ‘destination’ that Tesla is creating for Tesla owners — the Tesla Diner. We’ve now learned that Chef Eric Greenspan will run Tesla's upcoming Hollywood diner, which will include a drive-in movie theater with two 45-foot LED movie screens and over 75 V4 Supercharger stalls. The diner will feature a "1950s retro charm, dazzling neon lights, the unmistakable scent of freshly grilled burgers & hand-spun milkshakes."
Elon comments: “It will be cool.”

Q1 was great for Supercharging

Tesla Supercharging team keeps going at a crazy pace. In Q1 alone, they opened 2.2k new Supercharger stalls (+17% YoY), delivered 1.4 TWh (+26% YoY) in 42M charging sessions (+27% YoY).

As Max de Zegher has shared before for a unique perspective, Tesla's charging arm is already:

• one of Europe's largest energy buyers, and is

• one of the fastest growing tenants and real estate dealmakers in the world. Also, it's becoming

• one of the largest corporate energy users in the world.

MUSKONOMY

Optimus walking

Elon shares a video of Optimus walking, captions it:
“Accurate actuators accelerate automation”

And Milan Kovic, the VP of Optimus comments “Straight knees, smoother heel-to-toe gait & arms sway, just chilling around. Entirely trained in simulation with RL.”

(RL here means  Reinforcement Learning, by the way)

We also kind of see what Owen was talking of when he posted a previous video of Optimus walking with “Come along way since the "I just shit my pants" walk lol”. Seems Elon agrees since he commented with a laughing emoji.

We actually got more details from Ashish, who is also leading AI at the Tesla Optimus program : “Learned with RL in sim, deployed zero shot to real. We are planning to extend our RL sim training to manipulation in the coming months (with 22 degrees of freedom hands). Initial results will produce dexterous robot specialists. My team is also building a generalist robot policy by leveraging robot & generic internet video data. Both are on the critical path to general robot intelligence.”

Now, we know that Elon told us what matters for Tesla the most – that their robot has a” real brain – not on the cloud and not pre-programmed" – but it’d still be cool to see it pull off tricks like we’ve seen from other humanoid developers recently.

It seems that some robot-fights might also been on Elon’s mind as he commented “Optimus could take Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em to a whole new level!”. Perhaps he can send in the Optimus in his place for that cage fight with Mark?

SpaceX & Starlink

SpaceX performed the static fire of the Super Heavy preparing to launch Starship's ninth flight test. This booster previously launched and returned on Flight 7 and 29 of its 33 Raptor engines are flight-proven. SpaceX says:

“The first Super Heavy reuse will be a step towards our goal of zero-touch reflight.”

While the Fram2 mission has (successfully) returned to Earth now, here’s a video of what they saw on the third day — just incredible.

Boring Company

Boring Company opened the Vegas Loop Encore Tunnel, connecting the Las Vegas Convention Center to the Encore Resort. Here’s a video of it. It’s about a 90-second trip in the ¼ mile tunnel to Encore from Central Hall, price is $6.25 round trip. On the ground, of course, you’ll have a lot more ground to cover than the straight quarter mile.

Neuralink

Neuralink opens its Patient Registry globally.

“If you have quadriplegia and are interested in exploring groundbreaking ways to control a computer using your thoughts, you can now sign up from anywhere in the world.”

D.O.G.E.

Reports on Elon ending at DOGE work given the end of special employee status? Not quite true — JD Vance confirms Elon Musk will stay on as an adviser to President Trump once he leaves DOGE, as expected: “The work of DOGE is not even close to done, the work of Elon is not even close to done. DOGE has got a lot of work to do.”

To end this section, here’s Elon at CIA HQ:

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