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<ul> 
 	<li>Tesla slashed prices multiple times in the first few months of 2023 on various models to drive sales volume, but the move squeezed the company’s operating profit margin and dinged its stock. Tesla raised prices again in May 2023.</li> 
 	<li>In April 2023, Tesla won a lawsuit that had aimed to hold the company’s Autopilot driver-assist software responsible for a crash years prior, but it faced other safety concerns with probes into faulty seat belts and steering wheels on some models.</li> 
 	<li>Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his CEO successor at Twitter in May 2023, a signal that he would refocus his energies on Tesla; Tesla shares rose on the news.</li> 
</ul>

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<span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Elon Musk’s electric-car company cruised to No. 100 on this year’s list. It’s a big accomplishment for the automaker, which brought in $31.5 billion in sales for its fiscal 2020, a 28% jump over the previous year. Tesla also reported a profit of $721 million in 2020, driven largely by regulatory credits. While Consumer Reports ranked Tesla second to last in its most recent automobile reliability survey, the carmaker still captivates investors—not least because of its recent big bet on Bitcoin. Tesla remains the most valuable automaker in the world with a market cap of nearly $600 billion as of May.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:12673,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;10&quot;:2,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Calibri, Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:11}" data-sheets-textstyleruns="{&quot;1&quot;:0}{&quot;1&quot;:312,&quot;2&quot;:{&quot;6&quot;:1}}{&quot;1&quot;:328}">Elon Musk’s electric-car company brought in $31.5 billion in sales for its fiscal 2020, a 28% jump over the previous year. Tesla also reported a profit of $721 million in 2020, driven largely by regulatory credits. While Consumer Reports ranked Tesla second to last in its most recent automobile reliability survey, the carmaker still captivates investors—not least because of its recent big bet on Bitcoin. Tesla remains the most valuable automaker in the world with a market cap of nearly $625 billion as of July.

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F500-2021-100-Tesla

<span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Elon Musk’s electric-car company cruised to No. 100 on this year’s list. It’s a big accomplishment for the automaker, which brought in $31.5 billion in sales for its fiscal 2020, a 28% jump over the previous year. Tesla also reported a profit of $721 million in 2020, driven largely by regulatory credits. While Consumer Reports ranked Tesla second to last in its most recent automobile reliability survey, the carmaker still captivates investors—not least because of its recent big bet on Bitcoin. Tesla remains the most valuable automaker in the world with a market cap of nearly $600 billion as of May.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:12673,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;10&quot;:2,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Calibri, Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:11}" data-sheets-textstyleruns="{&quot;1&quot;:0}{&quot;1&quot;:312,&quot;2&quot;:{&quot;6&quot;:1}}{&quot;1&quot;:328}">Elon Musk’s electric-car company cruised to No. 100 on this year’s list. It’s a big accomplishment for the automaker, which brought in $31.5 billion in sales for its fiscal 2020, a 28% jump over the previous year. Tesla also reported a profit of $721 million in 2020, driven largely by regulatory credits. While Consumer Reports ranked Tesla second to last in its most recent automobile reliability survey, the carmaker still captivates investors—not least because of its recent big bet on Bitcoin. Tesla remains the most valuable automaker in the world with a market cap of nearly $600 billion as of May.

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Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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Future 120

Tesla is a maker of electric vehicles and energy generation and supply systems. It is the largest manufacturer of electric cars in the U.S., and, with China’s BYD, one of the two largest makers of EVs globally. Tesla was founded in 2003; Elon Musk became the company’s largest shareholder the following year.

Q2 2026

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Q4 2025

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Q4 2024

Tesla (TSLA): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Tesla

tesla

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Tesla's Q4 2024 Q and A webcast. My name is Travis Axelrod, the Head of Investor Relations here at Tesla, and I am joined today by Elon Musk and Bevav Taneja and a number of other executives. Our Q4 results were announced at about 3 pm 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 one question and one follow-up. Please use the raise hand button to join the question queue. Before we jump into Q and A, Elon has some opening remarks. Elon?

Thank you. So in summary, in Q4, we set a record and delivered vehicles at an annualized rate of nearly 2,000,000 a year.

So congratulations to the Tesla team on excellent work achieving record production and deliveries. Model Y was the best selling vehicle of any kind for 2024. That's worth noting that not just the best electric vehicle, the best vehicle of any kind on earth, number 1 was Model Y. We're staying focused on maximizing volumes and obviously doubling down more. I don't know what it's really I was going to say doubling down on autonomy, but really it's like autonomy is like 10xing things, frankly.

Doubling is not even enough. We made many critical investments in 2024 in manufacturing AI and robotics that will bear immense fruit in the future. Immense. Like it's in fact, to such a scale that it is difficult to comprehend. I've said this before and I'll stand by it.

I see a path, but I'm not saying it's an easy path, but I see a path to Tesla being the most valuable company in the world by far, not even close, like maybe several times more than I mean, there is a path where Tesla is worth more than the next top 5 companies combined. There's a path to that. I mean, I think it's like an incredibly just like a difficult path, but it is an achievable path. And that is overwhelmingly due to autonomous vehicles and autonomous humanoid robots. So our focus is actually building towards that.

And then that's where we're laying the ground. We laid the groundwork for that in 2024. We'll continue to lay the groundwork for that in 2025. In fact, more than lay the groundwork actually. So we'll be building the structure.

We're building the manufacturing lines. And I'd like setting up for what I think will be an epic 2026 and a ridiculous 20 728. Ridiculously good. That is my prediction. As yet, very few people understand the value of full self driving and our ability to monetize the fleet.

Some of these things I've said for quite a long time, and I know people have said, well, you know, Elon wants the boy who cried wolf like several times. But I'm telling you there's a damn wolf at this time, And you can drive it. In fact, it could drive you. It's a self driving wolf. You know, for a lot of people, their experience of Tesla autonomy is like, if it's even a year old, if it's even 2 years old, that it's like meeting, it's like meeting someone when they're like a toddler and thinking that they're going to be a toddler forever.

But obviously, they're not going to be a toddler forever. They grow up. But if their last experience was like, oh, FSD was a toddler. It's like, well, it's grown up now. Have you seen it?

It's like walks and talks. And, that's really what we've got. And it's difficult to, for people to understand this because human intuition is linear as opposed to what we're seeing is exponential progress. So that's why my number one recommendation for anyone who doubts is simply try it. Have you tried it?

When's the last time you tried it? And the only people who are skeptical, the only people who are skeptical are those who have not tried it. So, you know, a car goes, a passenger car typically has only about 10 hours of utility per week out of 168, a very small percentage. Once that car is autonomous, my rough estimate is that it is in use for at least a third of the hours per week. So call it 50, maybe 35 hours of the week.

And it can be used for both, cargo delivery and people delivery. So even let's say people are asleep, but you can deliver packages in the middle of the night or resupply restaurants or whatever the case may be, whatever people need, at all hours of the day or night. That same asset, the thing that that is these things that already exist with no incremental cost change, just a software update, now have 5 times or more the utility than they currently have. I think this will be the largest asset value increase in human history. Maybe there's something bigger, but I just don't know what it is.

People who look in the rearview mirror are looking for past precedent, except I don't think there is one. So, but the reality of autonomy is upon us. And I repeat my advice. Try driving the car or let it drive you. Now, it works very well in the US, but of course, it will over time work just as well everywhere else.

We're working hard to grow our annual volumes. Our current constraint is battery packs this year, but we're working on addressing that constraint. And I think we will make progress in addressing that constraint. And then things are really going to go ballistic next year and really ballistic in 'twenty seven and 'twenty eight. So, So a bit more on full self driving.

Our Q4 vehicle safety report shows continued year over year improvement in safety for vehicles. So the safety numbers, if somebody has supervised full self driving turned on or not, the safety differences are gigantic. So, and people have seen the immense improvement with version 13 and with incremental versions in version 13. And then version 14 is going to be yet another step beyond that, that is very significant. We launched the Cortex training cluster at Gigafactory Austin, which was a significant contributor to FSD advancement.

And we continue to invest in training infrastructure out of Texas headquarters. So the training needs for Optimus for Optimus human like robot are probably at least ultimately 10x what's needed for the car, at least to get to the full range of useful roles. You can say like, how many different roles are there for a humanoid robot versus a car? Humanoid robot has probably, well, a 1000 times more uses and more complex things than in a car. That doesn't mean that the training scales by 1,000, but it's probably 10x.

Now you can do this progressively. So it doesn't mean like hotels are going to spend like $500,000,000,000 in training compute. Because we're obviously trained optimists to do enough tasks to match the output of optimists robots. And obviously, the cost of training is dropping dramatically with time. So it is it is like it is one of those things where I think long term optimists will be optimists has the potential to be north of $10,000,000,000,000 in revenue.

Like it's really bananas. So then you can obviously afford a lot of training compute in that situation. In fact, even $500,000,000,000 of training compute in that situation would be quite a good deal. Yeah. The future is going to be incredibly different from the past, that's for sure.

We live at this unbelievable inflection point in human history. So So, the proof is in the pudding. So, we're going to be launching unsupervised full self driving as a paid service in Austin in June. I've talked with the team. We feel confident in being able to do an initial launch of unsupervised, no one in the car, full self driving in Austin in June.

We already have Tesla's operating autonomously unsupervised full self driving at our factory in Fremont, and will soon be doing that at our factory in Texas. So thousands of cars every day are driving with no one in them at our Fremont factory in California. They will soon be doing that in Austin and then elsewhere in the world, the rest of our factories, which is pretty cool. And the cars aren't just driving to exactly the same spot because obviously it all when it collided at the same spot. The cars are actually programmed with where with what lane they need to park into to be picked up for delivery.

So they drive from the factory end of line to their destination parking spot and to be picked up for delivery to customers. And then doing this reliably every day, thousands of times a day. It's pretty cool. Like I said, the Teslas will be in the wild with no one in them in June in Austin. So, what I'm saying is this is not some far off mythical situation.

It's literally 5, 6 months away, 5 months away type of thing. And while we're stepping and putting our toe in the water gently at first, just to make sure everything's cool, our solution, our solution is a generalized AI solution. It does not require high precision maps of a locality. So we just want to be cautious. It's not that it doesn't work beyond Austin.

In fact, it does. We just want to be put a toe in the water, make sure everything is okay, then put a few more toes in the water, then put a foot in the water with safety of the general public as and those in the car as our top priority. With regard to Optimus, obviously, I'm making these revenue predictions that sound absolutely insane. I realize that. But they are I think they will prove to be accurate.

Now, with Optimus, there's a lot of uncertainty on the exact timing because it's not like a train arriving at the station for Optimus. We are designing the train and the station and in real time while also building the tracks. They're like, why didn't the train arrive exactly at 12:05? We're literally designing the train and the tracks in the station in real time while, you're seeing, you're like, how can we predict this thing with absolute precision? It's impossible.

The normal internal plan calls for roughly 10,000 Optimus robots to be built this year. Will we succeed in building 10,000 exactly by the end of December this year? Probably not. But will we succeed in making several 1,000? Yes, I think we will.

Will those several 1,000 Optimus robots be doing useful things by the end of the year? Yes, I'm confident they will do useful things. Those Optimus in use at the Tesla factories, production design 1 will inform how will we change for production design 2, which we expect to launch next year. And our goal is to ramp optimist production faster than maybe anything's ever been ramped, meaning like aspirationally, an order of magnitude ramp per year. Now, if we aspire to an order of magnitude ramp per year, perhaps we only end up with a half order of magnitude per year.

But that's the kind of growth that we're talking about. It doesn't take very many years before we're making 100,000,000 of these things a year. If you go up by, let's say, a factor by 5x per year.

Insane. Not 50%, 500%. So you know, these are big growth numbers. Yes. But we do need to this is an entirely new supply chain.

It's entirely new technology. There's nothing off the shelf to use. We tried desperately with Optimus to use any existing motors, any actuators, sensors. Nothing worked for a human or robot at any price. We had to design everything from physics first principles to work for a humanoid robot, and with the most sophisticated hand that has ever been made before by far.

Optimists will be able to play the piano and be able to thread a needle. This is the level of precision no one has been able to achieve. And so it's really something special. Yes. So and my prediction long term is to optimist will be overwhelmingly the value of the company.

a minute? Okay. Back to earth. Energy storage is a big deal, and will become it's already super important, will become incredibly important in the future. And it is something that enables far greater energy output to the grid than is currently possible.

Because the grid, the grids are the vast majority of the grid has no energy storage capability. So they have to design the power plants to for very high peaks, and assuming that there's no energy storage. Once you have grid energy storage and home based energy storage, the actual total energy output per year of the grid is dramatically greater than people think. Maybe it's at least double. This will drive the demand of stationary battery packs and especially the grid scale ones to insane basically as much demand as we could possibly make.

So we have our second factory, which is in Shanghai, that's starting operation and we're building a 3rd factory. So we're trying to ramp output of the stationary battery storage as quickly as possible. Now there is a challenge here where we have to be careful to that we're not robbing from one pocket to take to another pocket because for a given gigawatt hours per year of the cell output, we have to say, does it go into stationary applications or mobile applications? It can't go both into both. So we have to make that trade off.

Yes. But overall, the demand for total gigawatt hours of batteries, whether mobile or stationary, that will grow in a very, very big way over time. So in conclusion, 2025 really is a pivotal year for Tesla. And when Google look back on 2025 and the launch of unsupervised full self driving, true real world AI that actually works, yeah, I think they may regard it as the biggest year in Tesla history, maybe even bigger than our first car, the Roadster or or the Model S or the Model 3 or Model In fact, I think it probably will be viewed 'twenty five as maybe the most important year in Tesla's history. There is no company in the world that is as good at real world AI as Tesla.

I don't even know who's in 2nd place. Like, you say like, who's in the 2nd place for real world AI? I would need a very big telescope to see them. That's how far behind they are. All right.

very much, Elon. And Devav has some opening remarks as well.

Yeah. I'll talk about things on earth. As Elon mentioned, in Q4, we set records at vehicle deliveries and energy storage deployments in an uncertain macro environment. We were able to grow auto and energy storage volumes, both sequentially and on a year on year basis. For this, I would like to thank the efforts of everyone at Tesla to make this a reality and our customers who helped us achieve this feat.

Coming into the Q4, our focus was to reduce inventory levels in the automotive business. And we accomplished that by ending the quarter with the lowest finished good inventory in the last 2 years. This was a result of offering not only attractive financing options but also other discounts and programs which impacted ASPs. While we saw volume growth in almost all regions that we operate in, we hit a new record for deliveries in the Greater China market. This is an encouraging trend since we grew volume in a highly competitive BV market.

On the automotive margin front, we saw a quarter over quarter decline primarily due to lower ASPs and due to the recognition of FSD related revenue in Q3 from future releases. Our journey on cost reduction continues and we were able to get our overall cost per car down below $35,000 primarily by material costs. This was despite increased depreciation and other costs as we prepare for the transition to the new mobile, for which we recently started taking orders in all markets. All our factories will start producing the new Model Y next month. While we feel confident in our team's abilities to ramp production quickly, know that it is an unprecedented change and we are not aware of anybody else taking the best selling car on the planet and updating all factories at the same time.

This changeover will result in several weeks of lost production in the quarter. As a result, margins will be impacted due to ID capacity and other wrap related costs, as is common in any launch but will be overcome as production is ramped. We'll be introducing several new products throughout 2025. We are still on track to launch a more affordable model in the first half of twenty twenty five and we'll continue to expand our lineup from there. On a dollar for dollar basis, we believe we have the most compelling lineup today compared to the industry, and it will continue to get better from here.

As always, all our products come with the best software in the industry, autonomy features and capable of full autonomy in the future. And despite the premium experience, the total cost of ownership is close to mass market, less premium competitors. In our storage deployments reached an all time high in Q4, and resulted in but declined sequentially. This was a result of higher sorry, growth came from MegaPack and Powerwall. Both businesses continue to be supply constrained and like Elon mentioned, we're trying to ramp up production with Mega Factory Shanghai coming online this quarter onwards.

While quarterly deployments will likely continue to fluctuate sequentially, we expect at least 50% growth in deployments year over year in 2025. Gross profit and margins in the service and other business was up year over year, but declined sequentially. This was the result of higher service center costs and lower profit from used car business. The businesses within service and other primarily support our new car business, especially through their impact on total cost of ownership. Therefore, while we manage them to be positive on a GAAP business, we do not expect similar margins as the rest of the business.

There's a lot of uncertainty around tariffs. Over the years, we've tried to localize our supply chain in every market, but we are still very reliant on parts from across the world for all our businesses. Therefore, the imposition of tariffs, which is very likely, and any of the super capacity will have an impact on our business and profitability. Our operating expenses grew both year over year and sequentially. The biggest driver of the increase was R and D as we continue to invest in AI related initiatives.

The remaining increase came from growth in our sales capabilities and marketing efforts from referral program. For 2025, we expect operating expenses to increase to support our growth initiatives. It is important to point out that the net income in Q4 was impacted by a 600,000,000 mark to market benefit from Bitcoin due to the adoption of a new accounting standard for digital assets, whereby we'll change we'll take mark to market adjustments through other income every reporting period going forward. Our free cash flow for the quarter was 2,000,000,000 and despite CapEx increase of over 2,400,000,000 in 2024, we were able to generate free cash flow of 3,600,000,000 for the year. CapEx efficiency is something we are extremely focused on.

While we have invested in AI related initiatives, we've done so in a very targeted manner to utilize the spend to get immediate benefits. The build out of Cortex was accelerated because of the rule actually kind of accelerate the rollout of FSD with version 30. Accumulated AI related CapEx, including infrastructure, so far has been approximately 5,000,000,000. And for 2025, we expect our CapEx to be flat on a year over year basis. In conclusion, like Elon said, 2025 is going to be a pivotal year for Tesla.

There are a lot of investments which we have made and we'll continue to make in this coming year, which will set the pace for the next phase of growth. And it is something which now I'm getting out of port, it is going to be out of this world. We're just putting the client foundation. That's all I have.

Great. Thank you very much, Vipaf. Now we will move over to investor questions and we'll start with say.com. The first question is, is unsupervised FSD still planned to be released in Texas and California this year? What hurdles still exist to make that happen?

You addressed the Texas piece, I think already.

Yeah, I'm confident that we will release unsupervised FSD in California this year as well. Yeah, in fact, I think we will most likely release unsupervised FSD in many regions of the country of the US by the end of this year. Like I said, we're just putting a toe in the water, then few toes, then a foot, then leg, then make sure everything's 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, you know, 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 shunt within the autonomous car, it's headline news.

So it's really from an the only thing holding us back is an excess of caution. But people can certainly get a feel for how well the car would perform as unsupervised FSD by simply having a car allowing a car to drive you around your city and see how many times did you have to intervene, not where you wanted to intervene or were a little concerned, but how many times did you have to intervene for definite safety reasons. And you will find that that is currently very rare, and over time, almost never.

Great. Thank you very much. The next question is, are there any discussions with other auto companies about licensing FSD?

What we're seeing is at this point significant interest from a number of major car companies about licensing Tesla full soft driving technology. What we've generally said is the best way to know what to do is take one of our cars apart. And then you can see where the placement of the cameras are, what the thermal needs are of the Tesla AI and Burns computer. That's better than us sending some CAD drawings. And then we're only going to entertain situations where the volume would be very high.

Otherwise, it's just not worth the complexity. And we will not burden our engineering team with laborious discussions with other engineering teams until we obviously have unsupervised full self driving working throughout the United States. I think the interest level from other manufacturers to license FSD will be extremely high once it is obvious that unless you have FSD, you're dead.

Great. Thank you very much. The next question is, is Optimus now mostly design locked for 2025 production?

Just Optimus is not design locked. So when I say like we're redesigning the train as it's going down the tracks while redesigning the tracks and the train stations.

rapidly evolving. It's rapidly evolving in a good direction. You know, it's pretty, pretty damn amazing actually. The team is doing a fantastic job. We really have by far, I think by far the best team of humanoid robotics engineers in the world.

And we also have all the other ingredients necessary because you need a great battery pack, you need great power electronics, you need great charging capability, you need great communications, go to WiFi and cellular connectivity. And, and of course, you need real world AI. And then the ability to scale that production, to huge levels. So you have to design for manufacturing. The things that I mean, really what other companies are missing is they're missing the real world AI and they're missing the ability to scale manufacturing to millions of units a year.

I think that is an underappreciated thing that industrialization of design is a whole different thing than meeting a design.

Yeah. Prototypes are trivial, basically. Prototypes are easy. Production is hard. I've said that for many years.

The problem is that there's like those who have never been involved in production or manufacturing somehow think that once you come up with some Eureka design that you magically can make a 1000000 units a year. And this is totally false. There needs to be some there's some Hollywood story or where they show actually the problem is manufacturing. I never even heard of one. It's just doesn't fit the narrative.

The Hollywood thing is like it's like some loan inventor in a garage goes, Eureka! And suddenly it files a patent and suddenly there's millions of units. But like I'm listening to guys, we're missing really 99% of the story. 1% is you know, the old saying, a product is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. The Hollywood Church is 1% inspiration and minus, but forgets about the 99% perspiration of actually figuring out how to make that initial prototype manufacturable and then manufactured at high volume such that the product is reliable, low cost, consistent, doesn't break down all the time.

And that is 100 times hotter, at least, than the prototype.

Then you have to get it there, deliver it back. Yeah.

You're going to meet all these regulations and there's a zillion regulators around the world. It's very difficult.

Great. Thank you. The next question is also Optimus related. When will Tesla start selling Optimus? And what will the price be?

Well, for this year, we expect to just close the loop with Optimus being used internally at Tesla because we obviously can easily use several 1,000 humanoid robots at the Tesla for, you know, like the most boring, annoying tasks in the factory, like the task nobody wants to do, where we have to like beg people to do this task. And then they, it's like, like the robots are totally happy to do the boring, dangerous, repetitive task that no humans want to do. And that's also actually some of the easiest use cases for us to, you know, have optimists do things like, you know, like load the hopper, like for, you know, like say, if you're looking body line, if you're like transporting pieces of sheet metal to the robot, which is ready robot, the robot welding line for the body. And you just have to non stop take things out of a, from one fixture to another fixture. And it's a very boring job.

That's the kind of thing what the optimist could do.

Yeah, there's a ton of boring jobs, tedious jobs, slightly dangerous jobs that are perfect for Optimus. So we expect to use Optimus for those tasks at our factories and that'll help us close loop for improvement this year. It's really with production version 2, which I think launches sometime next year. I'd like it to be the beginning of next year, but maybe it's more like the middle of next year.

And then we have to just go with a production line that is designed for on the order of 10,000 units a month versus 1,000 units a month. So when you design a unit for like when you design a production line for 1,000 units a month, it takes you a while to actually reach anywhere close to 1,000 units a month. When you design for any given production output, it takes you a while to actually reach its potential. The current line that we're designing is for roughly a 1000 units a month of Optimus robots. The next line would be for 10,000 units a month.

The line after that would be for 100,000 units a month. And I think probably with version 2, that is a very rough guess because there's so much uncertainty here. Very rough guess that we start delivering Optimus robots to companies that are outside of Tesla in the maybe the second half of next year, something like that. But like this is such an exponential ramp that will go from no one's receiving humanoid robots to these things are coming out like crazy. We can't build enough.

What would they worry is going to be in the we can't build enough situation? Demand will not be a problem even at a high price. And then as I said, like once we start once we're at a steady state of above a 1000000 units a year, I think the production and I'm confident at a 1000000 units a year that the production cost of Optimus will be less than $20,000 You compare the complexity of Optimus to the complexity of a car. So just the total mass and complexity of Optimus is much less than a car. So I would expect that at similar volumes to say the Model Y, which is over a 1000000 units a year, that you'd see Optimus be, I don't know, half the cost or something like that.

What the price of Optimus is is a different matter. The price of Optimus will be set by the market demand.

Great. Thank you very much. The next question is, what is the status on mass production of the Tesla Semi and how will it impact revenue and scale?

I can take that one. So we just closed up the semi factory roofing walls last week in Reno. Set the schedule, which is great with the weather. In Reno, you never know what's going to happen. But we're prepping for mechanical installation of all the equipment in the coming months.

The first builds of the high volume semi design will come late this year in 2025 and begin ramping early in 2026. But as we've said before, the semi is a TCO no brainer. It gets really similar to the optimist set by how much people pay and it has a total cost of ownership. It's much, much cheaper than any other transportation you can have. So at that point, when we're at scale, it will meaningfully contribute to Tesla's revenue.

to say how much. Tiffany, do you want to add anything on? No. I mean, I do think it tells us that again with autonomy is going to be incredibly valuable. You know, we actually have a shortage of truck drivers in America.

That's one of the limiting factors on transport. And, And people are humans, so they get tired. And sometimes, I have a lot of respect for truck drivers because it's a tough job. But But because it's a tough job, there's not that many people that want to do it. And there's actually, fewer, I believe, if I'm saying is correct, there are fewer people entering truck driving as a profession than are leaving it.

think of yeah, exactly. So when you consider, okay, there's more people leaving truck driving as a profession than entering it. Well, we've got to have a real logistics problem as time goes by. So autonomy will be very important to meet that need. So like, yeah, it'll it'll I don't know.

It's a it's a it's a several 1000000000 a year opportunity, which I don't know in this context is that these days, do several 1000000000 a year matter? I think it does. Nothing. It's probably like a 10,000,000,000 year thing. Yes, it's a 1,000,000,000 a month at some point, probably.

But it's all this is going to pale in comparison to Optimus. So yes, a 1,000,000,000 a month is a lot, but it's not it's it's going to be like 1% optimist or something.

Great. Thank you very much. We already covered the next question in opening remarks. So moving on, is it expected that Tesla will need to upgrade hardware 3 vehicles and if so, what is the timeline? And Tesla's CapEx?

They're really asking the tough questions, aren't they?

I guess we haven't stopped working on hardware 3 yet. We are still making software releases. We released the 12.6 release recently, which was like a it's like a baby v13, but it's a significant improvement compared to what they had previously. And, you know, people are still finding ways to distill larger models and the smaller models. So we don't give in upon hardware 3.

We're still working on it. Just the releases will trail the hardware 4 releases.

Tesla (TSLA) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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