Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript April 23, 2024
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Martin Viecha: Tesla’s First Quarter 2024 Q&A Webcast. My name is Martin Viecha, VP 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 and 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. But before we jump into Q&A, Elon has some opening remarks. Elon?
Elon Musk: Thanks, Martin. So to recap in Q1 we navigated several unforeseen challenges as well as the ramp of the updated Model 3 in Fremont. There was, as we all have seen, the EV adoption rate globally is under pressure and a lot of other auto manufacturers are pulling back on EVs and pursuing plug-in hybrids instead. We believe this is not the right strategy and electric vehicles will ultimately dominate the market. Despite these challenges, the Tesla team did a great job executing in a tough environment and energy storage deployments, the Megapack in particular, reached an all time high in Q1, leading to record profitability for the energy business, and that looks likely to continue to increase in the quarters and years ahead.
It will increase. We actually know that it will, so significantly faster than the car business as we expected. We also continue to expand our AI training capacity in Q1, more than doubling our training compute sequentially. In terms of the new product roadmap, there has been a lot of talk about our upcoming vehicle line in the next – in the past several weeks. We’ve updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models ahead, previously mentioned startup production in the second half of 2025, so we expect it to be more like the early 2025, if not late this year. These new vehicles, including more affordable models, will use aspects of the next generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms, and will be able to produce on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle lineup.
So it’s not contingent on any new factory or massive new production line. It’ll be made on our current production lines much more efficiently. And we think this should allow us to get to over 3 million vehicles of capacity when realized to the full extent. Regarding FSD Version 12, which is the pure AI-based self-driving, if you haven’t experienced this, I strongly urge you to try it out. It’s profound and the rate of improvement is rapid so – and we’ve now turned that on for all cars with the cameras and inference computer and everything from Hardware 3 on in North America. And so it’s been pushed out to, I think, around 1.8 million vehicles and we’re seeing about half of people use it so far and that percentage is increasing with each passing week.
So we now have over 300 billion miles that have been driven with FSD V12. Since the launch of full self-driving, supervised full self-driving, it’s become very clear that the vision-based approach with end to end neural networks is the right solution for scalable autonomy. It’s really how humans drive. Our entire road network is designed for biological neural nets and eyes. So naturally cameras and digital neural nets are the solution to our current road system. To make it more accessible, we’ve reduced the subscription price to $99 a month, so it’s easy to try out. And as we’ve announced, we’ll be showcasing our purpose-built robotaxi, or Cybercab, in August. Yes. Regarding AI compute, over the past few months, we’ve been actively working on expanding Tesla’s core AI infrastructure.
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