Tesla Space Insiders got an email alert from me late yesterday after the call with a few of the more breaking details.

Join here to get these email alerts from me in the future, too (we send this email sparingly, only when something actually breaks).

Anyway, let’s jump into it. I’ll weave all the new follow-up news that we’ve gotten into all the relevant earnings call pieces below, so make sure you read the whole thing. Enjoy!

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Before we start — here are the resources for you:

Tesla reported Q1 2026 revenue of $22.39B (+16% YoY) with improving margins and strong growth in services, despite declines in energy deployments and mixed vehicle trends.

Tesla says:

Speaking of Cybercab, it is now in production 🥳! Tesla shows it in a video rolling off the production line autonomously (no steering wheel!) and driving itself to the outbound lot.

Joe has also caught some of the fresh batch ones on flyovers — no steering wheel, cleaner finish, and color is now glossy, not at all matte like before:

Here are images of the VIN Zero produced at Giga Texas

The big info drop we got from Q&A was around the HW3 cars so let’s get that out of the way. Elon said (direct quote):

"Unfortunately, Hardware 3, I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capabilities to achieve Unsupervised FSD. You know, we did think at one point it would have that, but relative to hardware, 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.

For customers that have bought FSD, what we're offering is essentially creating like a discounted trade-in for cars that have full hardware. And 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. To do this efficiently, we're going to have to set up like, kind of microfactories or small factories in major metropolitan areas.

In order to do it efficiently, because if it's done just at the service center, it is extremely slow to do so 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."

This left quite a few new questions on peoples’ minds, but at least we got some clear direction.

As for Supervised FSD, the HW3 owners will still get something too, a “lite” V14 version around June, bringing park-to-park FSD (Supervised) with features similar to what Hardware 4 systems have today.

Oh, and Elon totally ignored the minivan question (in my opinion, you can check the transcript), and talked of autonomous vehicles of all shapes & sizes:

Cash remains strong:

I created a quick Sankey chart to visualize exactly how the money flowed:

Elon did say in the Q&A call that they expect to increase capex to ~$25B, so we seem to be looking at some cash flow negative quarters coming up.

Segment mix:

Tesla highlighted continued progress across AI, autonomy, and manufacturing:

Oh, right, that happened too — Tesla just rolled out a few robotaxis in Dallas and Houston, Texas. Fully unsupervised from the start! Here are all the details. Anyway, back to the earnings’:

The company also pointed to strong demand in APAC and South America, with a rebound in EMEA and North America.

Today, Tesla's Giga Berlin factory announced it will increase output by 20% and hire 1,000 new employees!

Fleet & software:

Interestingly, Tesla now has 456,000 active monthly FSD subscribers, generating over $45M/month in revenue.

Infrastructure & Energy

Tesla Energy side: “Good progress with new Megafactory outside Houston (will produce Megapack 3 for Megablock). Start of production on track for later this year”

Tesla Solar: “We began meaningful customer deployments of Tesla’s first in-house designed solar panel produced at Giga New York”

This quarter shows a margin-led recovery with shifting mix:

At the same time, Tesla continues pushing into:

And Tesla has done 1.7M paid robotaxi miles cumulatively by now:

FSD is also in the wider rollout works in China. Ashok Elluswamy commented:

“We recently received approvals for FSD in the Netherlands. This sets us up 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.”

Tesla says that Cortex 2 is now online & has started running training workloads. Also ramping on-site training infrastructure to ensure sufficient compute resources for AI products & services; and continuing with custom silicon development (Dojo 3) to reduce training cost over time.

On an ineresting note, Tesla has entered into an agreement to acquire an AI hardware company for up to $2B, of which ~$1.8B is subject to certain service conditions and/or performance milestones dependent on the successful deployment of the company's tech.

Oh, and did I mention — Roadster unveiling was postponed? Elon says, “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.”

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