Tesla Space #82: Full Self-Delivery

If this newsletter was forwarded to you, subscribe here.
If you’re a proper Tesla geek, upgrade to Insider here.

Welcome to the Tesla Space newsletter, our 82^nd issue.

As promised, we’ve got quite a value-packed report I’m bringing to you today.

Here’s what we’ll cover in Tesla Space today:

• The first car ever (a Tesla of course) delivered itself to a customer door;

• Tesla released their Impact Report 2024;

• Tesla about to expand to Africa, with Morocco;

• Video contest TeslaVision launched by Tesla, can win a Model Y;

• Grok is almost in our Teslas, and already in Optimus;

• We get insights into Tesla Supercharging utiliziation data over time;

• Neuralink and Elon launched an hour-long company update

…and a lot more. Enjoy!

— Jaan

X OF THE WEEK

I know many of you don’t want to see this, but…

… Elon’s direction seems right back to politics

if you want to feel some of the drama, see this new Trump v Elon.

$TSLA

… is down 10.66%  in a week (since Tuesday’s close), now at $304.48 per share. Tesla is now at a $950.4B market cap. It started today at around -4%, most likely on the Trump v Elon feud and Elon potentially wandering back into political fightgrounds.

TESLA NEWS

Full Self-Delivery

World's first autonomous delivery of a car! This Tesla drove itself from Gigafactory Texas to its new owner's home ~30min away — crossing parking lots, highways & the city to reach its new owner. It even went up to 72mph on the highway.

Here’s the 3-min announcement video, and here’s the full 30-minute video.

Sawyer Merritt did a 20-minute interview with this first self-delivery client, Jose (starts at 2:20). Turns out Jose was not affiliated with Tesla in any way, and Tesla just offered this opportunity to him out of the blue. And the car ran the robotaxi software, which the team “removed” once the car arrived, installing the regular latest user software to the car.

To be fair, most of that route was from Giga Texas → into the geofenced area where Tesla already uses its robotaxis in. So I would assume we will see Tesla gradually offer more of this full self-delivery option once the limitations are lifted for the service.

Now imagine if you leave a lease payment unpaid… will the Tesla drive itself back to the service center?

Tesla released its 2024 Impact Report yesterday

Although a lot of what they’ve put together is what we’ve learned on the go over the year, it’s still nice to get some roundups. I’ll share some of what they shared with you here, but first, the resources should you want to dig deeper:
Tesla Impact Reports - highlights (42-page pdf, mostly illustrations)
Tesla Impact Report - the full thing (210-page pdf, extended version)

Some takeaways:

A Tesla is 8.46 times less likely to catch on fire.

On average, there are 55 vehicle fires in the US per billion miles driven.
There are just 6.5 vehicle fires for Tesla per billion miles driven. In other words, a Tesla catches on fire, on average, every 153,846,153 miles.

Tesla received 4.65 million jobs applications in 2024. That's an average of over 12,700 applications per day. Tesla has also seen a 36% improvement in global work-related injuries over the last few years.

Tesla says the Cybercab robotaxis are expected to emit about half the emissions of Model 3 and Model Y and nearly 85% less emissions per mile than the average ICE vehicle.

Tesla released over 250 new or updated features to owners globally in 2024. 99% of Tesla "recalls" reported in 2024 were resolved through over-the-air software updates.

"If the world follows Tesla's example and transitions to a fully electrified and sustainable economy, we could avoid extracting 18 gigatons of fossil fuels every year.

Once our economy has fully transitioned, we would only require three gigatons of battery material mining per year to replace mining for fossil fuels, reducing mining needs by 15 gigatons a year, on net.

Unlike fossil fuels extracted from the earth, battery materials can be recycled. This, over time, will reduce the need for additional raw material mining as we transition to a circular economy."

Recycling: “In 2024, we processed enough battery material through our recovery and recycling processes to manufacture the equivalent of around 21,000 Model Y RWD vehicles (+133% YoY)."

• 5.3GWh of battery materials sent to Tesla's recycling partners, which is enough for 64,000+ Model Y RWD vehicles

• 1.7 GWh of battery materials processed at Tesla's own battery processing facility, equivalent to around 21,000 Model Y RWD vehicles

• 590MT per month battery recycling throughput at Gigafactory Nevada in Q4 2024

Supply chain cleanup: "In 2024, we invested more human and legal resources than ever before to combat forced and child labor throughout our supply chain. We collaborate with our suppliers to remedy harms across our supply chain by using robust tools to identify and assess risks."

In 2024, Tesla VPPs delivered 2.8 GWh of energy to the grid, supplied by over 100,000 enrolled Powerwall units globally-that is the equivalent of powering 742 Model Y vehicles for one year.

In 2024, Tesla customers avoided releasing nearly 32 million metric tons of CO₂e into the Earth's atmosphere by using our products, a 60% increase compared to 2023.

Tesla has launched a video contest called TeslaVision, with the grand prize being a new Model Y and an all-expenses-paid trip to Gigafactory Texas for a private tour.

"Submit a video that is 90 seconds or less showing how Tesla vehicles give you more in your life - more freedom, more safety, more fun, more convenience. Finalists will be selected based on originality, creativity, relevance to the prompt and entertainment value."

2nd and 3rd place get a tour too. By the way, Tesla also did this back in 2017, you can find some of those videos here. Enter by July 17th, and let me know if you do!

In other news:

• Tesla establishes Tesla Morocco subsidiary, looks like it will soon make its first direct venture into Africa.

• Omead Afshar, Tesla's Head of Operations for North America and Europe, reportedly leaves the company.

• Tesla released a video announcing that they are nearing completion of their first LFP cell manufacturing factory in North America (in Giga Nevada grounds), which will reduce reliance on sourcing LFP batteries from China. Now, we’re not sure if this is for EV batteries or its energy storage, but nevertheless onshoring production is a smart move by Tesla. Here’s a great analysis on the details of the video from our friend Jordan at The Limiting Factor.

• Tesla has put up an article on Dojo that frankly, I don’t understand much and I assume it’s meant mostly for recruiting talent who do.

• Tesla 3, Y, S, X again take the top 4 of Most American-Made cars in the US.

• Grok is almost in our Teslas — @greentheonly has hacked around a bit to show you where and how you can prompt the Grok in your Tesla soon.

  

   

• The first half of the year is officially over. I expect an announcement any day now about the vehicles, including affordable vehicle, that Tesla has been writing about in its earnings call guidance for the past quarters as “starting production in the first half of 2025”

SUPERCHARGING

Tesla just shared a peek behind the curtain of their Supercharging arm and its utilization data with this chart.

For context, Tesla has now deployed over 70,000 Superchargers across the planet in over 7,400 locations.

Now, they’ve shared the graph above, which shows their average global utilization, with the Sessions per Stall per Day (SSD) steadily growing to over 8 per day, about doubling since mid-2021.

I looked it up and Tesla had "just" 26,900 Superchargers in mid-2021. So we now know that they've nearly 3x'd their charger count while doubling their utilization within the last 4 years.

Given that Tesla also oversizes their infrastructure somewhat (e.g how they build to also count for holiday surges or to avoid no coverage areas across geos), it's especially significant they are still able to win in utilization at scale.

The Director - Charging @ Tesla, Max de Zegher, was kind enough to answer my question on how the utilization for Tesla Superchargers differs across the continents:

This is fascinating to learn, since there’s several factors at once that go into the lower or higher utilization per region for Tesla.

Max also commented on the data on waiters we see on the graph:

“Only Tesla has data on waiters, key to getting charging infrastructure right. This is how we're keeping the best customer experience, while pushing network utilization. Higher utilization leads to the cheapest average energy in the industry, financial sustainability, and re-investment into more new Superchargers.”

Tesla UK says that on Saturday, they’re “unveiling our 2000th Supercharger at Manchester Central. Join us for a cold drink, summer food and fun, plus activities for the whole family.” I like this summer vibes Optimus image there. Electric Summer was an event series last year, where Tesla celebrated anniversary of 10 years in Europe across the countries.

OPTIMUS

Optimus running Grok:

I have previously placed Optimus under the Muskonomy section… but that ain’t quite right. It’s still a Tesla company arm, and now we shall treat it like one.

Elon commenting on June 18th: “So many improvements to come in the next design of Optimus”

Meanwhile, Tesla has sued a former Optimus program engineer, accusing him of stealing confidential information about the humanoid robot and setting up a rival startup in Silicon Valley. Li worked on advanced robotic hand sensors, and has since launched his own advanced robotic hand.

MUSKONOMY

Neuralink

There’s a lot on Neuralink we can share with you this week! We’ll cover it all in the video over the next days, but here’s a few things for you:

Neuralink released an hour-long video as an update of their progress. Elon took to stage and everything.

One of the most interesting bits from Elon was that people with Neuralink brain chips will eventually "be able to have full-body control and sensors from a Optimus robot, so you could basically inhabit an Optimus robot. Not just the hand, the whole thing. You could mentally remote into an Optimus robot. The future is gonna be weird, but pretty cool."

Neuralink has now successfully implanted its "Telepathy" brain chip into seven humans.

Neuralink also has approval to launch this trial in Canada, UK and the UAE:

In the call, they also unveiled the next-generation surgical robot.

It's able to insert threads into the brain in 1.5 seconds vs 17 seconds in their previous gen surgical robot.

This new surgical robot is also now compatible with 99% of the global human population. They've also increased the depth the needle can insert threads and can reach more than 50mm from the surface of the brain. The needle cartridge is now 95% less expensive to make compared to the previous version.

They also unveiled the next-generation S2 brain chip. It's designed in-house from the ground up for stimulation.

In Q3 2025, Neuralink plans to implant directly into the speech cortex to directly decode attentive words from brain signals to speech.

In 2026, they want to triple the number of electrodes from 1,000-3,000 for more capabilities. In 2027, they want to triple that number of electrodes again, now to 10,000. This would enable, for the first time, multiple implants (motor cortex, speech cortex, visual cortex).

In 2028, Neuralink wants to get to 25,000 channels per implant, and use multiple of these implants. With this, they should get the ability to access any part of the brain for psychiatric conditions, pain, and also start to demonstrate what it would be like to innovate with AI.

Neuralink video: “Alex, our second participant, controls a virtual robot hand with his mind to play rock, paper, scissors against his uncle.”

xAI

Grok 4 is incoming.

Elon: “Last night’s Grok 4 big run model used with our command line editor is showing the best real-world useful results of any AI”

Elon: “Grinding on @Grok all night with the @xAI team. Good progress. Will be called Grok 4. Release just after July 4th. Needs one more big run for a specialized coding model.”

PS, if an announcement of the new vehicle falls to any other time in the week compared to our newsletter Tuesdays, then the Tesla Space Insiders get the info first. I send rather detailed email alerts whenever something big happens directly to them right away (like I did with the sudden Q1 investors’ update, the first robotaxi sighting, etc). Consider joining the 50+ Insiders here.