Missed Tesla's Q2 Earnings Call? Read Our Bullet-Point Summary of Everything Announced

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Did you miss Tesla’s Earnings Call, or just want to see a summarized version? We’ve got you covered. Below is an outline of everything talked about during Tesla’s earnings call and Q&A session.

EV Market and Giga Factories

• Strong EV adoption, despite short-term challenges.

  • Positive long-term outlook

• Future vision for an all-electric future, including boats and planes.

• Possible vehicle tariffs for Mexico means that Giga Mexico is on hold.

• Giga Berlin could serve as a new export point as tariffs are placed on Chinese-built vehicles in Europe.

Production

• Affordable Tesla model expected to be revealed in the first half of 2025.

• Expansion of vehicle lineup, including new trims and paint options in 2024 has helped sales

• Cybertruck production has tripled so far – 1,400 per week, and ramping continues.

  • Expected to be profitable by the end of 2024.

• Model 3 and CT are still being impacted by tariffs as they scale up.

• 4680 cell production improvements

  • 51% more 4680 cells in Q2 over Q1, with a COGS reduction.

  • 1,400 CTs per week on 4680.

  • Tesla is reaching cost-parity with other cells by the end of 2024.

  • First Validation Cybertruck on dry-cathode process has been built and is being tested.

  • Production launch for dry-cathode process in Q4, should drive costs down by up to 50%.

• Tesla Semi factory on track for large-scale production by the end of 2025.

• Giga Berlin has begun producing and delivering RHD vehicles, including to the UK.

• Roadster engineering is complete and expected to see production sometime in 2025.

• Tesla’s guideline for production is 300mi on a single charge.

  • Tesla expects to expand its Supercharging network globally to meet this goal.

  • This seems to be the data-driven distance that Tesla has found most suitable for general driving uses.

FSD, Autonomy, AI

• Tesla continues to work towards unsupervised FSD. Aiming to see unsupervised FSD by the end of 2024, if not the end of 2025.

  • Elon has admitted he’s been overly optimistic in the past.

  • This new estimate is based on current trends in miles per intervention growth.

• Robotaxi event to take place on 10/10/2024.

  • Elon wanted to improve Robotaxi a bit more, and also show off “some other things”

• Tesla is looking to seek FSD approval with V12.5 or V12.6 in Europe, China, and other countries, hopefully by the end of the year.

• Tesla is in talks with multiple OEMs for FSD licensing.

  • OEMs will need 360* camera coverage, a gateway, and Tesla’s AI computers at minimum.

  • Tesla is looking for OEMs to produce over 1m vehicles per year.

  • Disclosure of an agreement will happen in conjunction with the signing OEM.

• Optimus is working in Tesla’s factories in a limited capacity.

  • Limited initial production to begin at Giga Texas in early 2025.

  • Tesla expects to use V1 to iron out bugs internally.

  • V2 is expected through 2026 and will be sold to outside customers.

• Tesla will continue working on DOJO, as acquiring Nvidia GPUs is becoming more and more difficult.

  • Tesla aims to be competitive with Nvidia in the AI GPU space in the future.

• Tesla aims to launch distributed compute alongside its AI5 hardware (formerly HW5).

  • AI5 is expected to launch in late 2025 and be in mass production by early 2026.

  • Distributed compute could use about 100 hours of idle time per week to generate income.

• Grok in Tesla could be a thing of the future, Tesla has learned a lot from xAI.

  • A proposed shareholder vote on investing in xAI could happen soon.

Tesla’s Financial Performance in Q2 2024

• Record quarter for regulatory credits.

• High interest rates globally have impacted sales and revenue per unit.

  • Tesla has offset rates in the US through competitive financing rates and expects to continue this into Q3 2024.

• Service and Merchandise profits have improved incrementally this quarter.

• Energy Storage deployments doubled between Q1 to Q2, leading to record revenue and profits.

• Tesla has a positive cash flow of $1.3 billion after restructuring this year.

  • Restructuring cost approximately $622m

  • Total free cash float of $30B.

• Capital expenditures of approximately $10B this year but beginning to come down.

  • This includes the money already spent on the new AI supercomputer cluster.

Energy Storage and Deployment

• Tesla’s Megapack factory production continues to ramp up, new Shanghai Megafactory is well in progress.

  • After the completion, current production is expected to double or triple.

  • Tesla is currently constrained by production.

• Powerwall 3 is now available in multiple countries, and demand is exceptionally high.

• There is a long pipeline between purchase and delivery for Megapack, Tesla has good pricing leverage and is working with global energy providers.

• Chinese OEMs are competitive, but Tesla offers a full software stack, including Auto Bidder with its Megapacks.

• New Megapack demand lines:

  • Buffer for power plants – Megapack can buffer power plants so they can run at a steady state, improving power production and efficiency by 2-3x.

  • AI and Data Center backup – AI compute is power-hungry, and data centers are now looking to Megapack to provide battery backup.

Watch Earnings Call

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Is Tesla Planning to Add Steam Support to All Vehicles?

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Yesterday, we reported that Tesla updated their Steam integration on Model S and Model X vehicles. The update was part of their 2024 Holiday Update, but it looks like there may be more to this than a simple update.

Steam, a video game library app, makes it easy for users to buy or launch games on their computers. However, a couple of years ago, Valve, who created Steam, launched their own standalone device, the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck runs a custom OS based on Linux.

Steam Launch

When Tesla launched the redesigned Model S and Model X, Tesla introduced a dedicated gaming GPU with 16GB of RAM and touted the ability to play top-tier PC games in Tesla vehicles.

In 2022, Tesla finally launched the Steam app for the Model S and Model X as part of its 2022 Holiday Update. The Steam app runs Steam OS, the same OS as the Steam Deck in a virtual environment.

However, earlier this year, Tesla stopped including the GPU and Steam (Beta) in their vehicles, and we haven’t seen any updates to the Steam in quite some time. In fact, we thought Tesla was axing their gaming-on-the-go dreams.

SteamOS Update

The Steam app, which is still in Beta, is getting an interesting update for the Model S and Model X vehicles with the discrete GPU.

Those vehicles received an update to SteamOS 3.6 - the same version of SteamOS that runs on the Steam Deck. While nothing has visually changed, there’s a long list of performance optimizations under the hood to get things running smoother.

Comparing Steam Deck to Tesla Vehicles

Let’s take a look at the Steam Deck - according to Valve, its onboard Zen4 CPU and GPU combined push a total of 2 TFlops of data, which is fairly respectable, but much lower than today’s home consoles. The Steam Deck is capable of 720p gaming fairly seamlessly on low-to-medium settings on the go and is also built on the AMD platform.

AMD-equipped Teslas, including the Model 3 and Model Y, are packing an older Zen+ (Zen 1.5) APU (processor with a combined CPU and GPU). AMD claims that the V1000 - the same embedded chip as on AMD Tesla vehicles (YE1807C3T4MFB), brings up to 3.6 TFLops of processing power with it, including 4K encoding and decoding with the integrated GPU on board.

While that’s not enough for 4K gaming or comparable to a full-blown console or desktop GPU, that’s enough raw horsepower for light gaming and is currently more powerful than the Steam Deck.

The Model S and Model X’s GPU brings that up to about 10TFlops of power - comparable to modern consoles like the Xbox Series X at 12 TFlops.

Steam Gaming for All Vehicles?

The fact that Tesla is updating SteamOS even though the feature is no longer available in any new vehicles could indicate that Tesla is not only bringing Steam back to Teslas but that it’s going to play a much bigger role.

While SteamOS is run in a virtual environment on top of Tesla’s own OS, we could see Tesla bring SteamOS to all of its current vehicles, including the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck. Steam in these vehicles would likely support any game that’s capable of running on the Steam Deck.

We think this Steam update, which includes performance improvements and a variety of fixes, has quietly passed under most people’s radars. This could be a very exciting update for those who enjoy gaming, especially for those who love to do it in their Tesla.

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Tesla Holiday Update Weather Features: All the Small Details

Robert Rosenfeld / YouTube

As part of Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, Tesla included two awesome new features - Weather at Destination and the long-awaited Weather Radar Overlay. These two features are big upgrades built upon the weather feature that was added in update 2024.26. The original weather feature added an hourly forecast, as well as the chance of precipitation, UV index, Air Quality Index, and other data.

However, this update also added some smaller weather touches, such as the vehicle alerting you if the weather at the destination will be drastically different from the current weather.

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Weather At Destination

When you’re navigating to a destination and viewing the full navigation direction list, the text under the arrival time will show you the expected weather next to your destination. You can also tap this, and the full weather pop-up will show up, showing your destination's full set of weather information.

Note the weather under the arrival time

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You can also tap the weather icon at the top of the interface at any time and tap Destination to switch between the weather at your current location and the weather at your destination.

You’re probably considering that the weather at your destination doesn’t matter when you’re three hours away - but that’s all taken into account by the trip planner. It will add in both charge time and travel time and show you the weather at your destination at your expected arrival time.

And if the weather is drastically different or inclement, such as rain or snow, while you’ve got sunshine and rainbows - the weather will be shown above the destination ETA for a few moments before it tucks itself away.

Tesla also recently introduced a new voice command. Asking, “What’s the weather?” or something similar will now bring up Tesla’s weather popup.

The weather pop-up above the ETA

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One limitation, though—if you’re planning a long road trip that is more than a day of driving, the weather at destination feature won’t be available until you get closer.

Weather Radar Overlay

As part of the improvements to weather, Tesla has also added a radar overlay for precipitation. You can access the new radar overlay by tapping the map and then tapping the weather icon on the right side of the map. It’ll bring up a radar overlay centered on your vehicle. It’ll animate through the radar data over the last 3 hours so that you can see the direction of the storm, but you can also pause it at any point.

You’re able to scroll around in this view and see the weather anywhere, even if you zoom out. It also works while you’re driving, although it can be a little confusing if you’re trying to pay attention to the navigation system. If you like to have Points of Interest enabled on your map, the weather overlay will hide POIs except for Charging POIs.

Requirements / Data

Unfortunately, you’ll need Premium Connectivity for any of the weather features to work, and being on WiFi or using a hotspot will not be enough to get the data to show up. The data, including the weather radar, is provided by The Weather Channel.

As for supported models, weather and weather at destination are available on all vehicles except for the 2012-2020 Model S and Model X. The weather radar has more strict requirements and requires the newer AMD Ryzen-powered infotainment center available on the 2021+ Model S and Model X and more recent Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.

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