Yesterday Tesla held their Q2 2024 Earnings Call. Let’s take a deeper look at some of what was said.
Affordable Tesla
Tesla’s affordable model – previously dubbed the Model 2 by many, is supposed to be revealed in the first half of 2025. Tesla has been targeting a price point of about $25,000 USD for this vehicle, and many are excited to see an affordable EV from Tesla that doesn’t require the Federal EV Rebate to come down below $30,000.
The Model 2 is supposed to be built off the same production lines as Tesla’s other mass-manufactured vehicles — the Model 3 and the Model Y. Tesla has reserved their unique unboxed process testing for the upcoming Robotaxi instead.
New Date for Robotaxi Event
Speaking of the Robotaxi, Elon Musk confirmed in the earnings call that the Robotaxi event will be taking place on 10/10. In line with what we previously reported, this delay was due to some important design changes. In addition, the extra time allows Tesla to “show off a few other things,” according to Musk.
We’re quite excited to see what these other things are – they could be previews of the affordable Tesla model, the Cybervan or a demo of the Robotaxi.
Unsupervised FSD Goal
In terms of FSD, Musk also mentioned that the hope is for Unsupervised FSD to be rolled out sometime between the end of 2024 and the end of 2025. That’s a pretty big time gap, and while we’re used to expecting the usual two weeks, Musk came clean and said he’s been overly confident in the past.
Instead, this new estimate is based on the current trend of miles per intervention, which has been growing at a steady clip since FSD v12 rolled out and has become more refined.
Expansion of FSD
But that’s not all. Tesla also intends to introduce FSD v12.5 or FSD v12.6 to Europe, China, and other countries by the end of this year, which is rapidly approaching. That’s a major piece of news for many countries that have limited access to Full Self Driving or Autopilot. Tesla previously worked hard to get regulatory approval for FSD in Europe and China and just launched some Vision-based features outside of North America.
Giga Mexico on Hold
Giga Mexico is now on hold, along with Tesla’s plans to produce their next-generation vehicle there. Instead, Tesla will be producing these vehicles at Giga Texas. This hold comes after US Presidential Candidate Donald Trump has said that if he’s elected, he will enforce heavy tariffs on vehicles that are produced in Mexico and imported to the United States.
Optimus Robot Timeline
Optimus has seen some timeline solidification between the Shareholder Meeting and this Earnings Call. While there are a few test units on the factory floors today, Tesla intends to begin limited production at Giga Texas for a V1 unit, to be used internally. This production run will be starting in early 2025.
They expect to work out any initial kinks and bugs, and then begin work on Optimus V2, which should be available for purchase to outside organizations by early 2026.
Megapack
Tesla Energy has seen the greatest growth, with production, revenue, and sales all being greater than in Q1 2024. In fact, Tesla’s megapack factory in Lathrop is continuing to expand and scale production, all while Mega Shanghai is also breaking ground. Overall, deployments of static energy storage doubled in Q2 from Q1, which already saw a doubling since last year.
Tesla is banking quite a bit on its energy business, and working to expand its supply chains, while also selling Megapacks to energy utilities around the world. And it's more than energy utilities interested – Megapack is being seen as an energy backup source for AI compute – data centers suck power extremely fast, and Megapack can help provide the juice needed.
There’s more on that front too – Tesla and energy utilities are looking to buffer power plants with Megapacks – which means powerplants can run at optimal capacity while Megapack handles the ebbs and flows. There could be a 2-3x increase in power plant efficiency, and this could also help with power plant base loading.
Earnings Call Video
So that’s it for all the big key points from the Earnings Call. If you want to know more about the call, you can review our recap, which includes some of the financial data, as well as lots of other information. You can also see the investor slide deck, or watch the earnings call below.
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Last night on X, Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla will be expanding the service area for its Robotaxi Network pilot in Austin, Texas, this coming weekend. This is the first official confirmation we’ve had of a date for expansion, following news that Tesla is hiring more Vehicle Operators and plans to expand the Robotaxi supervisor ratio in the coming months.
This is a sign of Tesla’s confidence in the Robotaxi pilot program and its current FSD builds.
Expanding to a larger service area in Austin this weekend
The announcement confirms the sights we’ve been seeing of Tesla’s engineering validation vehicles focusing on areas outside the initial geofence. This public test shows that Tesla was likely finalizing FSD builds and gathering the necessary safety data to push the boundaries for the service, and this upcoming weekend’s expansion will be the first direct result of that work.
Given the increase in service zone size, this expansion will also likely include the addition of more vehicles to the initial Robotaxi fleet of approximately 20 vehicles. We expect the new number to be anywhere from 30-50 vehicles serving both the original and new areas, combined, based on Tesla’s previously expected rollout schedule.
What to Expect
While the exact new boundaries haven’t been released, it is almost certain that the expansion will include the South Congress Bridge and the downtown core areas of Austin. Expanding into a dense urban zone will include more complex intersections, heavy pedestrian traffic, and a unique road layout. That is a major vote of confidence for Robotaxi FSD’s capabilities.
The expansion will also help Tesla to close the service area gap with Waymo, its primary autonomous competitor in the city. This quick expansion is a sign of just how scalable Tesla’s vision-only approach is, versus Waymo’s arduous and drawn-out mapping processes.
We also expect that with this first service zone expansion, Tesla will continue to invite more people to its Robotaxi Network in the coming weeks. Tesla has already sent out various rounds of events, as they’ll need users to continue using the system. If you’re waiting for an invite, it may be time to start getting excited about the next rollout.
We’ve been hearing about Grok, xAI’s AI assistant, coming to Teslas for almost two years now, but this is finally coming to fruition soon. XAI unveiled Grok 4 last night, but the entire stream didn’t mention Teslas. However, Musk later posted on X that Grok will arrive in Tesla vehicles “by next week.”
Between leaks and the Grok mobile app, there’s a lot we already know about Grok, but there are a few missing pieces that will be cleared when it finally arrives.
Next Week, or Next Next Week?
Musk said that Grok would arrive by next week, meaning it could arrive before then. However, based on how Musk typically states Tesla timelines, there are a few things to consider that give us a better idea of what to expect.
First, whenever Musk posts a Tesla timeline on X, he typically means when it’ll be released to employees and not a public release. Expect this to be the same thing.
Tesla releases software updates to employees first for a final round of testing before starting a gradual release to the public. Sometimes issues are found, especially with FSD updates, and the update needs some fixes before being released publicly. So expect employees to get it by next week, and not necessarily normal Tesla owners.
The second part to this is that Tesla always rolls out their updates gradually, so when it does finally arrive, it’ll only be available on a small percentage of vehicles. Tesla will gradually monitor issues and logs, continuing the rollout as long as no major issues are found.
Which Software Update?
The entire Grok UI was already included in software update 2025.20, but it’s not exposed to users. Typically, a new feature like Grok requires a vehicle update to be added; however, this version may be different, as it’s locked behind a server-side configuration.
Tesla likely has the ability to enable it for all supported vehicles with a simple switch. However, we feel more confident in it being rolled out in Tesla’s next major update, which is likely to be 2025.24 or 2025.26. Rolling it out in a new update aligns with how Tesla has historically introduced features.
If they turned it on for everyone at the same time, they could be exposing everyone to potential new issues, rather than only a smaller segment of users. While Grok is now well-tested through X and the Grok app, there are several elements that are new in Teslas, likely including the ability to control various vehicle functions, such as opening the glove box or other capabilities that voice commands are currently capable of. The Grok interface in the vehicle is also entirely new and may have some bugs associated with it that will need to be addressed, especially if they impact other features.
What we can likely expect is that Tesla will make some tweaks or bug fixes to Grok with the next major update that weren’t included in update 2025.20 and they’ll begin rolling it out to employees and then customers.
Supported Vehicles
Speaking of supported vehicles, thanks to the behind-the-scenes look at Grok, we have a good idea of the vehicles that will be supported. Tesla uses the same code for most of its vehicles, but then it’s compiled for each type of hardware. However, only the needed code is compiled for each vehicle, meaning that some pieces are left out entirely. Unfortunately, Grok code is not included in Intel software builds, meaning that only AMD Ryzen-based vehicles will receive Grok, at least initially.
We’ve seen Tesla go back and add support for Intel vehicles after it initially released a feature for AMD vehicles. We saw this with the weather radar overlay and several other features in the past. However, Tesla has been developing code with web technologies lately. While this makes development easier, it just doesn’t perform as well on the slower Intel hardware, causing it to be left out. We saw this with the new Dashcam Viewer, which is entirely coded in HTML, CSS, and JS. The new viewer was available on HW3 and HW4 vehicles, but only those that included the Ryzen infotainment processor.
Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles very soon. Next week at the latest.
There’s a lot we’re expecting in Grok for Teslas. Some people will absolutely love it because it’ll completely transform their drives from a singular experience to feeling like they have a knowledgeable person sitting right next to them. Given the recent controversies surrounding Grok, some people will strongly oppose it. Hopefully, Tesla makes it easy for those users to turn off Grok.
The voice command system, which is activated through the steering wheel, is expected to be replaced with Grok. This will mean that you’ll be able to talk to your vehicle much more naturally, rather than having to remember specific syntax and commands, which should be a major improvement.
We’re personally looking forward to just being able to ask questions that pop into our heads while driving, such as What’s the date of Tesla’s next event, or How many miles away is Mars? Knowledge will be available at the touch of a finger and more accessible than ever.
Grok is also expected to support continuous conversations, meaning that you’ll be able to hold a conversation with it and go back and forth about a certain topic. While there are hints of a wake word in the code, for now, it seems like you’ll press the steering wheel button once to activate it, and then again to turn it off.
For those excited about AI and Grok, this will be one of the biggest additions to Tesla’s software in years, possibly only rivaled by the Dashcam / Sentry Mode feature and FSD Beta.
It shouldn’t be long now before we all have a chance to try it out for ourselves.
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