Everything Tesla Announced During Its Earnings Call - Robotaxi Details, HW3 Support, FSD and More

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Did you miss Tesla’s Q3 2024 Earnings Call, or just want to review everything Tesla announced? Either way, we’ve got an outline of everything Tesla announced during the call.

This call was strongly focused on autonomy and revealed a lot more details about Tesla’s plans for its ride sharing service and the Cybercab.

Below is a section-by-section outline of both the actual earnings call and Q&A session and the investor slide deck.

Autonomy and FSD

• Tesla is still focusing hard on autonomy

• There were 50 autonomous vehicles at the We, Robot event

  • Carried thousands of people with no incidents or issues

  • 20 were Cybercabs and 30 were regular Model Ys

• Cybercab will reach volume production by 2026

  • Expected to reach 2 million units per year for initial capacity

  • Tesla could see expanding it to 4 million units per year

• There have been significant improvements in FSD year-to-date

  • FSD launched in the Cybertruck, FSD V12.5 launched most recently

  • Actually Smart Summon is a taste of Unsupervised FSD

  • Single Stack for Highway and City, all end-to-end, all neural nets coming soon in V13

  • 100x improvement in miles per intervention between FSD v11.4.9 and FSD v12.5

  • Tesla expects a 5-6x improvement in miles per intervention between FSD v12.5 and FSD v13

  • By Q2 next year Tesla expects FSD to have higher miles per critical intervention than the average human’s miles per collision

    • This is the “safer than a human” mark Tesla is aiming for

  • Hardware 4 has made significant strides in helping progress FSD due to the available processing power

• Tesla will continue to roll out more 30-day trials with every significant FSD improvement

  • FSD has seen an increased take-rate after We, Robot

Internal Testing for Robotaxi

• Tesla employees in the California Bay Area have already been testing Tesla’s Robotaxi service, which is run with Model Y’s

  • These vehicles have a safety driver

  • Tesla is also testing the Robotaxi / ridesharing app internally

Ride Hailing

• Ride Hailing/Robotaxi network’s initial rollout will begin in Texas and maybe California next year

  • California’s regulatory approvals will be challenging, and Texas may happen sooner.

  • California may be delayed to 2026

  • Other states that follow Texas could come sooner

• Driverless Teslas will be offering paid rides sometime next year

• Some recently released features were designed for the Robotaxi, but went to every Tesla

  • Robotaxis will automatically load and adopt your Tesla profile, logging you into media apps, adjusting the vehicle’s climate and seat settings for comfort

  • Navigation can be done with the phone app, and you can also track progress of Robotaxis on-route

• Cybercab, Models S3XY, already meet federal vehicle regulations for autonomy

• State vehicle regulations are all over the place, each state has different (or no) process for autonomy

Hardware 3

• “Vast Majority” of Tesla’s vehicles on the road today will be capable of autonomy

• Tesla will continue to iterate FSD on HW4 first, and then backport to HW3

• HW3 does not “fundamentally support” kernel features, and Tesla has to use tricks and additional work to get it to function

• Elon admits he is not 100% sure HW3 will be capable of autonomy

• If HW3 cannot do the job, Tesla will upgrade HW3 computers for owners who have purchased FSD.

  • Tesla has previously said multiple times this was not possible, this is big news

  • Upgrade will only cover the inference computers, not cameras or other parts

Affordable Model - 25K

• Tesla’s more affordable model is still on track for the first half of 2025.

• It will be built on the same next-gen platform as Cybercab, with an estimated 5.5mi/kWh.

  • This will be Tesla’s most efficient powertrain.

• Tesla will continue to innovate to reduce the cost of its current lineup (S, 3, X, Y, CT).

  • CT is now profit neutral/approaching profitability

Semi

• Semi factory is well under construction, CapEx for the factory is complete

• Pilot builds of the updated Semi begin next year

• Production ramp begins in 2026

• Lots of signaled demand from trucking companies

  • Tesla is not expecting a demand issue

• Cost per mile per ton is far lower than diesel trucks

  • Companies that don’t adopt Semi won’t be able to keep up

• Pepsi’s drivers don’t want to go back to their old vehicles, fight to stay on Tesla’s Semis

• “Couple hundred” already deployed this year

  • Tesla is training the Semi fleet on FSD, will deploy FSD to the Semi when its ready.

Roadster

• Roadster is the “cherry on the icing on the cake”

• Not a priority for the Tesla mission

• Will come after other items that have a bigger impact on the mission (25K Model, etc.,)

• Design is close to finalization

Service

• Tesla is trying to fix issues upstream - at the factory level - to reduce service wait times

• Tesla is looking to establish dedicated service facilities where they have dedicated lanes and technicians for certain specific issues

• Throughput of service matters

• Tesla, unlike other auto manufacturers, services cars

  • Normally, car dealers, not manufacturers make money on service

  • Tesla does not make money on service

  • Tesla has an incentive to reduce servicing costs as much as possible

• Tesla is working on automating vehicle diagnostics and prep work

  • Vehicle self-diagnoses, information is provided to Tesla

  • Parts arrive, lift is booked and tools prepared

  • Vehicle arrives, technician is fully aware of the issue and can immediately fix the problem without wasting time

  • Already, most of the time Tesla doesn’t need to diagnose the issue, the car diagnoses itself and reports potential problems to Service.

4680 Cell

• Tesla has produced the 100 millionth 4680 cell in Q3 2024.

• Rapidly becoming the most competitive cell in terms of price

  • Tesla’s internally produced 4680 will be the most cost-competitive cell in North America

• Continued progress on the dry-cathode line and expanding past the initial test batch

• Tesla will continue to rely upon external cell providers

  • Lots of capacity is needed for both vehicles and stationary storage that can’t be achieved internally

AI and Optimus

• AI training capacity is still expanding

• Tesla is not compute constrained right now, especially with Cortex coming online

  • FSD is getting good enough that it is hard to find and figure out issues

  • Can see 10,000 miles of FSD video and not find an issue in current builds

• Tesla is testing both virtually and physically

  • Real-life physical testing offers additional benefits, interacting with real humans, etc.,

• Optimus’ new hand has 22 DoF, and is extremely humanlike

  • Tesla is likely the only company that can scale humanoid robots

  • This is likely due to Tesla’s extreme vertical integration, including batteries, actuators, sensors, software, and inference

  • FSD provides the humanlike brain, while Tesla’s factories can provide volume production capabilities

• Grok in Tesla / Infotainment

  • Tesla will keep expanding what’s available for infotainment, will include AI support

  • Will also include browser improvements, movies, games, productivity

Energy

• Energy is still doing well, lots of space to continuing scaling this business sector

• Megafactory Lathrop is doing 200 Megapacks a week, for 40GWh a year

• Shanghai will begin doing 20GWh per year, starting Q1 2025

• Tesla wants to ship at least 100GWh per year by the end of 2025

• Tesla wants to meet the stationary energy demands for a sustainable energy future

  • This includes the delivery of multiple terawatt hours per year

• No material limitations on stationary battery business expansion

  • No rare materials or complex procedures are involved in the production process

Financial & Deliveries

• Tesla has pushed out record deliveries this quarter.

• No other EV company or EV section of another automaker is profitable

• Tesla’s future is the world’s future - autonomous and fully electric

• As Tesla executes on its objectives, Tesla will become the most valuable company in the world.

• Tesla has done an excellent job executing in a difficult fiscal and regulatory environment so far

• As cyclic fiscal and standing regulatory challenges are overcome, Tesla can continue to expand and grow in value

• Automotive revenue grew Quarter over Quarter

  • Financial incentives have hurt direct profit numbers, but increased overall sales considerably

  • Tesla will continue to offer compelling financing options, but sparingly

  • Tesla has a compelling overall package - safety, autonomy, features, total cost of ownership

  • Tesla acknowledges there is an awareness gap about these items with new and old buyers alike

• Tesla has had their vehicle margins grow Quarter over Quarter due to optimizations

• Tesla continues to squeeze costs without compromising on the customer experience

• Tesla has benefitted from lower freight and duties by delivering vehicles locally in markets where possible

  • North American vehicles from North America, European vehicles from Giga Berlin, Asian vehicles from China

• Decline in interest rates as economy steadies will have a drastic impact on automotive demand

  • Due to interest rates, people have been holding onto cars longer, especially in North America

  • This has impacted new vehicle sales, as people are hesitant to spend money

  • Tesla sees an opportunity to educate and find new buyers in this market sector

• Energy saw a decline in Q3, due to cyclic conditions

  • Projects are long term, and many begin in Q3, while ending in other quarters

  • Q4 will show growth for Energy

  • Q3 has been Tesla’s off-quarter for Energy (2021, 2022, 2023)

• Tesla’s Q2 restructuring continuing to impact the company, will have no more impacts after Q4

• GPU deployments continue, and Tesla will continue making quarterly investments, but sparingly

  • As it stands, Tesla has more GPU capacity than they can work with now - not compute constrained

• Fragmented regulatory landscape will cause issues for the rollout of the Robotaxi Network and Unsupervised FSD

• Most automotive companies have not internalized autonomy or EVs, and Tesla is a leader in both sectors
  

If you’d like to listen to the earnings call, it’s available below.

Plus, Tesla put out a highlight list of some of their biggest achievements for this quarter here on X.

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Tesla Debuts Super Manifold V2 in the New Model Y—But Not Every Car Has It Yet

Tesla Service Manual

The Super Manifold is Tesla’s solution to reducing the complexity of a heat pump system for an EV. Tesla showed off its engineering chops back with the original Model Y in 2019, where it introduced a new 8-way valve (the Octovalve) and a new heat pump alongside the uniquely designed Super Manifold to improve efficiency.

Now, Tesla is launching an improved version with the refreshed Model Y - the Super Manifold V2. We got to hear about it thanks to Sandy Munro’s interview with Tesla’s Lars Moravy (Vice President of Vehicle Engineering) and Franz Von Holzhausen (Chief of Vehicle Design). You can watch the video further below.

What Is The Super Manifold?

The Super Manifold (get it, Superman?), is an all-in-one package that brings in all the components of a heat pump system into one component. The Super Manifold packs all the refrigerant and coolant components around a 2-layer PCB (printed circuit board).

This Super Manifold would normally have 15 or 20 separate components, but Tesla managed to integrate them all into one nice package. That presented Tesla with a new challenge: how to integrate a heat pump—capable of both heating and cooling—into a single, efficient platform?

Several years ago, Tesla designed the Octovalve. It combines inlets and outlets and can variably change between heating or cooling on the fly - without needing to be plumbed in different directions. This is especially important for EVs, which may need to heat the battery with the waste heat generated from the motors or the heat pump while also cooling the cabin - or vice versa.

Original Super Manifold V1.1

Tesla launched the Super Manifold V1.1 back in 2022, and it provided some minor improvements to the waste heat processing of the heat exchange system. It also tightened up the Octovalve, preventing the leakage of oils into the HVAC loop that could cause it to freeze at extremely low temperatures.

Tesla has been using the V1.1 for several years now, and it has really solved the vast majority of issues with the heat pump system that many older Model Ys experienced.

Super Manifold V2 Coming Soon

Now, Tesla is introducing the Super Manifold V2 in the new Model Y. It will improve the overall cooling capacity provided by the original Super Manifold, but unfortunately, not every single new Model Y will come with it equipped. Tesla will be introducing it slowly across the lineup and at different rates at different factories, depending on part availability.

Eventually, the Super Manifold V2 will also make its way to other vehicles, potentially including the upcoming refresh for the Model S and Model X, but initially, it’ll be exclusive to the new Model Y. Tesla expects to have the new manifold in every new Model Y later this year.

If you’re interested in checking out the whole video, we’ve got it for you below.

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Breaking Down Tesla’s Autopilot vs. Wall “Wile E. Coyote” Video

Mark Rober

Mark Rober, of glitter bomb package fame, recently released a video titled Can You Fool A Self-Driving Car? (posted below). Of course, the vehicle featured in the video was none other than a Tesla - but there’s a lot wrong with this video that we’d like to discuss.

We did some digging and let the last couple of days play out before making our case. Mark Rober’s Wile E. Coyote video is fatally flawed.

The Premise

Mark Rober wanted to prove whether or not it was possible to fool a self-driving vehicle, using various test scenarios. These included a wall painted to look like a road, low-lying fog, mannequins, hurricane-force rain, and bright beams.

All of these individual “tests” had their own issues - not least because Mark didn’t adhere to any sort of testing methodology, but because he was looking for a result - and edited his tests until he was sure of it.

Interestingly, many folks on X were quick to spot that Mark had been previously sponsored by Google to use a Pixel phone - but was using an iPhone to record within the vehicle - which he had edited to look like a Pixel phone for some reason. This, alongside other poor edits and cuts, led many, including us, to believe that Mark’s testing was edited and flawed.

Flaw 1: Autopilot, Not FSD

Let’s take a look at the first flaw. Mark tested Autopilot - not FSD. Autopilot is a driving aid for lane centering and speed control - and is not the least bit autonomous. It cannot take evasive maneuvers outside the lane it is in, but it can use the full stable of Tesla’s extensive features, including Automatic Emergency Braking, Forward Collision Warnings, Blind Spot Collision Warnings, and Lane Departure Avoidance.

On the other hand, FSD is allowed and capable of departing the lane to avoid a collision. That means that even if Autopilot tried to stop and was unable to, it would still impact whatever obstacle was in front of it - unlike FSD.

As we continue with the FSD argument - remember that Autopilot is running on a 5-year-old software stack that hasn’t seen updates. Sadly, this is the reality of Tesla not updating the Autopilot stack for quite some time. It seems likely that they’ll eventually bring a trimmed-down version of FSD to replace Autopilot, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Mark later admitted that he used Autopilot rather than FSD because “You cannot engage FSD without putting in a destination,” which is also incorrect. It is possible to engage FSD without a destination, but FSD chooses its own route. Where it goes isn’t within your control until you select a destination, but it tends to navigate through roads in a generally forward direction.

The whole situation, from not having FSD on the vehicle to not knowing you can activate FSD without a destination, suggests Mark is rather unfamiliar with FSD and likely has limited exposure to the feature.

Let’s keep in mind that FSD costs $99 for a single month, so there’s no excuse for him not using it in this video.

Flaw 2: Cancelling AP and Pushing Pedals

Many people on X also followed up with reports that Mark was pushing the pedals or pulling on the steering wheel. When you tap on the brake pedal or pull or jerk the steering wheel too much, Autopilot will disengage. For some reason, during each of his “tests,” Mark closely held the steering wheel of the vehicle.

This comes off as rather odd - at the extremely short distances he was enabling AP at, there wouldn’t be enough time for a wheel nag or takeover warning required. In addition, we can visibly see him pulling the steering wheel before “impact” in multiple tests.

Over on X, techAU breaks it down excellently on a per-test basis. Mark did not engage AP in several tests, and he potentially used the accelerator pedal during the first test - which means that Automatic Emergency Braking is overridden. In another test, Mark admitted to using the pedals.

Flaw 3: Luminar Sponsored

This video was potentially sponsored by a LiDAR manufacturer - Luminar. Although Mark says that this isn’t the case. Interestingly, Luminar makes LiDAR rigs for Tesla - who uses them to test ground truth accuracy for FSD. Just as interesting, Luminar’s Earnings Call was also coming up at the time of the video’s posting.

Luminar had linked the video at the top of their homepage but has since taken it down. While Mark did not admit to being sponsored by Luminar, there appear to be more distinct conflicts of interest, as Mark’s charity foundation has received donations from Luminar’s CEO.

Given the positivity of the results for Luminar, it seems that the video had been well-designed and well-timed to take advantage of the current wave of negativity against Tesla, while also driving up Luminar’s stock.

Flaw 4: Vision-based Depth Estimation

The next flaw to address is the fact that humans and machines can judge depth using vision. On X, user Abdou ran the “invisible wall” through a monocular depth estimation model (DepthAnythingV2) - one that uses a single image with a single angle. This fairly simplified model can estimate the distance and depth of items inside an image - and it was able to differentiate the fake wall from its surroundings easily.

Tesla’s FSD uses a far more advanced multi-angle, multi-image tool that stitches together and creates a 3D model of the environment around it and then analyzes the result for decision-making and prediction. Tesla’s more refined and complex model would be far more able to easily detect such an obstacle - and these innovations are far more recent than the 5-year-old Autopilot stack.

While detecting distances is more difficult in a single image, once you have multiple images, such as in a video feed, you can more easily decipher between objects and determine distances by tracking the size of each pixel as the object approaches. Essentially, if all pixels are growing at a constant rate, then that means it’s a flat object — like a wall.

Case in Point: Chinese FSD Testers

To make the case stronger - some Chinese FSD testers took to the streets and put up a semi-transparent sheet - which the vehicle refused to drive through or drive near. It would immediately attempt to maneuver away each time the test was engaged - and refused to advance with a pedestrian standing in the road.

Would FSD hit a transparent film wall?
This test showed it just avoids it.

Added English subtitles.

Credit: Douyin 第一智驾 pic.twitter.com/IU8IyuRG01

— Aaron Li (@boolusilan) March 18, 2025

Thanks to Douyin and Aaron Li for putting this together, as it makes an excellent basic example of how FSD would handle such a situation in real life.

Flaw 5: The Follow-Up Video and Interview

Following the community backlash, Mark released a video on X, hoping to resolve the community’s concerns. However, this also backfired. It turned out Mark’s second video was of an entirely different take than the one in the original video - this was at a different speed, angle, and time of initiation.

Mark then followed up with an interview with Philip DeFranco (below), where he said that there were multiple takes and that he used Autopilot because he didn’t know that FSD could be engaged without a destination. He also answered here that Luminar supposedly did not pay him for the video - even with their big showing as the “leader in LiDAR technology” throughout the video.

Putting It All Together

Overall, Mark’s video was rather duplicitous - he recorded multiple takes to get what he needed, prevented Tesla’s software from functioning properly by intervening, and used an outdated feature set that isn’t FSD - like his video is titled.

Upcoming Videos

Several other video creators are already working to replicate what Mark “tried” to test in this video.

To get a complete picture, we need to see unedited takes, even if they’re included at the end of the video. The full vehicle specifications should also be disclosed. Additionally, the test should be conducted using Tesla’s latest hardware and software—specifically, an HW4 vehicle running FSD v13.2.8.

In Mark’s video, Autopilot was engaged just seconds before impact. However, for a proper evaluation, FSD should be activated much earlier, allowing it time to react and, if capable, stop before hitting the wall.

A wave of new videos is likely on the way—stay tuned, and we’ll be sure to cover the best ones.

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