Tesla vanity license plates - clever ideas for a custom plate

@smarlo35

When we get a new car we love to add those little touches that make it our own. Tesla owners are no different, except you’ll probably find a higher percentage of serious ride-pimpers amongst Tesla owners than other car brands.

And there are so many options. Want to organize the vast central console space more efficiently? Need to protect the boot carpets from your wet skis? Even upgraded hard drives for Sentry Mode and in-car refrigerators are available.

But all these perks and polishes are best appreciated by you, inside the car. What about projecting your personality to those around you? A custom wrap or a paint job is nice, but there’s another way. License plates.

What better way to let your sense of humor show, give a gentle ribbing to the gas guzzlers following you, or make a serious point about why you went green. Let’s take a look at some of the options you might want to consider for a custom plate.

Many countries allow you to purchase a license plate with your own choice of letters and numbers. Sure, you could go for your name or something that means something to you alone.

But why not lean into the Tesla vibe with your plate, and make a statement! Here are five genuine plates already out there.

LOL OIL

While quite a nice sentiment at the best of times, the recent skyrocketing of oil and gas prices has probably made this Tesla owner more ROFL OIL than a mere LOL.

3VOLVED

@Lucybri83

This Model 3 owner shared her new plate on Twitter, and admitted that she reserved this plate 2.5 years before getting hold of the car itself. That’s dedication to the cause: in this case throwing out a cleverly ambiguous statement that could be taken as an observation on Teslas, EVs, or EV owners’ level of evolution. Nice twist on replacing the E with a 3, a la Model 3.

THX 3LON

@sampagnepapi_

Continuing the ‘Tesla E’ theme of throwing in the number 3 instead, this owner knows who is responsible for this slice of happiness. I wonder if it’s appreciation for the vision and achievements of Elon Musk and his team, or whether the car was a personal gift from Elon?! Probably not the latter.

BUY TSLA

@sampagnepapi_

You don’t need to be a certified financial advisor to offer this advice. This Model X owner is clearly playing the long game, in more ways than one. Looking at the healthy level of dirt on the bodywork, this license plate is a commitment to the stock market strategy of going long on Tesla, and the owner doesn’t look like they’ll be changing their advice any time soon.

NOPLANETB

@smarlo35

Straight to the point, if you’d rather not beat around the bush with the environmental message through gentle humor, lest the message be lost, you could take a leaf out of this Australian owner’s book.

Unfortunately, some folk can’t get a vanity plate and are forced to go with a regular random assigned plate. Where I am in Switzerland, you can choose your number from a catalog, and it looks like that’s the case for @thevoltmonkey in Germany too:

Quite an inventive way of proclaiming this Tesla as not just any old Tesla, but ‘Dah Tesla’.

So maybe you can see if one of these options are available in your area, or perhaps you can think along some other pun lines. Model Y owners can have some fun with Y OH Y, Y BE MAD, or YNOT. Or any Tesla owner could consider an electricity pun, for example, OHM RUN, PLUG IN or SAY WATT.

There’ll be some limits, depending on where you are. There’s usually a minimum and maximum number of characters allowed. Often, nothing that can appear obscene or offensive will be allowed, and there are stories of people in Canada and some US states retrospectively being ordered to give up their plates due to bad language or perceived discrimination against an ethnic minority group. In the UK, you can’t have a Q at the start of your number (they are reserved for kit cars) or display a number that could appear to show the car as younger than it really is, as standard plates include the year of registration - so including ‘22’ on a car manufactured in 2020, for example.

Of course, whether or not you’ve got the perfect plate, there’s nothing stopping you from making a little nod to your likes and wants through the plate holder…

Now, when the full self-driving revolution is complete, will there still be a need for license plates anyway? If there are no more driving infractions, and the Robotaxi fleet means the end of parking fines, do the authorities need the plates anymore? Or will every car be identifiable through a unique identifier broadcast by the computer?

In the meantime, make the most of those customized plates.

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Imagining Tesla’s Robotaxi Network Charging Stations

Not a Tesla App

It was a rainy April 1st when a news-searching author went on a delve into the depths of April Fools to find fact from falsehood. And while we found a lot of fantastic jokes, we also found some good ideas.

So, with a shoutout to MarcoRP on X, whose April Fool’s Joke gave us a good run for our money for a couple of minutes, we thought to ourselves - what would a Cybercab Charging Station / Cleaning Hub really look like?

Cybercab Wireless Charging Sites

Now, before continuing, we’d like to point out that the image up top is a joke from Marco - it isn’t an accurate or real site map submission from Tesla. However, it gave us the impetus to think critically about what is required for a Robotaxi fleet, based primarily on the Cybercab, to be able to service a city.

Requirements

Tesla will likely need to charge a small fleet of Cybercabs at a single time and in a single place. That means that the site needs to be large enough to cover a major metro area while also still being compact enough to not cost too much money to build out.

In addition, we need to factor in charge times. The Cybercab is likely to launch with a battery around 50 kWh, which will result in a range of approximately 300 miles. With that much range, the average Cybercab may not need to charge more than once or at all during daytime shifts, so instead, most of the vehicles will charge overnight.

MarcoRP

Math and Charge Times

The overnight charging means that most of these vehicles could be charged slowly. When we did some back-of-the-napkin math last year, we determined that Tesla’s wireless charger will likely peak around 17 kW (for comparison, Tesla’s Wall Connector at 32 amps charges at about 7 kW). If we scale Tesla’s wireless charger down slightly to 10 kW, accounting for some energy loss and the potential size of the site, that means a Cybercab will be able to charge in about 5 hours.

Tesla’s upcoming V4 Supercharger unit can currently handle 1.5MW per cabinet, but this slower-speed charging is A/C, not DC, which means there is a step-down loss of about 3-5%. Let’s make that a comfortable 10% for any other overages, but we can estimate around 1.35MW of power. That 1.3MW will easily handle charging up to 100 Cybercabs at once - all wirelessly, using Tesla’s unique beam-forming and beam-steering technology to keep efficiency high at every single stall.

Within about 5 hours, a whole fleet of 100 Cybercabs could be charged overnight when electricity rates are cheaper and still be out in time for the morning commute.

While this is all just hypothetical, it really does make sense that Tesla will be establishing these sites that won’t require much space or a ton of energy.

Tesla recently curtained off a large section of the parking garage at Giga Texas, as well as some of their chargers on the eastern end of the facility, leading us to believe they may just be testing this at scale internally.

There’s a lot to look forward to with Tesla’s V4 Supercharger deployment coming this year and with Robotaxi launching in just a couple of months.

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Tesla Announces 2025 Q1 Numbers: Lower Than Expected, but the Worst May Be Over

Not a Tesla App

Tesla released its Q1 2025 delivery and production numbers this morning, reporting 336,681 vehicles delivered and 362,615 produced—marking the company’s weakest quarter since 2022. Deliveries declined 13% year-over-year and fell well short of Wall Street estimates, which ranged from 360,000 to 370,000. Some analysts had forecast as many as 407,000 units.

Despite the shortfall, Tesla stock is actually up about 4% this morning, not only suggesting the market had already priced in weaker performance, but that this may be seen as the low point for the company. Tesla began delivering its refreshed Model Y in March, and production across all four Gigafactories was impacted by several weeks of downtime as Tesla retooled lines to accommodate the newer model. However, there’s no doubt that there is some brand impact from Elon Musk.

Comparing Numbers

Most of the deliveries—323,800 units—came from the Model 3 and Model Y lineup, while the “Other Models” category (including the Cybertruck, Model S, and Model X) accounted for 12,881 deliveries. That’s a 31% drop for Model 3/Y and a sharper 45% drop for the Other Models category compared to the previous quarter. However, comparing it to a more applicable Q1 2024, these numbers are only down about 13% for the Model 3/Y and down about 24% for the Model S/X and Cybertruck.

In terms of production, Tesla built 345,454 Model 3/Y vehicles and 17,161 from its “Other Models” line. The company attributed the production drop to the Model Y changeover but said the ramp is “going well.” This still leaves a large gap between production and delivery numbers, although they may not be as large as many had feared.

Cybertruck

One major weak point in Tesla’s numbers seems to be Cybertruck deliveries. While Tesla previously expected the Cybertruck to sell more than 250k units per year, we’re already seeing a decline in numbers. This is likely due to several factors, including the higher-than-expected price point of the truck, the unavailability of the RWD model, and the Cybertruck’s polarizing design, which may attract unwanted attention right now.

While the Cybertruck was ramping up production in 2024, making the lower numbers reasonable, the deliveries for Q1 2025 dropped drastically compared to the previous quarter. Cybertruck deliveries are estimated to be in the 5- 6k unit range for the quarter.

The good news to take away here is that the Single Motor variant of the Cybertruck appears to be nearing release. The price of the RWD version is expected to be about $60k USD before any incentives.

Q1 Earnings Call

Tesla announced their quarterly numbers this morning and posted on social media that they’ll live stream their Earnings Call on April 22nd.

This post was later edited to change “Q1 Earnings Call” to “Q1 Company Update.” It’s not clear whether there’s any significance in this change, but it could mean that Tesla has more to announce during the call.

The Company Update will occur on April 22nd at 2:30 PM PT / 5:30 PM ET. The standard Q&A session with executives and Musk is expected to follow the release of additional financial results for the quarter.

Tesla is set to launch its long-awaited Robotaxi service in June, and a cheaper, mass-market model is also planned for this year. With delivery numbers coming in soft and the refreshed Model Y just hitting the road, all eyes will be on forward-looking commentary during the update.

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