Deep Dive: Everything we learned from Tesla Q2 earnings call

Tesla held its Q2 earnings call. Here are the resources you need to dig deeper:

• Slide deck (29-pages)

• Webcast (1 hour) with Elon and Q&A; full transcript.

• Questions and Answers in written format on the Say platform.

• Or: my conclusions below.

You can find the financials (including the record quarterly revenues and the massive Tesla Energy growth) written out way better in the slide deck above. I’ll just drop this quick Sankey diagram for you:

So I’ll instead highlight some of the numbers on the business as a whole that I like to follow:

• Tesla expects an increase in production in Q3.

• Cybertruck production more than tripled sequentially and

  remains on track to achieve profitability by end of year.

• Preparation of Semi factory continues

  and is on track to begin production by end of 2025.

• Tesla significantly increased deliveries in several markets supplied by Gigafactory Shanghai in Q2, including South Korea,

• In Q2, Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg began producing vehicles for right-hand drive markets and delivered its first units to the UK. Also began delivering vehicles to Qatar, while increasing deliveries to Israel and Taiwan.

• 👀 “Plans for new vehicles, including more affordable models, remain on track for start of production in the first half of 2025. These vehicles will utilize aspects of the next-generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms and will be able to be produced on the same

  manufacturing lines as our current vehicle line-up” Read: this will help Tesla reach closer to the maximum capacity of three million vehicles.

• 👀 👀 “Our purpose-built Robotaxi product will continue to pursue a revolutionary “unboxed” manufacturing strategy.”

• The lithium refinery in Corpus Christi starts production in 2025.

• Tesla store & service locations: 1,286 (+12% YoY),
  Mobile Service fleet 1,896 vehicles (+7%)
  Superchargers locations: 6,473 (+23%) with
  59,596 charging points (+24%).

Here’s Tesla’s currently installed capacity per region:

And here’s how Tesla market share, across all fuel types, has changed over the years:

What we learned from the Q&A

Robotaxi event is pushed to 10/10 (10th of October).

Musk says “Cybertaxi… I mean Robotaxi will be manufactured here at our HQ in Texas.” A nice pause after letting that word ‘slip’ out of his mouth.

On Roadster: “we've completed most of the engineering. And I think there's still some upgrades we want to make to it, but we expect to be in production with Roadster next year. It will be something special, like the whole thing.”

Musk says based on the current trend Tesla could possibly to unsupervised by the end of this year, and he’d be shocked if they cannot do it next year. “So next year seems highly probable to me based on quite simply plus the points of the curve of miles between intervention. That trend exceeds humans for sure next year, so yes.

On the CyberSUV/CyberVan question, Elon says he’d rather have a specific product announcement event than announce a new product on an earnings call.

Lars Moravy (VP of Vehicle Engineering) says 4680 production ramps well, delivered 51% more cells than Q1 while reducing costs significantly. “We currently produce more than 1,400 Cybertrucks of 4680 cells per week.” He confirms they have set a cost parity target for the end of the year, and says “We've built our first validation Cybertruck with dry cathode process made on our mass production equipment, which is a huge technical milestone and we're super proud of that. We're on track for production launch with dry cathode in Q4, and this will enable cell cost to be significantly below available alternatives, which was the original goal of the 4680 program.”

On Tesla’s own compute: “We're also nearing completion of the South expansion of Giga Texas, which will house our largest training cluster to date. So it will be an incremental for 50,000 H100s plus 20,000 of our hardware for AI5 at Tesla AI computer.”

On Dojo, Elon says he is impressed with NVIDIA, but it’s hard to get the GPUs when they want them (and it’ll get more expensive soon). This is why Elon thinks they’ll need to put more effort on Dojo to get the training capability they need, will double down on Dojo, and “we do see a path to being competitive with NVIDIA with Dojo.” Here are some Dojo pics Elon shared. He said Dojo 1 will have roughly 8k H100-equivalent of training online by end of year. "Not massive, but not trivial either.”

On advertising, CFO Vaibhav Taneja says best products at a reasonable price is important, In Q2 “over two-thirds of our sales” were to people who had never owned a Tesla before. “We've spent money on advertising and other awareness programs and we have adjusted our strategy. We're not saying no to advertising, but this is a dynamic play”

On Giga Mexico, Elon: “Well, we currently are paused on Giga Mexico.” Says they’ll wait for what happens after election, Trump has promised tariffs on vehicles produced there.

On FSD Licencing: Elon says there’s a few major OEMs that have expressed interest.

On xAI and integrating Grok into Tesla, Elon says “I should say Tesla is learning quite a bit from xAI. It's been actually helpful in advancing full self-driving and in building up the new Tesla data center. […] And I think there are opportunities to integrate Grok into Tesla's software, yes.”

For extra context, a while after the call Elon posted this on X:

If, like me, you’re undecided if that’d be a good idea, here’s great analysis on the potential of this deal by Larry Goldberg (and this week’s X account I recommend you follow would be his: @TeslaLarry).

And if you’re looking for someone to put the Tesla financials into context, our friend AJ does that well, with graphs, here.

Point of view: Tesla cumulative revenue since founding. “Trend is good,” says Elon.

Done with this deep dive? Cool, now get back to reading our newsletter 🙂