Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Loomis, quick shout out to my newest patron David H. Thank you for choosing to support the channel. Rather than doing my typical post earnings video, I think this one will be more valuable to hop around a little bit and touch on some things that I think are going overlooked or not talked about at all and then clarifying some other things. But before we even get into it, I think it's important to reiterate Elon's sentiment given the valuation where it is. If you don't think Tesla is going to solve autonomy, you should not be in Tesla stock.
欢迎来到 Electrified,我是你的主持人 Dylan Loomis。首先向我最新的赞助者 David H 致以诚挚的感谢,感谢你选择支持这个频道。这次我不会像往常那样做一个收益报告视频,我认为今天的视频会更有价值,因为我会谈到一些被忽视或根本没有被谈论的事情,并澄清一些其他问题。但在我们开始之前,我觉得有必要重申一下埃隆的观点,考虑到特斯拉目前的估值。如果你不认为特斯拉能够解决自动驾驶问题,你就不应该持有特斯拉的股票。
One thing that I think is not being celebrated nearly enough is that Tesla said by quarter four of this year they're on track for dry cathode production for the 4680s, which means if that goes well, Tesla's 4680s will then be significantly cheaper than any alternative in the market. They already have a validation cyber truck with the dry cathode that was made on Tesla's mass 4680 manufacturing equipment that most of which Tesla has designed in house and some of which was actually built in house Tesla acquired Maxwell's DBE tech back in May 2019.
So Tesla has been working on solving this problem for the last five years. And it's this solution that if they can scale it will actually remove all of that wet process, remove all of the drying and the huge machines and the time that goes with it. And that should dramatically accelerate both 4680 production and the cost of goods sold for 4680s coming down aggressively.
Now we likely won't see those benefits hit Tesla's margins until mid 2025 and into 2026. But people were talking about Tesla abandoning the 4680 program all together by the end of this year. And the way I see it this confirmation from Tesla should totally take that off the table, even though personally I never thought it was on the table to begin with. This means Tesla's original goal with battery day to make batteries in house with new technologies that will be cheaper than any alternative from suppliers and with better energy density is now on track and likely to be solved by the end of this year and into next year. It's not a done deal yet, but when it comes to Cybertruck and other vehicle profitability, whatever vehicles Tesla will ultimately use 4680s in, this is a major win for the company for the next three to five years and beyond.
Let's shift focus to autonomy and robotaxies because that really is the main driver for Tesla stock at least in the near term. People out there are mistakenly saying, see, I told you that hardware three will never be fully autonomous. I don't believe that's true. Elon actually said that hardware three would run the same parameter count, meaning the five X increase that we're seeing in 12.5, but it requires extra work to optimize the code for hardware three, not that it's never going to work on hardware three, just that Tesla needs a bit more time for that. When it comes to 12.5 and the early reviews overwhelmingly, they are very positive and more positive than it was with the 12.4 releases. That's not to say this version is perfect and that FSD is all of the sudden solved. However, it does seem to be a solid upgrade from 12.3.6 and 12.4.
Some lesser known FSD users who were just saying that Tesla's FSD is effectively terrible are now saying 12.5 is by far the best it has ever been. AI driver has said 12.5 is a step change in improvement from both 12.3 and 12.4, saying the quickness and decision making on this version is on another level. A shock said there was a huge focus on improving both safety and smoothness in this release. One of my personal tests is to not spill an open cup of coffee while on FSD. 12.5 was the first version where I was able to do that for 30 minute drives.
It's still not available on the Cybertruck, looking like that will come with a future dot release. Dirty Tesla said I'll say this is the safest, the best version of FSD ever and should go to everyone with FSD worldwide. And on Chris's 45 minute ride to work, he said it was by far the most impressive it's ever done that route. As I said though, from Chris, it's definitely not perfect as this clip shows it driving right into a do not enter. Chris also mentioned that it was still struggling with blinking red lights where it would just come to a complete stop and then stay there. And AI driver had a clip of 12.5 not slamming on the brakes at a yellow light, which I'll be honest personally, I was hoping to see.
It's early, but at this point barring anything unexpected, it feels like 12.5 will be the release one of these dot releases that does make it to a wide release. One of these years, Elon's prediction about robot taxi timing will be right, but we really can't put much stock in his guesses at this stage. What we can do however, is look at what Tesla is doing with compute. This is where we are right now. Let's just call it sitting around 38,000 H100 equivalents. Tesla's plans for the end of this year, they're expected to be up to around 89,000 H100 equivalents. The math on that is a 2.3 X in compute capacity over just the next five months. I'm certainly still expecting improvements this year as Tesla really learns how to actually train with all of this data and customize it in the way that they want. But once the South Extension at Gigatexus is filled up with compute and it's turned on and begins training 2025, maybe the year where the real magic happens. By that time, Tesla will have multiples of the compute power it has now, plus roughly a year under its belt of learning how to train this end to end network.
And to those of you in the comments that have been saying Tesla doesn't really train the system, it's just the data in and then controls out. Well, it's not that simple. Tony a Tesla engineer just said a lot of hard work in many late nights went into making FSD 12.5. Many ideas were simplified and reworked from first principles. Plus Tesla is in control of the actual video footage that makes it into the system for training. Another example is when Elon was talking about 12.4, he said part of the issue was too much training on interventions and not enough on normal driving. So this is the type of thing I'm referring to when I say that Tesla is learning how to train this new end to end neural net on Tesla's compute build out Elon said it's important to note we also use the Tesla AI for computer in the training loop within video GPUs currently at roughly a one to two ratio. By the way, hardware four is now being called AI for just like hardware five is now AI five. Elon said that means around 90,000 H 100 plus around 40,000 AI for computers.
Thus, it seems like this chart we just had on the screen would actually not include those 40,000 AI for computers. Elon said Dojo one will have roughly 8,000 H 100 equivalent of training online by end of year, not massive but not trivial either. So it sounds like looking at that chart any H 100 equivalents would actually be Dojo and then the AI for may not be included in that chart at all. But those details are not as important as knowing that heading into 2025 Tesla's compute will be on an entirely different level and that's both for FSD and Optimus. That leads us to the Tesla and X AI conversation. Elon's poll about if Tesla should invest $5 billion into X AI currently sits at 68% for 32% against this poll has no bearing on anything Tesla would still need board approval and a shareholder vote. This is just testing the waters. Now this leads to a potential mistake that I think Elon made on the call. We've been told Tesla is not compute constrained right now but Elon said that he was quite concerned about getting state of the art in video GPUs when they need them.
Sadly I can almost guarantee you there's a nefarious Tesla investor out there somewhere thinking wait a second X AI just bought 100,000 H 100's and that's 100,000 that Tesla now doesn't get. Now please do not misunderstand me I am not trying to argue that that complaint is somehow justified. But if Tesla gets to a place in the next two years where they are again compute constrained I can guarantee you these conflict of interest arguments between Tesla and X AI get even louder. Thanks to that Nvidia demand Elon did say they're doubling down on Dojo to not be so reliant on that but he also said Tesla really needs to make Dojo work which implies that it's not working at least at the scale they had wanted it to. He said they'll figure it out and they still see a path to be competitive with Nvidia but at least right now we would have been hoping for an update to hear that Dojo was actually accounting for a larger percentage of Tesla's training compute. But that's not what we heard after the last Dojo update which was that it was actually online and doing some training.
When it comes to Tesla investing in X AI personally I would be on board I wouldn't be overly excited about it if you just run some simple numbers let's just say Tesla would end up with between 15 and 20% of X AI which after the last round based on a 5 billion dollar investment is where Tesla would land even if X AI grew to be a 300 billion company that's still only 60 billion dollars in valuation for Tesla. Now from an ROI standpoint I think that's just fine no one would be complaining about that but to think that it's going to transform Tesla into a trillion dollar company in my opinion with a 5 billion dollar investment that's really not in the range of outcomes for the next few years. But I also disagree with people like Gene Munster who said that he thinks Tesla should invest 20 billion dollars to make it more worthy Tesla investor while but that seems crazy to me because Tesla has plenty of AI endeavors and planned CapEx in-house that they should be spending money on before they invest that type of cash with X AI. You guys know I'm in the camp that X AI and Tesla are not really direct competitors they may be competing for certain resources like H100s but in LLM like Grock is definitely not the same thing as real-world AI like Tesla is working on and as I've said all along I think long term Tesla and X AI will be very mutually beneficial to each other.
Elon confirmed that much on the call saying that Tesla has already learned a lot from X AI again though I do think this would be a Tesla investment that investors should be going into with eyes wide open because I do think it at least opens the door a bit more for new attack vectors for Tesla Elon and X AI from a legal standpoint and not that I'm saying they're justified I'm just saying I'm not a lawyer so I'm not sure how they would play in court. On the gig of Mexico talks and tariffs Rohan Patel said the risk of Trump placing import tariffs on cars from Mexico made by American companies is near zero. It would significantly harm US companies think GM and Ford who are currently making vehicles in Mexico and importing to the states. It would also very likely be illegal based on his own updated NAFTA agreement. This is just his usual bluster to scare Chinese companies away from setting up in Mexico. Much more likely is some national security related excuse to exclude specifically Chinese vehicles. But if we're looking at this from first principles I think Elon blaming Trump's political chatter is only part of the reason Gigamexico may actually be on pause.
The other and likely more accurate reason is that Tesla currently has nearly 3 million units of production capacity but they're only producing about 1.8 million per year which just means Tesla still has over 50% growth potential at its current factories before needing to invest any money in new manufacturing lines at new sites. Elon did reiterate that the Robotaxi and Optimus production version 2, the high volume one, will both be built at Gigatexas. That's not to say Gigamexico isn't going to happen at all just that Trump likely won't be the reason that it doesn't and it may be 3, 4, 5 years before Gigamexico ever actually enters production. I'm not trying to say Elon's comments on Trump's policy chatter are not valid but on a prior conference call we were told that Gigamexico was intended for South America and some other markets in that the US was not going to be one of the main export regions. It's just that Elon's a smart guy, he knows most people aren't that far into the weeds and they'll hear that argument about why Gigamexico is on pause and think okay yeah that makes sense. And it does, I'm just saying I think there's more to the story.
Touching on Tesla energy just briefly, this was a screenshot from the 10Q that was released this morning. As of the end of Q2, the total transaction price allocated to performance obligations that were unsatisfied or partially unsatisfied for contracts with an original expected length of more than one year was $5.71 billion. Of that amount, we expect to recognize $2.56 billion in the next 12 months and the rest over the remaining performance obligation period. To make this as simple as possible, let's say Tesla shakes hands on a new megapack contract for $100. Up front, they may recognize a portion of that revenue. Then when the megapacks are actually set up, deployed and connected to the grid, Tesla receives a bit more of that $100. But then there's a remaining portion, these unsatisfied performance obligations that Tesla will only be able to recognize after the project is turned on. Thus, over time, as Tesla signs more contracts for the megapack, these UPOs will call them will continue to build.
Now, here's the kicker, and before I say this, I'm trying to actually confirm this with a few different accountants, but it's very tough to tell for sure. There is however a chance that these numbers that we're looking at on the screen will flow down largely to Tesla's gross profits when this revenue is actually recognized. That's because there's a good chance from an accounting perspective that when these megapack projects do actually go live and are turned on, Tesla is recognizing the majority of the cost at that point. If not some, even before that, during the production process. So if that's true, a large portion, if not all of this amount, could be flowing right down to Tesla's gross profits. Which yes, over time, as this is recognized, would indeed play a large role in actually boosting the gross margins and the percentages we're seeing on the Tesla energy business side. Matt Smith from Rebellionair shared some charts on this very data for our visual learners.
The blue bars are the total unsatisfied performance obligations you can see them increasing with each passing quarter. The orange is the total energy revenue that's actually recognized in that quarter. Again, gross oversimplification, but these blue bars or UPOs are kind of like a piggy bank that Tesla can access at certain times in the future. And listen, even if these UPOs don't flow through as nearly pure profit, it's also going to be much higher than zero, future revenue in profits that Tesla will recognize. This shows the total balance at $5.7 billion and the orange is the current portion which again is roughly $2.6 billion to be recognized over the next 12 months. Plus, Elon did say that the Shanghai megapactory set to come online Q1 2025 may actually triple Tesla's megapack output rather than just double it, which is what we were expecting. Tesla energy will definitely be bumpy quarter to quarter, however, it's going to play a large role in helping Tesla to actually grow into its current valuation even after today.
On the energy side, I'm glad Elon and the team took some time to explain why the megapack really is so revolutionary for the grid and why Tesla is now building out its megapack backlog into 2026. The TLDW is that megapacks give existing power plants the ability to produce nearly two times the energy as they are right now because it allows these plants to operate in a more continuous manner because with the battery storage, they can actually store that excess energy. As it's been for the past five years, Elon reiterated that the expected demand for megapack is still likely to be underestimated by orders of magnitude.
Just to quickly touch on the auto side, we'll talk a lot more about this in the weeks to come, but something's not really adding up for 2025. As it stands now, Tesla would be rolling out a Model Y refresh, a more affordable vehicle sometimes supposedly in the first half of next year, and Roadster production is now supposed to enter production next year. And Tesla Semi is supposed to enter production by the end of next year. That's basically three and a half new vehicles for Tesla next year, and then you could add another half because the Cybertruck will still be ramping next year as well. Given that Tesla said the Robotaxi was still going to pursue the fully unboxed method on the slide deck, I'm not expecting any Robotaxi production until 2026 at the very earliest. I'd love to be wrong, but Tesla's 2025 is already quite booked up. That doesn't even consider the fact that Optimus production version 1 is supposed to start production next year followed by version 2 shortly after in 2026. All that to say, at this point, I am most certainly expecting some delays on those timelines.
I think part of the reason that Wall Street isn't more excited about this more affordable Tesla is of course one we don't have really any information about the vehicle. Tesla's obviously avoiding the Osborne effect, but it's true this more affordable vehicle will likely have slimmer margins and when it comes to the FSD attach rate, we're still not really getting any insight. They did say the FSD attach rates improved materially after the price cut, but Vibov also said they were coming from a very low base. I also believe if the attach rates were good, Tesla would be sharing them. That's also why Tesla is pushing FSD demos so hard because they're seeing when people actually try it out they tend to keep using it, but it's just most people aren't even trying it out. Thus, in a sense regardless of how good Tesla's FSD actually is, the market is saying right now at that price point I'm really not that interested. It would be nice if we could have even a breakdown of these FSD buys, how many are buying it outright, versus how many are going the subscription route. But for now we're stuck with very little.
A few quick ones in a new Tesla software update, you're now going to be able to control the brightness of the ambient lights in the Cybertruck and the new Model 3. Before, the brightness of the lights was directly linked to the brightness of the display. There's also a new Night Only option which turns on the accent lights when conditions outside get dim so you don't waste any of the lifetime of those LED lights during the day when they're not as visible. Additionally, when you're using the Charge Your Other EV option in the app, the options to sort and filter chargers have been updated. The first Model 3 performance deliveries in Canada are right around the corner as VINs are being assigned. The Irvine Police Department has been talking about it but they just confirmed on their official X account that the Cybertruck will be joining their police fleet soon.
Elon was at the Capitol building today and he said at no point did I say I was donating $45 million a month for Trump, that was a fiction made up by the Wall Street Journal. We haven't dropped into the macro world lately but it's worth pointing out if you haven't been paying attention there's currently over a 90% chance that we get a rate cut at the September meeting. The sooner and more often we can get these rate cuts the better it will be for Tesla and the less they'll actually have to bear the brunt of offering those lower APRs. On that note, Gary Black was able to confirm with Tesla IR, the present value of the discounted loan rate is accounted for upfront at the time of sale so discounting a Tesla by $5,000 compared to offering a low cost loan impacts Tesla earnings about the same. As Gary said, the low APR offers don't impact residual values and Tesla can end those at any time but as we said heading into quarter to earnings don't forget about the margin impact that those low APR rates were likely to have.
On the financials, it's true that Wall Street has been modeling a bit more for Tesla energy and getting excited about Robotaxi potential but it's plain as day that this line right here, auto gross margin X credits is still largely driving the stock. Going into quarter to many analysts were expecting this line to have bottomed in quarter one and that was certainly not the case. Operating margin is a line we should be looking at every quarter because that's what Tesla has said they're currently optimizing for. The headline number was 6.3% which was below expectations but if we remove that $622 million restructuring charge that was from the layoffs, the operating margin would have been 8.7% the best reading in the past four quarters.
I know people will argue that the regulatory credits were a lot higher than expected so those two can effectively be awash because $350 million of that restructuring charge was expected heading into Q2. But the reason I don't look at it that way is because the restructuring charge really is a one off that should be backed out. The regulatory credits have been going on now for years and based on what legacy auto is doing, in this case not doing, I think those regulatory credits will proceed into the future. There certainly could be policy changes but Tesla said on the call they're planning their business as if all of these IRA benefits and regulatory credits could go away. This is not a number that Tesla reports but one that I like to track, regulatory credits as a percentage of operating income this quarter it was up at 55.5%.
Again though even if you take the restructuring costs out of this equation that number still would have been 40% a new high for Tesla and if you can't tell we want this number to be low. While these regulatory credits may be around for another few years at some point they are indeed likely to go away so this number shows you kind of the true health of Tesla's business without those red credits. We learned the Cybertruck is expected to reach profitability by the end of this year which means for the rest of the year the Cybertruck will indeed boost Tesla's average selling price but it's also going to be a drag meaning it'll be increasing Tesla's cost of goods sold. It's not profitable now they're selling it for around $110,000 so the Cogs per unit is potentially north of $100,000.
So when it comes to the sexy lineup there really isn't that much more room to take off any more Cogs which means barring a demand spike and price increases we really are in this waiting period for next generation vehicles and products. While Tesla energy has largely been the star of the show as of late one thing to keep in mind on much greater energy revenue and profit for the quarter the gross margin came in flat quarter over quarter which likely means we're seeing the beginning of the impact of Tesla reducing the mega packed price dating back to last year. Over that time the pricing for the mega pack has effectively been cut in half so it's going to be interesting to watch this energy gross margin number balancing the price cuts with the recognition of these UPOs. Tesla stock closed the day at $215.99 down 12.33% while the Nasdaq was down 3.64%.
We'll wait and see how Wall Street updates their Tesla EPS expectations for this year to look at the forward PE ratio but annualizing quarter two gap and non-gap has Tesla's forward PE over 100. That number could certainly run up to three four five hundred in the future it's been in the thousands before but based on Tesla's current earnings per share growth and the expectations I would say that's very unlikely. I did buy some shares today but I think there could be some weakness for Tesla stock in the weeks ahead a retest of 200 is certainly on the table and if it breaks through 170s are back in play. Not financial advice just sharing where I'm coming from I did use some of my dry powder today after this move but definitely not all of it as I think there could be better opportunities ahead.
To clarify one more thing Elon said he said that Tesla's self-driving capability that's been deployed in Europe and other regions is significantly behind that in the US. All he was saying was that in geographies outside of North America they have dumbed down versions of Tesla's FSD whether it's just autopilot or just enhanced autopilot. He was not saying the full version of Tesla's FSD is significantly behind for other regions because it for some reason would need to be trained on their specific data. Then the team went on to explain how adding new video data from new geographies won't really impact FSD that much it's built to work really anywhere on the planet or even another planet. And Elon did say he thinks that they'll get regulatory approval to release FSD in Europe, China and other countries before the end of this year but we'll see.
Tying back to earlier in the video though if that happens Tesla would likely need a lot more training compute once they get to wide release with FSD and Europe and China. Just be prepared for the potential storm that is looming if Tesla gets to a point where they're scrambling for Nvidia Compute.
As Vibov said the future is still as bright as ever but patience will be required. Hope you guys have a wonderful day please like the video if you did you can find me on X-linked below and a huge thank you to all of my patreon supporters.