Today, I know many of you are joining live. If you are checking this out afterward, you can check out the timestamps below. We'll fast forward then to when earnings actually come out, some of the financial review and things like that as well. So definitely looking forward to earnings today. It's good to be back. Obviously the last time we would have done an episode would have been for the last earnings report.
So quite a bit has happened since then. We'll spend a few minutes here before market close and before the earnings report comes out to chat about some of those things. If anyone has questions for me, feel free to put those in the chat right now and I'll take a look at some of those as we go.
Hopefully everything's working okay though. I'm always a little bit nervous when doing this since it only happens every three months. Make sure the audio's good. But definitely looking forward to it. Obviously the stock down a bit today, 1.6% right now, still a little bit before market close, but as you can see here, we're performing identically to the NASDAQ right now, which when you consider Tesla's beta is actually an outperformance of what Tesla's beta normally would be.
So, obviously we've seen a bit of a decline in the share price since the Wii Robot event on October 10th. But at least for today, this seems to be more of a market move than anything related to earnings. But of course the biggest move will happen after earnings. So, as we usually do, we'll go through the report as always not any financial advice contained in there, but happy to share some of my thoughts as we get those things.
So, I'm gonna just take a look at the chat here, but I think of course people are gonna be curious about the Robot taxi event. I did get a chance to go to that. So did get a chance to go in the cyber cab and do one of the test drives there. I think Tesla announced that they did over 1,300 unsupervised rides that evening, which is great to see. Obviously closed course at Warner Brothers Studios.
And I think for those of us that have followed the progress with FSD, not anything terribly surprising in terms of that functionality in an environment like that. But just for people that may not be aware of this, it wasn't necessarily just like you're going and it's this predefined route and things like that. There were definitely people walking around and things that were complicating the environment more than a normal closed course might be. And they also, when you got into the cyber cab, let you select from a few different destinations, I think there were three or four that you could choose to go to.
So it wasn't just one predetermined route, there were multiple routes. And then obviously as cars go throughout the night, they are sitting for different periods of time and departing at different periods of time. So there are things that are a little bit more complicated rather than just like you're getting in this one car and it's going in this one spot at the exact same time with no interference. There were other things to manage throughout the night that seemed like Tesla managed very well. So that part of it was exciting.
In terms of the overall just vehicle, I was really impressed with it. I think it was roughly what I expected. I mean, from the Walter Isaacson biography, obviously we got that sort of side profile view of prototype. This vehicle very closely aligns with that. So I didn't think anything with the design was too surprising. I definitely expected two-seater, no steering wheel, things like that. There's definitely a lot of cargo space here, which I think will be really nice.
I'm sure people have read things about the two-seat design. I think it completely makes sense with I think 90% of trips being just one occupants. For those that are more, obviously there will be Model 3, there will be Model Y, SNX, Cybertruck, et cetera. So there will be a variety of vehicles that are available on a future Tesla network. Should that come to fruition?
This vehicle would really be primarily meant for the vast majority of trips that are just single person. Maybe it's going to work, just going to get groceries, whatever the case may be, things like that. So I'm definitely happy with that choice to do two-seeds. And overall the vehicle, I mean, it looks really cool. I think obviously there's a lot of thought that went into the production process. If you look at the interior, it's extremely simple interior, but when you're actually in the vehicle, it was very comfortable.
It feels like a premium experience because what you're comparing it to is an Uber ride. So unless you're getting an Uber Black or something like that, then this is going to be a much, much better experience. And even then, I would personally prefer an experience like this. You have this giant screen right here, which is really nice. Of course, Tesla's going to put effort into sound quality and all of those sort of things as they usually do. So the entertainment value will be good and just not having to deal with another person and a stranger driving you around. I think most people will find that to be also a premium experience, but obviously ultimately this should significantly lower the cost. So hopefully you're getting a more premium experience lower cost with a Robotaxy service like this. And obviously that's kind of the whole of your grill for Tesla to be able to take pretty much all of that market potentially. So I was excited with the design.
I guess one of the things that I wonder about is the width of the door opening here. So Tesla obviously went with the hinge upward doors. It's not clear exactly how far those open relative to what a normal door design would be. I think what Tesla's probably doing here is wanting to get it up and out of the way of maybe curbs or things like that that would maybe most commonly impact sort of a Robotaxy environment. Because these vehicles are probably not going to be going into parking spaces all that often. So hopefully the width of the door isn't really all that important. Obviously if you're getting out and maybe there's traffic on one side of the vehicle that could be a concern. But you can always just get out the other side like you would with an Uber or something like that. So hopefully it's not too big of a deal. But one thing to think about certainly, and again, I think Tesla has certainly thought about that and probably made this design to help avoid sort of those lower obstructions that maybe people wouldn't be as aware of when exiting a vehicle.
So yeah, I was happy with the event. Robovan, I think it looks awesome. I think there's definitely a use case for that type of a vehicle. I'm kind of writing it off for now because I just think that this is going to be the priority obviously, CyberCAD and developing the software to get that operational. That's what matters the most. So that's going to be the focus. I think Robovan is just an exciting concept that could potentially come years after that. So I'm putting that sort of on the back burner on the horizon. It's nice to see Tesla's concept for it, but we've seen concept vehicles like the Roadster and the CyberTruck that have taken many years to come to fruition. So I certainly don't expect the Robovan on any sort of very quick timeline.
So those are kind of my thoughts on the event. Outside of that, Optimus, I mean, phenomenal progress there. Now, obviously there was some teleoperation going on probably in terms of selecting different types of movements. I'm not sure exactly to what extent I think Tesla's confirmed that a little bit too. And then I think of course the voice interactions, those seem like they were just people talking through the bot. I think Tesla was more demonstrating just the progress in hardware and then trying to give an overall vision of what this is going to lead to because even integrating a large language model today, something from XAI most likely, it wouldn't be too far off of what we saw. Now, still a lot of ways to go to really feel like human interaction, but for those that have fallen kind of the AI space, and certainly what chat GPT has done recently with their voice mode, it's not a stretch to think about integrating that into Optimus. And that's I think what Tesla's kind of trying to demonstrate where this is all going.
And then just in terms of the hardware, again, I think tremendous progress. It wasn't too long ago where Optimus was really just a person in a suit. And then of course, about a year after that, Tesla I think brought it out on stage. And of course it's tethered and going slowly and things like that. And now just a couple of years later, we've got, I think there were like 20 of them. Maybe I'm getting mixed up with the cybercab number, but something in that ballpark out and about untethered, interacting with people. So it shows Tesla's confidence in the progress of the hardware, which I think has been really, really fast paced over the last couple of years. And I think it was a positive surprise from that event. So a lot to be excited about with Optimus, lots to be excited about with cybercab.
As I posted when the cybercab or when the Rubik's XE event was delayed though, for me, it's interesting to see the hardware. I'm excited about the vision of the future. Ultimately it still comes down to can the software get the job done? And that is what we're watching with the progress of FSD. So that's the most important thing. Relating to any of this, Optimus, a little bit separate, the hardware progress there is extremely important. But for me, what's most important for the entire Tesla story right now is that FSD progress. And I think that's been happening. Hopefully version 13 is another step forward. I know we've got a lot of things going on in Texas in terms of bringing more compute online.
And I'm sure we'll read a little bit more about that in the earnings reports today. But event or no event, that I think is the most important area of focus right now, is just getting that completed. So we'll continue to monitor FSD progress very closely. All right, did see a couple of super chats in here. Thank you guys for that. Let's see. Do you have comments on your experience of FSD? Yeah, for sure. So I think, you know, I've talked before about version 12, specifically 12.3.6.
That was kind of the, you know, initial neural network version. That version for me was a massive, massive step forward here in Chicago. I posted a couple of videos of those, you know, on St. Patrick's Day, my experience there and a huge step forward. Since then, it seems like the progress has been a little bit slower. It's really tough to tell though, because 12.3.6 didn't necessarily have kind of like the speed control issues that we're starting to see in these later versions, which are much more inconvenient on sort of a day-to-day usage level. So a lot of the time when I feel like I'm making some adjustment, it's related to, for me, going under the speed limit. That's not how people drive in Chicago, obviously.
So that's been more where I've had to intervene. And then that kind of distorts my perception of like how well the system is doing. But that doesn't mean that there hasn't been progress or that it's not operating in a safer way. Certainly both of those things could be true. It's just more difficult for me to kind of make that assessment when I am having to kind of intervene for speed reasons. I've got hardware three, I don't think end-to-end on the highway is out on hardware three yet. So I haven't been able to test that out, but excited for that, that's obviously another huge milestone that probably wouldn't be appreciated enough. You know, widely speaking.
So I'm excited to eventually try that out. I may have to upgrade to a hardware four car here as they're starting to deviate a little bit. I've definitely been pondering that. If anyone wants to use my referral code, it's in the link that maybe helps push me over the edge because obviously Tesla just suggested the referral program a bit. So we'll see. I wouldn't be shocked if I do upgrade this quarter though. It would probably be a Model 3 again. So Cybertruck doesn't really make sense for my use cases in Chicago, unfortunately, as much as I would like to. We're gonna cleanse things for the super chat. Thank you, Shami, appreciate that.
But yeah, we've got a couple of minutes till market close here. We'll look through the chat for some other questions and then hopefully we'll get into the earnings report just a few minutes after that. I feel like half this chat is like politics right now. The election won't be over soon. Why haven't you known FST transfer to hardware four? I'm considering it. I'm very strongly considering it. Okay, so before market close, let's just hop over to Excel, so we can do a little preview of what we'll talk about later. As we normally do, once the earnings report comes out, we'll go through the shareholder letter, then we'll take a closer look at the financials, put it into the sort of simplification summary sheet here. Just quickly looking at sort of analyst consensus expectations, they are expecting a bit of an improvement on the bottom line from last quarter up from 52 cents, non-gap earnings per share up to about 60 cents. I've seen it seems like, I don't know, kind of whisper or consensus seems to be like a little bit lower than that. My expectations, I haven't done it as a detail of a forecast this quarter. I'd probably expect a little bit lower than that too, but you never really know when you're talking bottom line and we've talked about this many times, but sometimes it's overrated in terms of it's important in terms of it's importance.
Like last quarter, for example, there was the $622 million restructuring charge and there was $890 million in regulatory credits. Neither of those things are something that we would expect to be consistent on a go forward basis. They don't really have that much to do with the fundamental health of the business, but they have massive impacts on the bottom line. So I think the bigger number to focus on is automotive gross margin X credits, as usual, that's a little bit more of an indicator of the health of the business.
And we've continued to see that decline over the last couple of quarters. So I think people are gonna be looking for that to stabilize or at least not decline as quickly. Tesla did a lot of things with financing last quarter. So it'd be interesting to see how that comes through. And then as Cybertruck ramps up too, that's gonna affect average selling price, cost to get sold, auto gross margins, as that becomes a bigger part of the total.
But we're still pretty early in the ramp, right? So there's still a lot of progress on cost to be made. I would assume that they're close to break even, maybe just continuing to lose money in the third quarter. And then this fourth quarter, obviously we've seen the transition from foundation series into just the normal pricing. So there's gonna have to be a significant progress on costs to offset that decline in average selling price for Cybertruck this quarter, which again will continue to be more impactful as it grows as a percentage of the total vehicle deliveries. All right, so markets closed. Let's see, I'll switch back over to the browser. I'll see if earnings comes out yet. Sometimes I feel like the stock price is the best place to see if it's actually out because sometimes the website doesn't, don't get excited, that's Q2.
Sometimes the website doesn't update immediately, at least on my end. So we'll keep refreshing the shareholder website. This is Q2, I just have the same URL here for Q3, that seems to be the quickest way to usually get it. But we'll keep an eye on it here. Let's read it through the chat while we wait here for a minute. FSD Montreal, thank you, appreciate that. We'll appreciate that. Cheryl just meeting, yes, that would have been a while ago. I can't remember, but I do appreciate it. And Bill as well, thank you. All right, a little movement after hours, probably nothing release related yet.
But we'll keep watching. This is the last few quarters, as you usually got in and out pretty quickly after market close. I guess just last comments before we head into it. I don't have any high expectations for this quarter. We just had a massive product event. Like I said, FSD is the kind of the biggest focus here. Maybe afterward, if someone can try to remind me, if I don't remember, we can talk more about some of the sort of like other vehicle plans, because I've got some thoughts on that, just that have been rolling around my head since the Robotaxi event. So we can definitely talk about that.
But my expectations, again, they're not anything crazy here. People get really excited about earnings, what Tesla might say, what we might learn, which is great. We always love getting the updates, but at a certain point, we gotta also understand this is a required quarterly report. And the purpose of it is really just to update us on what has happened and not to give us any juicy tidbits necessarily about what's coming in the future. But we'll see. Looks like maybe something is out here.
All right, up 4%. So yeah, here we go. I'm gonna scroll down to the outlook section first. It's a little bit different than we normally would, but I just wanna see what's going on there. So I'm gonna also put Q2, just so we have this for comparison and we'll see. So plans for new vehicles, including more affordable models, remain on track for startup 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 lineup. This approach will result in achieving less cost reduction than previously expected, but enabled us to prudently grow our vehicle volumes in a more capex-efficient manner during uncertain times. This should help us fully utilize our current expected maximum capacity of close to 3 million vehicles, enabling more than 50% growth. Over 2023 production before investing in new manufacturing lines, our purpose-built Robotox taxi product will continue to pursue a revolutionary unboxed manufacturing strategy. So this looks to be probably identical language to the Q2 report there. So let's just again check in how the share price is doing. So a little bit of a pop there, up about 4% still. So let's go back and look through just a quick look at the financials. So we can see one of the reasons that things might have increased a bit. Earnings per share was 72 cents on a non-GAAP basis. So it was above the 60 cents consensus on the non-GAAP line. And then gap earnings per share, 62 cents, so no surprise there. Those are usually about 10 cents difference, just based off of stock-based compensation. So nothing too crazy there. Let's check out the revenue line, which was at 25,182, that compared to analysts' consensus of 25,290, so slightly below about $100 million or so. But operating margins, I can already see off the bat, it was about a 7.5% expectation from analysts. This is 10.8%. So really healthy operating margin there. Gap growth margin looks like it's probably a beat as well, which is probably helping drive that bottom line stuff. So we'll see as we go through what's driving those things, but it does look like at least pretty decent financial results so far.
And already I can see free cash flow here, $2.7 billion, which is really exciting. So obviously Tesla delivered more vehicles in the third quarter, significantly more in the third quarter than they did last quarter, which I think is definitely contributing to free cash flow. So let's go through and get back in order here and check out some of the highlights. So profitability, $2.7 billion gap operating income in the third quarter, 2.2 billion gap net income, 2.5 non-gap net income, operating cash flow of $6 billion, $6.3 billion, free cash flow of 2.7 and 2.9 billion increase in cash and cash equivalents at the end of the quarter. And then for operations, increased AI training compute by over 75% in Q3, love to see that. Cyber truck became the third best selling EV in Q3 in the US, behind Model 3 and Model Y, we already knew that. Over 2 billion miles, driven cumulatively on FSD as of Q3 with more than 50% on V12, which is of course the end-to-end neural network version, at least in cities for the majority.
All right, so summary, we delivered strong results in Q3 with growth in vehicles deliveries, both sequentially and year-on-year, resulting in record third quarter volumes. We also recognized our second highest quarter of regulatory credit revenues as other OEMs are still behind on meeting emissions requirements. So that's one of the first things that come to mind when you see a margin or operating margin beat is what the regulatory credit contribution was. Sounds like it's pretty significant. So we'll take a look at that in a minute. But our cost of goods sold per vehicle came down to its lowest level ever at about $35,100. That's really exciting because like, cyber truck is still contributing to drive that number up, which means there is still further room to improve and drive that even below 35,000 and continue to make progress on that as cyber truck ramps up.
They say, in order to continue accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy, we need to make EVs affordable for everyone, including making total costs of ownership per mile competitive with all forms of transportation. Preparations remain underway for our offering of new vehicles, including more affordable vehicles, more affordable models, which will be launching, which will begin launching in the first half of 2025. At our Wii Robot event on October 10th, we detailed our long-term goal of offering autonomous transport with the cost per mile below ride share personal car ownership and even public transit. The energy business achieved another strong quarter with record gross margin. Additionally, the mega factory in Lathrop produced 200 megapacks in a week and power wall deployments reach a record for the second quarter in a row as we continue to ramp power wall three.
Despite sustained macroeconomic headwinds and others pulling back on EV investments, we remain focused on expanding our vehicle and energy project lineup, product lineup, reducing costs and making critical investments in AI projects and production capacity. We believe these efforts will allow us to capitalize on the ongoing transition in the transportation and energy sectors. All right, so really exciting to hear about the energy gross margin. Let's take a look at that. Looks like revenue declined. We could have talked about that before. Not unexpected given Tesla's comments on the last earnings call. As we've talked about, it's pretty, I don't know, batchy, probably not the word I'm looking for, but fluctuates a lot from quarter to quarter. So sometimes when we see these massive increases, no surprise to see it come back down in the following quarter, but we'll take a look in a second at what the overall storage deployments were.
So maybe we can find that sheet here first. So one thing to mention, even though production did outpace deliveries, seeing cashflow still be positive $2.7 billion while some of that cashflow is being used for production that exceeded deliveries, extremely positive there. So very happy with that cashflow. I'm curious what these regulatory credits are because it must have been pretty significant. We'll come back and look at that. Let's see if I can type correctly. It's gonna be here somewhere. All right, 739 million. So that's the regulatory credit sales number. That's down from 890 million last quarter. So less significant, which since we're seeing strong financial results here, I'm glad that that is less significant and a minute we'll go through the financials in the summary sheet and that'll work through automotive gross margin X credits. So we can take a look at that.
But as you can see, definitely higher than probably the 450 million or so average that we had been seeing prior to last quarter sort of over the last year prior to that. Definitely a little bit higher, but probably only two, 300 million higher, which will certainly be backed out in terms of future expectations. But it's also good to see it be somewhat consistently higher here over the last two quarters, because hopefully that can kind of persist. If you look at some of these 500, 400s, these are higher than they used to be too. So if going forward Tesla can make $750 million a quarter on regulatory credit revenue, great. That's real money. I can put that towards CapEx. I can put that towards anything else in their business. So it's not that it's not important. It's just also important to understand how the business looks without that regulatory credit revenue, because obviously regulations can change. Competition can change, although they seem to be changing in the incorrect direction. But those things can fluctuate a bit over time.
All right. So I think we already talked mostly about this. We'll again come back to that in the more detailed look of the financials, but looking at the summary, total revenue up 8% year over year, revenue impacted by growth in vehicle deliveries, growth and energy storage and service in others, services and other, higher FSD revenue recognition year over year for releases related to Cybertruck and certain features such as actually Smart Summon. So that could be something that's also contributing to maybe a higher than expected financial performance here. High regular credit revenue we talked about, offset a bit by reduced vehicle average selling price, excluding foreign exchange impact, which obviously expected. Profitability, operating income increased year over year to $2.7 billion, $10.8% operating margin, impacted by lower cost per vehicle, including lower raw material costs, freight and duties and other one time charges, growth and energy and services, higher FSD revenue recognition, growth and vehicle deliveries, regular storage credit, decrease in operating expenses, including cost reduction efforts. And again, that's year over year. So quarter over quarter, obviously we're probably seeing a drop to zero in that $622 million restructuring charge that we had last quarter, which is gonna improve things sequentially, but this is again, talking year over year.
Quarter end cash we talked about, but nice to see that, continue to increase $33.6 billion cash and cash equivalents at the end of the quarter. All right, so storage deployed, that's actually right in line with analyst consensus, which is, I was already kind of laughing at, so 6.9 gigawatt hours, and that is the actual as well. So well done analysts on that forecast. Inventory, we're able to calculate that prior to quarter, or once we get the delivery numbers, so no surprise on that, but staying pretty stable, 19 days of supply and inventory and continuing to see growth in locations, service fleet and charging availability as well. Still growing 20% year over year on charging.
So I know there's a lot of worry about that with the supercharging team adjustments, but still going strong there on supercharging. All right, so let's take a look at this installed annual vehicle capacity chart, compared to last quarter. Try to match these up. Looks like the formatting is a little bit different, could just be in Safari, but. Okay, so 100,550, yup, yup, Shanghai, greater than 950, yup, Berlin, greater than 375, yup, greater than 250 in Texas and greater than 125, yup, all in production, yup, yup. Pilot production on Tesla Semi, so that matches. It's been nice to see the progress there though, in Nevada, action platform and roadster and development. Yeah, so that's all the same as last quarter, but let's look through the slide here. So vehicle capacity, production and delivery volumes, both returned to year on a year growth in Q3, also produced our 7 millionth vehicle on October 22nd. So, we're still doing Tesla daily, that would be a nice little clue for us to work in a production, but it's so early in the quarter, just three weeks there in the Q4, it doesn't really tell us a whole lot, but definitely an awesome milestone for Tesla. Continue to add to our vehicle lineup by expanding the options for new vehicle trims and paint for Model 3 and Model Y. In the US, refresh Model 3 RAM continued successfully in Q3 with higher total production and lower cost of goods sold a quarter of a quarter, which is great to see, cyber truck production increase sequentially and achieved a positive gross margin for the first time.
That's awesome, that's a really, really, really positive thing to see because obviously we've now seen them reduce the price very significantly. If they weren't already hitting positive gross margin, it would just be an even steeper climb to try to get those costs down with this price reduction, which is on the order of $20,000 I think. So, it means there needs to be a lot of costs cutting associated with that. So, for them to have achieved positive gross margin, that's phenomenal. It makes me much more excited about what can be accomplished at these lower pricing price points for the current cyber truck. Preparation of the semi-factory continues and remains on track with builds scheduled to start by the end of 2025. So, that's great. Very excited about the semi. Shanghai factory recently achieved two notable milestones, producing its 3 millionth vehicle in October and exporting its 1 millionth vehicle in September. Cost of goods sold per vehicle at the Shanghai factory improved sequentially to its lowest level ever. That's great. Cost of goods sold per vehicle improved sequentially at Gigabirlin as of Q3, Model Y as the most sold vehicle of any type in 2024 in Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland, and was the best selling vehicle in Europe in the month of September. Additionally in Q3, Model Y became the best selling EV of all time in Norway, which now has over 60,000 units on the road. And then we can see the market share levels here. No surprise, these have kind of started to plateau out a little bit. We're not obviously seeing much growth right now in Model 3 and Model Y. So I'm not terribly surprised that this is not changing too much since those are not completely plateaued, but obviously slowing significantly in their growth till we kind of get to the next stage, which we've talked about many times.
All right, core technology, this slide ever more important each quarter, but in Q3, we released the 12.5 series of FSD with improved safety comfort, thanks to increased data and training compute, a five times increase in parameter count and other architectural choices that we plan to continue scaling in Q4, released actually Smart Summon and FSD supervised to Cybertruck customers, including N10 neural nets for highway driving for the first time. We deployed in our training ahead of schedule on a 29,000 H100 cluster at Giga Texas, where we expect to have 50,000 H100 capacity by the end of October. So obviously that's just a week from now, roughly. So nice to see continued scaling there and hopefully that allows progress with FSD to continue to increase in terms of the rapidity of it, which we'll definitely keep an eye on.
All right, vehicle and other software are summer release, included YouTube and Amazon music as a native apps. Parents can now enable parental controls via PIN to apply maximum speed limit, reduce acceleration to chill, force enable safety settings, force enable safety settings and enable curfew notifications. Other new features include hands-free frunk, revamped climate controls for Model 3 and Model Y, weather forecast, air quality and improvements to in vehicle navigation, and then battery power train and manufacturing in October, we unveiled our CyberCab and RoboVan vehicles, both designed from the ground up for autonomy without a steering wheel or pedals. CyberCab will be built on our next generation platform, which includes a new power train with an estimated 5.5 miles per kilowatt hour. This will be our most efficient power train yet.
In Q3, we produced our 100 millionth 4680 cell and continued to progress our dry cathode manufacturing lines. I believe I'd probably have to go back and check, but I believe that 100 millionth 4680 cell was already announced by Tesla. So I don't think that's anything new. The 5.5 miles per kilowatt hour, that had been, I think, told to top gear and I think they had published it. So we did know that if you'd been following along closely, but I think first, official confirmation that we've heard from Tesla, I also wouldn't be too surprised if they were able to beat that in many use cases. Obviously that's a pretty significant improvement though over Model 3, Model Y, et cetera, which would be maybe not four, probably a little bit higher than four miles per kilowatt hour. It depends how you're dusting it to, obviously, whether it's EPI or Real World or whatever else. Anyway, looking at some of the charts here, so FSD version 12 miles and FSD miles, you can see, I think they now said that, key me relatively, half those miles are on FSD 12, which is a great more data to train future versions. And then we get a nice look at the expanding capacity. So this is something we spend a lot of time talking about when Tesla Daily was doing daily content, but around this time we were talking about how Tesla's compute capacity was gonna increase minifold, and we're now seeing that play out, and we're really in the early stages of seeing this massive increase, you know, whatever we're, I don't know, 3,000 here to 30,000 here. So you've got a 10 times improvement, just sort of, you know, year over year when we're in Q1, Q2 timeframe, and then we're seeing another tripling of that just in the last six months. So it takes Tesla time to bring that online. It takes time to be able to fully utilize that capacity and then be able to ship that into the vehicles and then use the new software to collect even more new data and then run it back through. So it takes time for us to start to like really see the effects of this compute capacity. The real world software and the improvements in it are going to lag behind whatever this curve looks like. So this curve is really steep. What you kind of hope to see then is that, all right, shift it out a year and you see sort of a similar curve in the software. Maybe not a year, but like, maybe you shift it three months, six months, whatever. And you start to see those really significant improvements that you see with this. And Ashuk has mentioned this before, just in terms of like the multiple different parts of the architecture that they feel scaling laws apply to. And this is just one of those areas. I think you mentioned four or five. That might have been a Q1 or Q2 earnings call, but hopefully there's multiple different things that are also scaling in a similar way that can really help with FSD here over the next few months. So it's a very exciting time seeing this come online. And hopefully we're in the early stages of seeing the effects of that in the actual product, which has definitely gotten a lot better in 2024.
All right, other highlights, energy and services and other businesses are becoming increasingly profitable parts of Tesla. We'll take a look at the energy growth margin a little bit here in a minute, when we go through the financials, because they did say that was all time high. So as energy storage products continue to ramp up and our vehicle fleet continues to grow, we are expecting continued profit growth from these businesses over time. So the energy business achieved a record gross margin of 30 and a half percent in Q3. There we go, we don't need a cow getting anymore. We still will, but nice to see it there. So that's awesome. I mean, that's far above now where automotive has been. Even probably the best automotive has ever been. I'm not even sure it ever really crossed that 30% level. So incredibly impressive.
And what's even better about the energy business is that it gets to leverage all of the fixed costs, not all of them, but a lot of the fixed costs that Tesla has from the automotive business. So if this were a standalone business, this would already be a very healthy gross margin, but since it gets to leverage a lot of Tesla's other costs, it means even more of this gross margin actually flows through to the net income, operating margin, things like that. So extremely impressive there. Hopefully we can continue to see this hold up, which it looks like Tesla is saying here, continued profit growth from these businesses over time. I guess they're not saying margin rate, but increased profit could mean more dollars, lower rate. So a little bit less clear on that, but if this holds up or continues to improve, that's extremely exciting. So anyway, that increased about 600 basis points, quarter over quarter, yeah, sequentially, despite lower megapack volumes, which as we talked about that can fluctuate a lot. So hopefully next quarter, we could even see a higher number with even more gross margin, which would be awesome.
Powerwall achieved record deployments and Q3 for the second quarter in a row. That's great. Ramp of Powerwall 3 and laythrough up mega factory continued successfully with laythrough up demonstrating 200 megapack production, which is a 40 gigawatt hour annual run rate, which is of course like the name plate capacity for laythrough up. I think there's probably room to actually get even more out of that if they're already hitting this 200 number. I think there's probably some room to increase that further. As of Q3, over 100,000 Powerwalls were enrolled in virtual power plants programs, delivering additional financial value to owners while providing much needed support on the grid during periods of stress. The Shanghai mega factory remains on track to begin shipping megapacks in Q1 2025. So only a couple of quarters away there, which should really, really help continue the growth that we're seeing in energy, really strong growth over the last couple of years. So Shanghai mega factory keep that going. Maybe that's gonna dip the energy margins for a little bit as that ramps up, just like we would see an automotive when a new product ramps up. But once that does, and I'm sure it will go pretty quickly because it's Shanghai, should be a nice contributor.
All right, services and other. The services and other business achieved a record gross profit in Q3 growing over 90% year on year sequential growth and gross profit was driven mostly by higher gross profit generation from supercharging, service center margin improvement, and higher gross profit generation from parts, sales, and merchandise. Supercharging network continued to expand in Q3 with over 2,800 new stalls in the quarter, 22% growth of the network year over year. So that's awesome. We'll look at the service margin a little bit more closely too in the financials.
All right. We went through the product outlook here. We'll just take a look at the other ones. I'm guessing these are largely the same. But for volume, our company is currently between two major growth waves. The first one began with the global expansion of the Model 3 slash Y platform. And we believe the next one will be initiated by advances in autonomy and introduction of new products, including those built on our next generation vehicle platform. Despite ongoing macroeconomic conditions, we expect to achieve slight growth in vehicle deliveries in 2024. Energy storage deployment, as expected, are more than double year over year in 2024.
好的。我们已经看过产品前景了。现在我们来看看其他方面。我猜应该大体相同。但就销量而言,我们公司目前处于两个主要增长浪潮之间。第一个增长浪潮是以 Model 3/Y 平台的全球扩张为起点。我们相信,下一个增长浪潮将由自动驾驶技术的进步和新产品的推出所推动,包括基于我们下一代车辆平台的新产品。尽管宏观经济形势依旧存在挑战,我们预计在2024年车辆交付量会略有增长。预计在2024年,能源储存部署将同比增长一倍以上。
All right. So that's probably something that's helping the stock here a little bit too. Let me make sure I'm on the right report still. Didn't get mixed up, but yep, this is still Q3. So this is basically giving Q4 guidance. We would have to work through the math on what total year deliveries were last year, subtract out year to date deliveries this year. That basically will give us the guidance for Q4. I think there was some skepticism that Tesla would be able to achieve that, but it seems like they're pulling some pretty significant demand levers here already pretty early in the quarter. If those get pulled even harder, as things go throughout the quarter, certainly seems like something that's possible as Tesla's guiding here.
Just taking a quick look. All right, stock up 9% now. That's awesome. It's been a while since we've had an earnings report like this. I think there was a lot of, I think I said even before this, I didn't have high expectations for this. So maybe it's just a factor of people's expectations being so low going into something. Sometimes you get the reverse of what you expect. But nice to have one. We'll see, obviously we've got the earnings called to go through as well. Sometimes those can change the trajectory a bit, but we'll see. Nice to see it up here after hours.
All right, cash, significant liquidity, strong balance sheet. Same stuff we always see. Profit continued to work to execute on innovations to reduce the cost of manufacturing and operations over time. Expect our hardware related profits to be accompanied by an acceleration of AI software and fleet-based profits. Same stuff there that we've seen in previous reports. So our apps up most of the text.
Let's take a look at some of the charts here. So not a chart that we see from Tesla frequently here, but looks like EV market share. Significant growth, but you can see outside of China, things have definitely tapered off. I think a lot of this coinciding with higher industries. And then obviously a lot of this is just Tesla itself having been responsible for a very large portion of this growth. And now that Model 3 and Model Y are currently sort of at a point where they're more closer to Platzel, less fast growth, obviously that's gonna impact the stuff too. China still growing, but obviously took a little bit of a recess from growth there in 2024 or earlier.
All right, so we've seen this stuff in the impact reports. This is just emissions from gas cars and robot taxi. Oh, so I guess that's new with the robot taxi. Normally we would see, although I think even in the impact reports before Tesla is kind of modeled that out of like what a ride share Model 3 would look like hypothetically. But you can just see, I don't know what the scale of this is, but maybe 15% something in that ballpark. Lifetime emissions versus gas vehicles. So obviously an electric vehicle moves that needle pretty far. And then if you can get even more use out on electric vehicle, it's gonna, you know, that sort of just compounds in terms of the emission savings.
So robot taxi, we've looked at these. Of course, nothing new there. There's the Robo van. I love it. Wireless charging, we can maybe talk a little bit more about that in the pros and cons. But as Tesla has said, in case anyone missed it, Tesla said that efficiency is well above 90% was sort of the direct words that they had said in terms of wireless charging. So hopefully something that can be implemented, you know, very efficiently and cost effectively, et cetera. There's optimist. This is the next generation hand. If you guys haven't seen this, this is the, I believe 20 degrees of freedom. That's something in that ballpark. This will be, I think version three of the optimist hand. So they had this sort of like sticking out of, I think a coffin just during the 10, 10 event. But there's a video of it. If you haven't seen that, go check it out. Definitely exciting to see, you know, a little preview of what's gonna be on the next generation optimist.
All right, seven millionth vehicle right there. Looks like that was done at Fremont. So congratulations. I'll test employees for that. Powerwall three. So here's Nevada with the semi. Awesome to see that progress. And then some of the quarterly charts and things like that.
Then we get into the detailed financials. So we'll come back to those for the spreadsheet portion. So we can hop into that. I do see some super chats here. I'll just take a quick look in case. Some of those are questions. I'll come back to them later, but in case it's relevant to what we kind of just walked through here might be better timing. But I do appreciate those. Let's see. I'm gonna miss these, but some of these, but I'll try to come back to any of that I do miss.
So Pete asking, do you think Elon is right? The Tesla will hit 20 million vehicles per year before 2030? No, I don't think that will happen. Even a few years ago, and that was really the goal. It was kind of a long shot. I think my model had something like, I don't know, 15 million or something like that when I kind of worked through it. But that was always a long shot, aspirational goal.
Tesla sets aggressive goals, tries to get there. And if you come out and set a goal of 20 and you hit 15, fantastic. But we've heard them back off that language or stop reiterating that type of language for probably the last year or so. I don't really think that's the target. I think they're trying to solve autonomy. And from there, they're gonna figure out the rest. That's the biggest thing that they're focused on. Not so much the specific volume.
Okay. All right, I think we're, again, there's more super chats here and I appreciate those, but I do wanna hop in on financials and keep this going. Once the earnings call does start, I'll do the same thing. It's gonna be on the channel and we'll do you, listen together, I'll take notes and we can talk about that afterward as well. That'll be linked in the description for this video.
But let's hop over to financials. The always the most fun and entertaining part of this review. Okay. I'm gonna take a look here. We've got 9500 people watching now. We'll see how many are watching once I'm done with this part. But we've got energy storage here. So I know it's not gonna be on your screen, but I'm just gonna be flipping back and forth and we'll get sort of the summary put together here.
We can take a look at margins, auto gross margin X credits. See how this is all flowing together pretty quickly here. So this energy storage revenue was, oh, so well, we know that one already. Great, nice forecast analysts. Auto sales, excluding regulatory credits. So just give me one second to pull those. So it's 18, 831. Ah, no, cause that doesn't include regulatory credits.
All right, so we know that's 739. So total would be 20, 016. So up a bit quarter over quarter, up a bit over last year. A little bit below analyst expectations, even with probably higher regulatory credits, than analysts expected. That's not something that's included in the consensus recap, unfortunately. Energy generation and storage, that's the 2376 right there. And then services and other is 2790.
So giving us our total revenue, just over 25.1, close to $25.2 billion. Again, about $100 million short of analyst consensus looks like mostly because of, or, you know, but yeah, I guess mostly because of, automotive sales coming in a little bit lower. So average selling price is probably a little bit lower than what analysts were expecting, but it seems like cost of goods sold probably were two.
So you win, and then you lose, and then it nuts out, hopefully towards a positive, with these automotive profit numbers. So we'll get those now, looking at cost of goods sold. Total automotive cost of revenue was 1590. So we'll just take that out of the revenue here. Energy, we should get a 30 and a half gross margin here. So 1651 was the cost. Nope.
Then services and other is 2544. So that gets us our 19.8, which checks out with what Tesla had said in the report. And then we get the 30 and a half on energy gross margin. So you can already see the biggest thing there. This is one of the most important numbers of every report and extremely exciting to see the 17.1% automotive gross margin X credits. So like I said, average selling price was probably a little bit lower, but it looks like Tesla was able to move costs down.
I think they said below 35,100, if I recall correctly. So you can see it's gonna be a massive, massive drop in costs of goods sold a quarter of a quarter. So in hindsight, it looks like Cybertruck was having a pretty big impact, getting that even to a slightly positive territory, probably massively helping with automotive gross margins. And again, in hindsight, probably was suppressing it more than what people had expected. Just my quick guess looking at these initially, but really, really exciting to see that.
I mean, that's a really big jump quarter over quarter, especially with all the financing activities and things like that that we saw Tesla do. What that means is Tesla has room to continue to do those types of things or even do more of them and still be in a healthy gross margin territory. Cause that's, for me, that's the biggest thing is that Tesla can fund all of the development that they're doing to get us to sort of that next stage of growth. That's what I've been talking about for probably the last year at least. Is that really is what this period is for, is funding all the CapEx that Tesla's doing for AI progress, funding development of the unboxed process, which will eventually happen with RoboTaxi.
Funding Optimus development, all the sort of stuff that's getting us to, just like Model 3 would have been part of the development process during the Model S and Model S bringing in funds for that X as well. We're in that same type of a period now where we're using our current products to generate this cash flow to support that next leg. And that next leg is very clear. Tesla's been very clear about what they view that as. So people should stay focused on that. And that's what this time period is all about. So 17.1%, fantastic.
Hopefully there's not any like one time things hiding in there. Now that I'm saying that there is potentially something in there with the FSD revenue recognition. So we'll put a little asterisk on that for the moment, but hopefully that's not that massively significant in this number. Now we probably won't know what that recognition number is until we get the 10Q. That should be out by next week. I don't, maybe even in the next couple of days. So keep a close eye on that.
We probably won't have like an episode of review that, but maybe I can post on X or something about it if I have a chance. So that's probably the one big thing that we need to keep an eye on is what that FSD revenue recognition amounted to this quarter. And then maybe take that out when we're looking at this automotive gross margin X credits. Because again, there's gonna be more FSD revenue to recognize, but it's not something that happens consistently every quarter. So 19.8% gross margin, obviously way, way above what analysts expected, even though revenue was a little bit lower, which means costs are coming in way, way lower than what was expected.
All right, so getting into sort of like the operating margin type of stuff. Let's look at R&D here quickly. We'll flip back to the report. So that was 10.39. So pretty consistent. We've been right around this billion dollar level, even a little bit lower. So that's gonna help operating margins. Selling general and administrative costs looks like those declined a little bit too. About $100 million quarter over quarter. And you can see R&D down 11% year over year, SG&A down 5% year over year. So good cost control, not surprising. Tesla's always great at cost control. And then we shouldn't, we do even have a little bit of restructuring costs here still flowing into the third quarter.
Obviously, last quarter, there were a lot of layoffs and things like that. So $622 million of restructuring costs last quarter, 55 million this quarter. So if you take that 55 million out, that's gonna improve 20 basis points or so in the operating margin, which is a clearer picture. Obviously, it doesn't mean much in terms of regulatory credits and things like that. But it's not nothing either. Maybe that's a fourth of the impact of higher than normal regulatory credits. So that's something that I wouldn't anticipate being around in Q4. So it actually helps even a little bit more. And then EBITDA, so 10.8 operating margin. Again, massive progress from where Tesla's been, which is great. And then the 7.5% expectation obviously was way lower than the actual.
All right, EBITDA, let's see. Just find this in the report quick. All right, 4665, very strong. About a billion dollars more in EBITDA than last quarter. Non-Gap net income was 2505. Stock based compensation. All right, so that's a little tricky to find it in here. There we go. That was 457, it looks like. So gap net income should be 2048. Which seems a little bit different. Hmm. Maybe I got the wrong stock point. All right, so that's a little bit more of a good idea. So that's a little bit more of a good idea. All right, so that's a little bit more of a good idea. Different, hmm. Maybe I got the wrong stock based compensation number here. One moment. Hmm. Interesting.
So unless I'm just completely not smart anymore, if I ever was, but I'll have to figure out what's going on there. We don't use those for much, but looks like this number needs to be adjusted a little bit. Something else other than stock based compensation, I think is affecting that. Unless I have the non-Gap number wrong. Hmm. Interesting. All right, well, I'll take a look at the chat. I'm sure someone here is better at accounting than me and understands why that is happening. But we'll continue forward and get into the bottom line here and then we can calculate price to earnings and things like that. So non-Gap earnings per share is 0.72. So obviously with higher than expected operating margins and gross margins, that's helping flow through to the bottom line here to 72 cents earnings per share on a gap basis. That's then 62 cents per share. So the only difference there should be stock based compensation.
Yeah, I don't know. Hmm. Just seeing if anyone knows. Anyone knows what's going on there. All right, I'll move forward. Free cash flow was 2742. So again, this is a phenomenal number, even though Tesla in the quarter produced more vehicles than they sold. Extremely strong free cash flow. That's probably the, I don't know if these numbers are gonna be right. This is like my old sheet, but. Yeah, that might be probably our highest free cash flow since Q3 2022.
So highest free cash flow in two years. That's nice. Okay, let's do ASP. So let me grab some of these numbers and then ASP will calculate for us. So auto revenue from leasing was 446 million. Was 446 million. Cogs from leasing. It's 247 million. And deliveries. Least. Find that here. 14,449. So that looks a little bit different than what Tesla had said. Getting nervous that my numbers aren't right here now. It's possible. These things should be right. I mean, I can check the formulas here, but. Auto revenue, auto revenue, X credits. Credits at leasing.
So. There we go. If I could just type, then I wouldn't have errors. Okay. Glad to double check that. So there we go. 35,106. So that aligns again with what Tesla had said. Those make more sense. Great. Okay, so 6% decline year over year in average selling price, but 6% decline in automotive cogs is great. So this excludes regular story credits. This excludes leasing. FSD revenue recognition, I think, would still get pulled into this. So it's probably helping increase the ASP. I think that's how it would end up being recognized. Obviously, that's a little bit weird when you're grouping something that's a recognition for past vehicle sales into the average selling price of things this quarter, but I think that's just how the math is probably unfolding in terms of how this is put together.
But let's say for now, $42,000 ASP, $35,100 average costs and obviously the revenue recognition, maybe there's a little bit of cost recognition associated with that, but probably not too significant. $1700 decline in average selling or average cost of goods sold this quarter, excluding regular story credits, excluding leasing. So that's a really phenomenal progress. We, you know, Tesla's been kind of chipping away. They've it's actually even increased a little bit here as Cybertruck probably ramped. That's probably what's driving those. But it seems like maybe not a breakthrough, but significant progress in probably the impact of Cybertruck costs this quarter, helping, helping do that. And then Model 3, right? Like that was recently refreshed. It's going to take Tesla time to work through that lower costs. And then just the volume as you, you know, deliver more and more vehicles, the volume is obviously going to help the gross margin from an economy of scale perspective. So really, really happy with that. Hopefully Tesla can continue to work that down even further.
Like I believe they said in the shareholder letter, these, this number is probably the single biggest factor of why the stock is responding so positively right now. I mean, you can look at this and you can say, yeah, it's a bottom line beat by 20%, right? Like fantastic. But what's driving that is, you know, lower costs on Tesla's vehicle sales. Which is letting them capture more margin, which is making the business stronger and healthier and probably most importantly, reflect reflects positively on what Tesla can accomplish from here with their current product lineup in terms of continuing to lower pricing, continuing to drive volume, which as volume goes higher, hopefully that improves costs. It's a very positive, very, very positive cycle, which is converse to how things have been trending, where you have these margin declines, you get all of the opposite sort of effects and concerns and things like that. So very, very happy to see to see that. That's, that's probably the biggest takeaway.
And again, that's flowing through to total gross margin. It's flowing through to operating margin. On the OpEx line, Tesla is definitely controlling operating expenditures, you know, really well. You can see operating costs here, even if you take out the 622, which I don't think that calculates. Oh, it does. So even if you take out these restructuring costs, you can see a Tesla was able to cut operating expenses by, you know, $130 million since last quarter, $300 million since two quarters ago. So, you know, Tesla's being very prudent with where the business is at right now in these operating costs. You know, $300 million is pretty significant when we're talking about these operating income numbers or these, or the net income numbers. So, you know, again, kudos to Tesla. That's not something that I've ever been concerned about. Like Tesla does a really good job keeping those things in line. Um, that's one of the reasons they're, you know, such a, such a healthy, strong business is, is that ability to do that. So good to see that continuing to reflect a strong number here. All right.
So yeah, the biggest thing, uh, this, this automotive gross margin, X credit, 17.1%, really strong number. Small asterisk is we need to see from the 10 key report how much FSD revenue recognition was, was in there. They did just say it was for cyber truck and actually smart summon. I can't imagine that's going to be a huge, huge number. I'd be pretty surprised. Um, although I think all the foundation series cyber trucks did have FSD. So, you know, if you've got an $8,000. Cost associated with, with that, I mean, we can project through the math. What, what were they like 24, 25,000 cyber trucks at that point? So I could be like $200 million of FSD. I don't think they would recognize it entirely. So maybe it's a hundred million. Don't know what percent Tesla recognizes, but, um, could be a decent amount. I'm hoping it's not so decent that it's making this, you know, look, look different than it really is in reality, but something to keep an eye on.
Okay. Let's see what the, see what the stock is doing here. We can hop back to the, the browser and then I'll just go through again, super chats and, uh, see what, what questions people have and things like that. Again, we will go through, uh, through earnings here as well. For those curious, we started at 9,500 before the financial or at 8,000 people watching now. So decent retention, I suppose for, uh, watching someone fill out a spreadsheet. Um, but hopefully the commentary is helpful. I mean, it helps me to go through those things. So that's why I do it. Um, Oh, well now it says 9,700. So I don't know. Maybe we gain a couple hundred people.
Okay. Uh, yeah, let's check out the stock. So up 8 and a half percent. So that's really nice. It's been a while. I don't, I don't remember the last time we had a, a really strong positive reaction to earnings.
Uh, again, we still have to get through the call, but, uh, I think that's a positive. All right. One thing I do want to talk about, um, before the kind of getting into the question, so let's look at kind of this product outlook section. And I just want to tell people like kind of where my, my head is at.
So plans for new vehicles, including more affordable models remain on track for start of production in the first half of 2025. Okay. And I think even up here, they said maybe even what deliveries are. We will be even launching in the first half of 2025. So I get not super clear on what launching means. Maybe that means launching production. Maybe it means launching orders, deliveries, whatever else.
Uh, but new products for staff 2025, having that reiterated is great. Um, now, what does that actually mean? I think a lot of people are thinking that's like a model to or like a cybercab with like a steering wheel, probably not many people think that for that timeline. But, um, I think if it were some significantly new vehicle, uh, we probably would have seen something about it by now or Tesla probably would have had to have talked about it by now, just given the sort of timing from unveiling to release that kind of needs to happen.
I think the quickest that's ever been for Tesla is probably the model Y, which maybe was nine months. I'd have to go back and look at that, but it was, it was very, very quick from sort of product unveiling to real startup production.
So we're now definitely in that if we're talking about the first half of 2025, uh, where we, you know, if there was some new vehicle, I think we probably would have seen that new vehicle. We're starting to get more into like the refresh timelines, right? Like what we've seen for, for the Highland Model 3, uh, for the updated SNX when, you know, when that was announced at an earnings call, uh, probably, I don't know, was that three years ago now? I can't even remember, but, um, that's where I'm kind of like putting my expectation is, is some sort of, some sort of an update to what Tesla is doing with, with Model 3 and Model Y.
And maybe there's some sort of variation of, of those vehicles that they, they then add. I don't know. I'm just trying to at least for my own expectations and hopefully other people just keep them a little bit lower and not necessarily just expecting that all of a sudden out of nowhere in six months, we're going to have this brand new. $25,000 car vehicle, right? Like that's, that's something that I think seems pretty unlikely.
I think, I think Tesla's strategy is. Maximize volume on this, on their current production lines, however they can do that, whether it's adding, you know, whether it's a refresh or whatever. Um, how can they cut costs out of that? How can they go to new markets? How can they just really maximize the volume on those current lines and try to get it up to that 3 million vehicle per year level, which I think maybe it's not designed for, but is designed to be able to accommodate that type of volume, uh, sort of in the current footprint that Tesla has.
If they were going to do some $25,000 vehicle, like what maybe people had expected for a long time, that's, that's just a different type of project. That's something where you need probably an additional factory, like a gig of Mexico, which, you know, obviously we're, we're not seeing that, um, that really happen at any significant scale.
Now, I know Tesla's got giga Texas and I know that some of the reporting was that the initial $25,000 car would be a giga Texas. A lot of those things make sense, but. If you're going to invest, I don't know how many billions of dollars in something that would eventually require a new factory, require new lines, require this new process, uh, we'd, we'd be seeing things like that.
So, uh, just something to that scale doesn't seem to make sense. It doesn't seem to fit with what Tesla is talking about here. So just urging caution on that point, which means if Tesla, we're going to do something like that, do a $25,000 car, do the cybercab with maybe a steering wheel. I know a lot of people think that maybe that's something that could happen. Uh, and obviously it could, but.
I think Tesla's at the point now and it he lands at the point now where he's confident enough in FSD to maybe not like bet the company, but like bet this, this next generation product lineup on achieving FSD. I think that's what he wants to do. I think he wants the company. I think he wants the forcing function of, of having no steering wheel of, of not having like a backup plan that they can just throw a steering wheel into this vehicle. I think it's really just built to be a robot taxi.
That's what it's going to be. I, I would be surprised if there's a cybercab that ships with a steering wheel. Um, and certainly not my expectation in this, you know, sort of next six month period. Um, and the reason I think that is because I could, I don't know, I should probably just do like an episode on this in general, but. I think Elon, like if, if you, back to the, the CapEx point, something like a $25,000 car, let's call it even a $30,000 car. The infrastructure required for that and to produce, you know, let's say like four million of those per year, or something like that, three or four million. Um, you have billions of dollars in CapEx. You've got so much time going into that from an engineering perspective. Um, it's going to cannibalize the current lineup. As soon as people know about that, people are going to be waiting for that. And then once it's in production, it's going to make the Model three and Model Y even more difficult to sell.
Um, just like what we've seen with SNX, when the three and Y came, right? Like that has obviously significantly impacted the upside for, for SNX, uh, for good reason, right? Like the, the Model three and the Model Y are better value vehicles. And if you had something like a Model three or a Model Y at a cheaper price, it's just going to make three in the Y that much more difficult to sell. So you've got those kinds of challenges. You've got a charge at like human resource challenges. You've got, you know, engineering challenge, like a lot of challenges, CapEx, all these things going into this $25,000, $30,000 car. When from you on's perspective, we're right on the cusp of having autonomous vehicles. It doesn't really make much sense to put those sort of resources into something that's then going to be at least a five year project.
If you think there's going to be, you know, with 90%, 95% certainty, if you think you're going to figure out FSD in that time period, you should be putting all of your efforts towards something like the robot taxi that takes advantage of that thing that you're going to have developed in that time period. Otherwise, you're kind of wasting all those resources when you should have put them towards the, the autonomous future. And that's what Elon's thinking about. That's what he's focused on. That's what he's been talking about for the last two years and beyond. Like he just, I just don't think that the $25,000 car achieves what he wants to achieve with Tesla at this stage. I think he wants to do the robot taxi. I think he wants, again, that forcing function.
I think that's where he wants to put the resources. And yeah, you could hedge it. You could design a vehicle like it with a steering wheel. I don't think that the market demand for like a two seat vehicle like this, if it's not autonomous would be that great. Um, so then you, you have uncertainty around that. Could it fit four seats? You know, if you do that, you're significantly changing a lot of the elements in the vehicle. kind of a rant here, but just. The more and more that I think about it, it just like from Elon's perspective, if you think FSD is coming soon, which I think he very clearly does, it just, it doesn't make a lot of sense. So that's how my expectations are set right now. And the way that I think about everything is pretty much always in probabilities and on spectrums and things like that.
I think, you know, it's not impossible that my, my thoughts could be off on this, but just in terms of like probability waiting, that seems more likely to me than, than not. So again, I can go through it even like math wise, I should probably do an episode and just like explain more of my thoughts on that, but that's kind of where my head is at, um, at the moment. So for the next six months, I think we see something with Model Y, like obviously Juniper is going on. I think that'll be an even more significant updates model Y than what we saw with the Highland Model three. Um, and you know, my expectation for that is probably right in line here with what they're talking about for a staff 2025. So. Hopefully we'll see something in addition to that, but that's kind of like my, my baseline expectation.
Um, it would seem like there would also need to be something a little bit, um, you know, something else to really move them towards that three million level. Um, especially because we've heard them say before they, if you like the incrementality of cost of good, sold improvement is, you know, it's, it's declining a little bit in terms of just like the ability to continue to progress and lower costs on the current line. Um, obviously we saw improvements this quarter, but again, I think that's probably more, more cyber truck related. Okay. Well, uh, let me get back to the, the chats here.
All right. So again, thank you for all the super chats. I really appreciate that. You guys are always so welcoming when I come back. It's, I mean, it's awesome. And again, once the earnings call starts, it's about, we're about 30 minutes out from that all, uh, on the same, same channel here, a different episode, but it'll, or different, different link. We'll do the normal, normal earnings coverage as well. Um, all right. So a question here, NHTSA, I know this is terrible to read. Uh, there we go. NHTSA is investigating accidents caused by camera obscuring. Do you think we'll need new slash more cameras to fix that problem? Um, not sure. I'm super familiar with that report. I know there was an investigation relating to like, I thought I was relating to some, but maybe that was something different. I need to look more closely at that, but relating to the question, do you think we'll need new or more cameras to fix that problem? Um, you know, the, the cyber cab camera setup was very similar to what we've seen before. It did have that front camera, like a cyber truck does, um, on, on these prototype vehicles. So I think Tesla's pretty locked in on, uh, on a camera placement.
Yeah. John, I always appreciate that. Sorry to hear about, about your father, but hope he's doing all right. Um, just about again, maybe they could fund advertising and fight misinformation. So yeah, I'm, I'm a proponent of this. I think I've, you know, we've talked a lot about the advertising, uh, sort of thesis over the years. I'm in favor of it. I know Tesla's done some testing of it. It's all been very small scale, uh, especially when Tesla does these, like financing promotion promotional offers, just like how are, how are, how are people supposed to know about that? If you're not like in the Tesla community on X or you don't happen to know someone that tells you, those are great resources of, of telling some people, but it's definitely not, it's definitely not hitting everyone.
Um, and I know Tesla sales do extremely well in Colorado, but man, the incentives that stack there, uh, in addition to some of the promotions that Tesla's now offering, it's like insane. Like why would you ever buy any other car? Um, it's not like it's free, but when you consider gas costs, it's like, it's almost free to just buy a Tesla instead. So, uh, obviously depending on your use cases, but yeah, I would definitely be in favor of more advertising. Um, just let people know how, how cheap the vehicles are.
Um, the model two is a two-seater. I don't think it would cannibalize three Y slash that's a different market. Yeah, it would be if it were a two-seater, it'd be a different market, but it's also probably a very small market. Like I don't think, you know, I don't think a two-seat volume that's not a Robotaxi.
嗯,Model 2 是一款双座车型。我认为这不会对 Model 3 或 Model Y 造成影响,因为它们针对的是不同的市场。是的,如果它是双座车,那确实是个不同的市场,但这个市场可能非常小。我不认为双座车会有很大的销量,除非它是自动驾驶出租车。
Um, just, you know, that's if you were to break down the market today of like two-seat vehicles versus four-seat vehicles, four plus, it's, it's got to be very, very small. Very small. It's kind of like sports cars and that's it, I would think. So.
All right. Um, up nine percent. Great. Things are holding, holding well there. Um, let me just take a look at some of the not super chat stuff here. Yeah, separate video for the call. So that's linked in the description below. So I'll, I'm this one and then we'll do the, the separate one for the call, but I think it'll auto direct you over there too. Um, I set it up to try to do that. So we'll see.
Um, Yeah, if anyone, uh, figured out what's going on with the, uh, that gap earnings or gap net income, let me know. I'll try to figure it out if not just hard to do on the live stream. All right. I'm going to wrap it up here. Uh, but again, we'll start the call in, in a little bit. Uh, appreciate you guys. It's, it's awesome, uh, hanging out, talking to us like again. So, um, looking forward to more of it in about 30 minutes. We'll see you there. Thank you.