different materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our most recent filings with the SEC. We are shareholders to read our definitive proxy statement, which contains important information about the matters we voted on at the 2025 annual meeting. During the question and answer portion of today's call, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Please use the raise hand button to join the question queue. Before we jump into Q&A, Elon has some opening remarks. Elon? Thank you. We're at a critical infection point for Tesla and our strategy going forward as we bring AI into the real world. I think it's important to emphasize that Tesla really is the leader in real world AI. No one can do what we can do with real world AI. I have pretty good insight into AI in general. I think that Tesla has the highest intelligence density of any AI out there in the car and that is only going to get better.
We're really just the beginning of scaling quite massively full self-driving and robotaxi and fundamentally changing the nature of transport. I think people just don't quite appreciate the degree to which this will take off. Honestly, it's going to be like a shock wave. The cars roll out there. There are millions of cars out there that, with a software update, become full self-driving cars. We're making a couple of million a year. In fact, with what we see now as a clarity on achieving full self-driving, unsupervised full self-driving, I should say, I feel confident in expanding Tesla's production. That is our intent to expand as quickly as we can. Our future production. I was ready to do that until we had clarity on unsupervised full self-driving. At this point, I feel like we've got clarity. It makes sense to expand production as fast as we can.
We're also making a huge impact on the energy sector with battery storage, both power wall and especially with the MegaPack. We are dramatically improving the ability to generate more energy from the grid. Let me sort of look a little bit about that. If you look at total US energy capability, for example, there's roughly a terawatt of continuous power available in the US. But the average usage over a twenty-fire cycle is only half a terawatt because of the big difference between day and night usage. If you buffer the energy with batteries, you can effectively double the energy output in the US, just with batteries pulling no incremental power plants. It's very difficult to build power plants. They take a long time. There's a lot of permitting, and it's not an industry that's used to moving fast.
We see the potential, therefore, Tesla battery packs to greatly improve the energy output per year for any given grid, US or otherwise. We're also on the cost of something really tremendous with Optimus, which I think is likely to be, or has potential to be, the biggest product of all time. It's a difficult project, and it's worth noting that it's not like it's just automatic. I'm going to wear any robot program by Ford or GM or in a barriose car companies. People like, I think, maybe think of Tesla as a car company, we mostly make cars and battery packs. It's not just an obvious full-of-a-log thing to make Optimus, but we do have the ingredients of real-world AI and exceptional electrical and mechanical engineering capabilities and the ability to scale production, which I don't think anyone else has all of those ingredients.
With version 14 of self-driving, which people, you can see, the reactions of people online, the quite amazes, and actually anyone in the US can get a version 14. If they just go and select, I want the advanced software in their car. If you're listening right now and you'd like to try it out, just go in settings and say, I want the advanced software, and you will get version 14. On the MegaPack front, we unveiled MegaBlock, MegaPack 3. We also have exciting plans for MegaPack 4. MegaPack 4 will incorporate a lot of what is normally in a sub-station and be able to output at probably 35 kV directly. This greatly improves our ability to deploy MegaPack because it's not dependent on building a sub-station of 335 kV for MegaPack 4. That's the engineering priority for MegaPack.
We look forward to unveiling Optimus V3, probably in Q1. I think it'll be ready for to show off. That is going to be quite remarkable. If you won't even seem like a robot, it will seem like a person in a robot suit, which is kind of how we started off with Optimus. It will seem so real that you'll need to poke it, I think, to believe that it's actually a robot. The real-world intelligence we've developed for the car, most of that transfers to Optimus. It's a very good sorting point.
In conclusion, we're excited about the updated mission of Tesla, which is sustainable abundance. So going beyond sustainable energy to say sustainable abundance is the mission where we believe with Optimus and self-driving that you can actually create a world where there is no poverty, where everyone has access to the finest medical care. Optimus will be an incredible surgeon, for example. I imagine everyone had access to an incredible surgeon. Of course, we make sure Optimus is safe and everything, but I do think we're headed for a world of sustainable abundance, and I'm excited to work with Tesla teams to make that happen.
Great. Thank you very much, Elon. VEBUB also has some opening remarks. Thanks, Thomas. Q3 was a special quarter at multiple levels. We set new records, not just for deliveries and deployments, but also around a range of financial metrics from total revenues, energy gross profit, energy margins to fresh free cash flow. This was the result of continued confidence of our customers in our products and the relentless efforts by the Tesla team.
The strength and deliveries was attributed to strong performance across all regions. Greater China and APEC were up sequentially 33 and 29% respectively. North America was up 28% while Mea was up 25%. The pace in deliveries was the function of continued excitement around the new model Y. We had previously talked about 2025 being the year of the Y, and have since delivered on that promise with the new model Y released in Q1, followed by model Y, Longville Base, end performance, and more recently standard Y in North America and Mea.
We're now operating a robot taxi in two markets, Austin and most various cities. We've already expanded our coverage area in Austin, free time since the initial launch and our own pace to continue expanding further. Unlike our competitors, our robot taxi fleet blends in the markets we operate in since they don't have extra sensors sets, or peripherals which make them stick out. This is an underappreciated aspect of our current vehicle offerings, which are all designed for autonomous driving.
We feel that as people experience the supervised FSD at scale, the demand for our vehicles, like Elon said, would increase significantly. On the FSD adoption front, we've continued to see decent progress. However, note that total paid FSD customer base is still small around 12% of our current fleet. We're moving, we're working with regulators in places like China and Mea to obtain approval so that we can get FSD in those regions as well.
Now, covering a little bit on the financial side, automotive revenues increase 29% sequentially in line with the growth and deliveries. While regulatory credits declined sequentially, we entered into new contracts and continued delivery on previously entered contracts. Our automotive margins, excluding credits, increased marginally from 15% to 15.4, which was attributed to improvements in material cost and better fixed cost absorption due to higher volumes.
The energy storage business continued to deliver with record deployments, growth profit and margins. As discussed before, this business has a bigger impact from tariffs as measured by percentage of cogs, since currently all sales procured are from China, while we're still working on other alternatives. However, as the ramp of mega-factually Shanghai is happening, this is helping us avoid tariffs because we are using this factory to supply the non-US demand.
Like Elon said, you know, grid-scale storage, the only way we can get to electricity fastest is by using storage. The other thing to keep in mind is we are seeing headwinds in this business given the increase in competition and tariffs. The total tariff impacts for Q3 for both businesses was in excess of 400 million, generally split evenly between them.
Services and other demonstrated a marked improvement sequentially. This was a function of improvements primarily in our insurance and service center businesses. Note that while small, our robot taxi costs are included within services and other, along with our other businesses like paid supercharging, used car, parts and merchandise sales, etc. Our operating expenses increase sequentially. The largest increase included in restructuring in other related to certain actions undertaken to reduce cost and improve efficiency to convergence of our AI chip design efforts.
Additionally, we incurred legal expenses related to proceedings in certain legal cases, as well as incremental cost incurred in preparation for our shareholder meeting. Such costs are recorded within S&A. Further, our employee related spend is increasing, especially in R&D, as we have recently granted various performance-based equity awards to employees working on AI initiatives, and therefore such spend will continue to increase going forward. Our other income decrease sequentially, primarily from market adjustments on BTC holdings, which was much smaller gained of 80 million in Q3 versus 284 million in Q2, with the rest of the movement attributable to FX movements in the quarter. Our free cash flow for the quarter was approximately 4 billion, which was yet another record.
Our total cash and investments at the end of the quarter were over 41 billion. On the CapEx front, while we are expecting to be around 9 billion for the current year, we're projecting the numbers to increase substantially in 2026, as we prepare the company for the next phase of growth in terms of not just our existing businesses, but our bets around AI initiatives, including optimists. In conclusion, note that bringing AI into real world is hard, but we have never shied away from doing what is hard. We are extremely excited about the future and are laying down the foundation, the benefits of which will be realized over years to come. I would like to end by thanking the Tesla team, our customers, our investors and supporters for the continued belief in us.
Cumulative miles, rides completed, intervention rates, and when will safety drivers be removed? What are the obstacles still preventing unsupervised FSD from being deployed to customer vehicles? I'll start off with that and then I shall elaborate. But we are expecting to have no safety drivers in at least large parts of Austin by the end of this year, so within a few months, we expect to have no safety drivers at all, at least in parts of Austin. We're obviously being very cautious about the deployment. Our goal is to be actually paranoid about deployment because obviously even one accident will be front page headlight news worldwide.
It's better for us to take a cautious approach here, but we do expect to have no safety drivers in the car in Austin, within a few months. I think that's perhaps the most important data point. Then we do expect to be operating robot taxi in I think about eight to ten metro areas by the end of the year. It depends on various regulatory approvals. But you can actually, I think most of our regulatory applications are online. You can kind of see them because they're public information. But we expect to be operating in Nevada and Florida and Arizona by the end of the year.
We continue to operate our fleet in Austin without any other in the driver seat. We have covered more than a quarter million miles with that. Then in the Bay Area, we still have a person in the driver seat because of the regulations. We cross more than a million miles. We continue to see that the fleet robot taxi fleet works really well. Customers are really happy. There's no notable issues. On the customer side, customers have used FSE supervise for a total of six billion miles as of yesterday. That's like a big milestone. Overall, the safety continues to be very good.
As Elon mentioned, we are on track to remove the person from inside the car altogether starting with Austin. Great. The next question is, what is the demand and backlog for Megapack, Powerwall, Solar, or Energy Storage systems? With the current AI boom, it's Tesla playing to supply power to other hyperscalers. Thanks. Demand for Megapack and Powerwall continues to be really strong into next year. We received very strong positive customer feedback on our Megablock product, which will begin shipping next year, not a fuston.
We're seeing remarkable growth in the demand for AI and data center applications as hyperscalers and utilities have seen the versatility of the Megapack product to increase reliability and relieve grid constraints as Elon was talking about. We've also seen a surge in residential solar demand in the US due to policy changes, which we expect to continue into the first half of 2026 as we introduce the new solar lease product. And we also begin production of our Tesla residential solar panel in our Buffalo factory, and we will be shipping that to customers starting Q1.
The panel has industry leading aesthetics and shade performance, and demonstrates our continued commitment to US manufacturing. Great. Thank you, Mike. Unfortunately, the next question is related to future products. This is not the appropriate venue to cover that, so we're going to have to skip it. The question after that is, what are the present challenges in bringing optimists to market, considering app control software, engineering hardware, training general mobility models, training task specific models, training voice models, implementing manufacturing, and establishing supply chains?
Yeah, bringing office optimist market is an incredibly difficult task to be clear. It's not like some walk in the park at some point. I mean, at this actually technically Optimus can walk in the park right now. And we do have optimists, robots that walk around our offices at our engineering headquarters in Palo Alto, California, basically 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So any visitors that come by, you actually, you can stop one of the Optimus robots and ask it to take you somewhere, and it'll literally take you to that meeting room or that location in the building.
So I don't want to downplay the difficulty partners. It's an incredibly difficult thing, especially it's difficult to create a hand that is as dexterous and capable as the human hand, which is an incredible, the human hand is an incredible thing. The more you study the human hand, the more incredible you realize the human hand is, and why you need five, you know, four fingers in the thumb, why the, why the fingers have certain degrees of movement of freedom, you know, why the various muscles are of different strengths, the fingers are of different lengths, and it turns out actually that all, that those are all there for a reason.
And so making it, making it that the hand and forearm, because most of the actuators, just like the human hand, the muscles that control your hand are actually primarily your forearm. The Optimus hand and forearm is an incredibly difficult engineering challenge. I say it's more difficult than the rest of, from an electro-bacannicle standpoint, the forearm and hand are more, it's more difficult than the entire rest of the robot. So, but really in order to have a useful generalized robot, you do need this, you do need an incredible hand, and you need the real-world AI, and you need to be able to scale up that production to have it be relevant, because it's not relevant if it's just a few hundred robots.
But so you need to be able to make Optimus robots at volumes comparable to vehicles, if not significantly higher. So, you can try to make a million or something per year, it's turning to make a million Optimus robots per year, that manufacturing challenge is immense, considering that the supply chain doesn't exist. So, with cars, you've got an existing supply chain, with computers, you've got an existing supply chain, with a human or a robot, there is no supply chain.
So, in order to manufacture, that tells actually has to be very botically integrated, and manufacture very deep into the supply chain may manufacture the parts internally, because there just is no supply chain. So, this is the kind of thing where I'm like, if I put myself in the position of a startup trying to make an off human or a robot, I'm like, I don't know how to do it without an immense amount of manufacturing technology. So, that's why I think like Tesla's in somewhat, almost a unique, I think unique position when you consider manufacturing technology scaling, real world AI, and the, and a truly dexterous hand.
Those are the generally the things that I'm missing when you read about other robots, that they just don't have those three things. So, I think we can achieve all those things, those three things with an immense amount of work. And that is the game plan. So, you know, my, like my fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have in Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be outstead at some point in the future?
That's my biggest concern. That is really the only thing I'm trying to address with this so-called compensation, but it's not like I'm going to go expand the money. It's just, if we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? It's not control, but a strong influence. That's what it comes down to in a nutshell. I don't feel comfortable holding a robot army if I don't have at least a strong influence.
Great, thank you. We've already covered ribotaxi expansion. Unfortunately, the question after that is another future product question, so we're going to have to skip that. The next one, though, is, can you update us on the $16.5 billion Samsung chip deal retailer? Given the importance of semiconductors to autonomy in Tesla's AI-driven future, what gives you confidence Samsung can fulfill AI6 at Tesla's timelines and achieve relatively better yields and cost versus TSMC?
Okay, so I'm going to give quite a long answer to this question, because after unpacking this question, and then answer the unpacked version. First of all, I have nothing but great things to say about Samsung. An amazing company. Samsung is worth noting, does manufacturer our AI-fold computer and does a great job doing that? With the AI-5, and here's, I need to make a point of clarification relative to some comments I've made publicly before, which is we're actually going to focus both TSMC and Samsung initially on AI-5.
So the AI-5 chip design by Tesla is, I think it's an amazing design. I've spent almost every weekend for last few months with the chip design team working on AI-5. And I don't hand out praise easily, but I have to say that I think the Tesla chip team is really designing an incredible chip here. This is, by some metrics, the AI-5 chip will be 40 times better than the AI-4 chip, not 40%, 40 times. Because we have a detailed understanding of the entire software and hardware stack. So we're designing the hardware to address all of the pain points in software.
So there really isn't anyone that's doing this the entire stack all the way through real world, you know, calibrating against the real world where you've got cars and robots in real world. We know what the chip needs to do, and we know what it just is important. We know what the chip doesn't need to do. You know, to give you some examples here. With the AI-5, we deleted the legacy GPU or the traditional GPU, which is in AI-4. But AI-5 does not have, we just deleted the legacy GPU because it basically is a GPU.
So we also deleted the image signal processor. And this is like a long list of actually of deletions that are very important. As a result of these deletions, we can actually put AI-5 in a half-radical and with good margin for the traces from the memory to the Tesla trip accelerators, the ARM CPU cores, and the PCIx, sort of the PCIx blocks. So this is a beautiful chip. I've poured so much life energy into this chip personally, and I'm confident this will be a winner next level.
So it makes sense to have both Samsung and TSMC focus on AI-5. Technically, the Samsung app has slightly more advanced equipment than the TSMC app. These will both be made in the US, that in TSMC and Arizona, Samsung in Texas. We're going to make a starting off just to be confident of having our goal, explicitly, is to have an oversupply of AI-5 chips. Because if we have too many AI-5 chips for the cars and robots, we can always put them in the data center.
So we already use AI-4 for training in our data center. So we use a combination of AI-4 and Nvidia hardware. So we're not about to replace Nvidia to be clear, but we do use both in combination AI-4 and Nvidia hardware. And the AI-5 access production we can always put in our data centers. Nvidia keeps improving that the challenge that they have is that they've got to satisfy a lot of requirements from a lot of customers. The TESLA only has to satisfy requirements from one customer with TESLA.
That makes the design job radically easier, and means we can delete a lot of complexity from the chip. I can't emphasize how important this is. So when you look at the various logic blocks in the chip, as you increase the number of logic blocks, you also increase the interconnections between the logic blocks. So you can think of it like there's just highways. How many highways do you need to connect the various parts of the chip?
And especially if you're not sure how much data is going to go between each logic block on the chip, then you end up having giant highways going all over the place. It becomes almost impossible difficult design problem. Nvidia is done an amazing job of dealing with almost an impossible difficult set of requirements. But in our case, we're grateful radical simplicity. And the net effect is that I think AI-5 will be the best performance per watt, maybe by a factor of 203, and the best performance per dollar for AI, maybe by a factor of 10.
So the proofs in the pudding, so we need to actually get the chip made and made it scale. But that's what it looks like. Great, thank you Elon. We've already covered unsupervised FSD. So the next question is, instead of trying to replace hardware 3 with hardware 4, why not give an equal incentive to trade in for a new vehicle? Yeah, we're not completely given upon hardware 3. However, over the last year, we've offered the customers the option to transfer FSD to their new vehicle, which at times we've been running some promotions. If they got FSD, they can get better preferential rates. So we've been definitely taking care of this. But we do want to solve it on me first. And then we'll come back with a way to take care of these customers. These customers are very important. They were the early adapters.
What it's worth, my daily commuter is a hardware 3 car, which I use FSD on a daily basis. So we will definitely take care of you guys. Great, thank you. One of the V14 release series is fully done. We are planning on working on a V14 light version for hardware 3, probably expected in Q2 next year. Awesome, thanks, Shirk. Alrighty, our final question from, say, is how long until we see self-driving Tesla semi-trucks? And could you see this technology replacing trains?
Yeah, so I guess I'll start with that in terms of the semi-production plan and schedule. So the factory is going on schedule. We've completed the building and are installing the equipment now. We've got our fleet of validation trucks driving on the road. We'll have larger builds towards the end of this year and then our first online builds in the first part of next year, ramping into the Q2 timing with real volume coming in the back half of the year. So that's going quite well. And that's the first step, obviously, getting autonomous trucks on the road.
In terms of trains, they're really great for a long point to point deliveries are super efficient, but that last mile, the load unload can be better served for shorter distances with autonomous semi-s and that would be great. And so we do expect that to probably shift. And as we, you know, really, as Elon said, change the way transportation is considered. And so we're looking forward to that timeline and a show I know you can take the full self-driving part. Currently, the team is super focused on solving for passenger vehicles or autonomy.
That said, the same technology will externally quite easily do the semi-truck once we have a little bit of data from the semi-trucks. Great. And now we will move over to analyst questions. The first question comes from a manual at Wolf. Manual, please go ahead and unmute yourself. Great. Thanks so much. Hi, everybody. So, Elon, you talked about expanding production of vehicles as fast as possible, now that you have confidence in the unsurpassed autonomy.
How should we think about that in the context of your existing capacity of three million units? Is that where you're hoping to get volume two? What sort of timeline are we talking about? And would this require, you know, some level of boosting or incentivizing the man? Like would this basically be prioritizing volume over near-term profitability, given the longer-term opportunity? Well, our capacity isn't quite three million. But it will be three million at some point. You know, aspirationally, you know, it could be three million within, we could probably have an annualized rate of three million within 24 months, I think.
Maybe less than 24 months. It brings in mind like there's an entire supply chain, like a vast supply chain that's got to also move in tandem with that. So, we're going to expand production as fast as we can. As fast as that supply can sort of keep up with it. And then we're going to think about where do we build incremental factories beyond that. Like the single biggest expansion in production will be the cyber cap, which stops production in Q2 next year. That's really a vehicle that's optimized for full autonomy.
In fact, does not have a steering wheel of pedals and is really an engineering optimization on minimizing cost per mile, fully considered cost per mile of operation. So that's for the other vehicles, there's still a little bit of the horse that's carriage thing going on where obviously you've got, if you've got steering wheels and pedals and and you're designing a car that people might want to go, you know, very do you write past acceleration and type cornering like type performance cars, then you're going to design a different car than one that is optimized for a comfortable ride, but doesn't expect to go, you know, past 85 or 90 miles an hour.
And it's just aiming for a gentle ride the whole time. That's what cyber cap is. So, yeah, so it's, I think we'll sacrifice margins. I don't think so. I think the demand will be pretty nutty. Like here's the killer app really what it comes on to is can you text while you're in the car? And if you tell someone yes that the car is now so good, you can you can you can be on your phone and text the entire time while you're in the car. Anyone who can't buy the car will buy the car. And it's a story. So, that's what everybody wants to do. In fact, not everyone wants to. They do do that. That's why in fact the reason you've seen like there's been an uptick in accidents pretty much worldwide is because people are texting and driving. So, autopilot actually can actually improve the safety here because if somebody's looking down at their phone, they're not driving very well.
So, that's really the game changer. And we do see like at this point, I feel essentially 100% confident, not essentially 100% confident that we can solve unsupervised full self driving at a safety level much greater than human. So, we've released 14.1. We've got a technology roadmap that's I think pretty amazing. We'll be adding reasoning to the car. Our world simulator for reinforcement learning is pretty incredible. Like I like when you see it that the Tesla reality simulator, you can't tell it from the screen. The video that's generated by the Tesla reality simulator and the actual video looks exactly the same. So, that allows us to have a very powerful reinforcement learning loop to further improve the Tesla AI. We're going to be increasing the parameter account by an order of magnitude that that's not 14.1. There are also a number of other improvements to the AI just that are quite radical.
So, this car will feel like it is a living creature. That's how good the AI will get with the AI4 computer with this before AI5. And then AI5, like I said, is by some metrics 40 times better, which is say safely its 10x improvement. So, it might almost be too much intelligence for a car. I do wonder how much intelligence should you have in a car? It might get bored. Actually, and then one of the things I hope, like if we got all these caused that maybe a board, well, while they're sort of, if they're all bored, we could actually have a giant distributed inference fleet and say, well, if they're not actively driving, let's just have a giant distributed inference fleet. At some point, if you've got tens of millions of cars in the fleet, or maybe at some point a hundred million cars in the fleet, let's say they had at that point, like I don't know, a kilowatt of inference capability of high-formance inference capability, that's a hundred kilowatts of inference distributed with power and cooling and power conversion to the carol.
So, that seems like a pretty significant asset. Great. Thanks, Elon. The next question comes from Adam from Morgan Stanley. Adam, please feel free to unmute yourself. Adam, go ahead and ask your question. It seems like we might be having some audio issues with Adam. So, we'll come back to you. The next question will then come from Dan from Parkless. Hi, good evening. Thank you for taking the question. Elon, I know that Tesla is really focused on with Master Plan 4 bringing AI into the physical world. And I think we've seen over the past, this willingness for Tesla to engage and go into new markets, new tams. So, when you think about the growth prospects, how do we define the areas that are really within Tesla's core competency versus where do you draw the line for markets or AI applications that are outside of Tesla's core competency?
Actually, I'm not sure what you mean by AI application's outside of Tesla's core competency. But we kind of, we didn't have any of these core competencies when we started, you know. So, it's like we had zero core competencies, total confidence is zero actually. So, I mean, the thing of Tesla is like, I don't know, it doesn't start up in one company. You know, and I've initiated every one of those startups. So, it's, it wouldn't used to make battery packs, say stationary battery packs, but now we do, we're making for the home, making for, you know, utility scale with car oil mega pack. We've created the supercharger network globally. No one else has created a global supercharger network. In fact, North American supercharger network. So, good, that basically that every other manufacturer in North America has converted to our standard and uses our, that, that Tesla supercharger network.
其实,我不太明白你所说的"超出特斯拉核心竞争力"的AI应用是什么意思。不过说实话,我们在刚开始的时候也没有任何核心竞争力。可以说,我们的核心竞争力最初为零,但我们的信心不是零。特斯拉的特点是,它不只是在一个领域开始创新。我是每一个这些新项目的发起者。所以,比如最初我们并不会制造电池组,比如用于固定储能的电池组,但现在我们会了,我们制造家用和电力公司大规模使用的电池,包括Car Oil Mega Pack。我们建立了全球的超级充电网络,没有其他公司做到这一点。实际上,北美的其他汽车制造商现在都采用了我们的标准,使用我们的特斯拉超级充电网络。
But if it was so easy, why don't they just do it? And the CHEP design team, started that from scratch, the Tesla AI software team with SOTR from scratch. I literally just say, hey, we're going to stop this thing. I posted on Twitter now X, and then, you know, join us if you'd like to build it. In fact, the show was, I believe the first person I interviewed for the Tesla autopilot team, which we're not called, it's a AI software. team, because it is the AS software team. So, you know, its core companies, come to these created while you wait. And, you know, Optimus at scale, it is the infinite money glitch. It's like, this is a, it's difficult to express the magnitude of, like if you've got something that, like, that, like, if I optimise, I think probably achieve 5X to the productivity of a person per year, because it can operate 24-7. It doesn't even need to charge. It can operate it tethered, so it's plugged in the whole time. And, so that's why I call it, like, if you're true of sustainable abundance, we're working with the optional.
You know, there's a lot of too much, how much AI can do in terms of enhancing the productivity of humans. But there is not really a limit to AI that is embodied. That's why I call it the infinite money glitch. I mean, one thing which I'll further add is, I mean, people forget, like, our first iteration of autopilot was 10 years back. So, you know, Elon had started this way back in the day. We got the twist to prove it. Exactly. And then even, even on the Optimus side, right, as much as people think, oh, good, this is a new thing, I still remember, was it 4 plus years back, we were in the finance meeting with Elon and Elon said, hey, our car is the robot on wheels. And that's where we started developing. In fact, most of the engineering team, which is working on Optimus, has come from the vehicle side. And that's why, you know, when we talk about manufacturing products, we have the bear with hope because the same engineers who worked in the back of the day on drive units are working on actuators now.
So that's where we can, if there's any company which can do it at scale, that is going to be us. But we also have actually added a lot of new engineers as well to the team. So there's actually a lot of the credit for the Optimus engineering is actually also new engineers, many of them that are just out of college, actually. So the Optimus engineering team is a very talented engineering team, to like wow, actually. So, and, you know, the Optimus reviews at this point are, that is the engineering review. And then there's the manufacturing review done. It's simultaneously with an iterative loop between engineering design and manufacturing. Because then we see we design something and we see like, oh man, that's really difficult to make. We need to change that design to make it easier to manufacture. So we've made radical improvements to the design of Optimus while increasing the functionality, but making it actually possible to manufacture.
Like I'd say Optimus 2 is almost impossible to manufacture, frankly. But my two-five of points we've gone from a person in a robot outfit to what people have seen with Optimus 2.5 where it's doing kung fu. You know, it was like Optimus was at the at the Tron premiere doing kung fu, you know, just out in the open, you know, like with Jared Leto. Like there wasn't, nobody was controlling it. It was just doing kung fu with Jared Leto at the Tron premiere. You can see the videos online. And actually the funny thing is like a lot of people walked past it thinking it was just a person. Even though with Optimus 2.5 you can see that it has a waist that's three inches wide, which is obviously not a human. So, but the movements were so human like that people didn't realize, a lot of people didn't realize they were looking at a robot.
So, and what I'm saying is like Optimus 3 will be a giant improvement on that and made its scale. But like said, a very difficult thing. The Optimus sort of injuring and manufacturing reviews and there's the Friday night meeting with Optimus, sometimes ghostful midnight. And then my Saturday meetings is the Saturday afternoons with the AI 5 chip design team. So, those two things are crucial to the future of the company. And you have a great day. Yeah, just as a related maybe you could just talk about to what extent are the AI efforts at Tesla and XAI complement 3 or they just different forms of AI. Maybe you could just help distinguish for the audience. Thank you.
好的,我的意思是,Optimus 3 将在这方面有巨大的改进,并将实现其规模化。但正如所说,这确实是一个非常困难的事情。Optimus 的生产和审核都要进行,还有周五晚上和 Optimus 的会议,有时候会一直开到半夜。然后我在周六下午还有一个和 AI 5 芯片设计团队的会议。这两件事情对于公司的未来至关重要。祝你有美好的一天。是的,可能你可以谈谈 Tesla 和 XAI 的 AI 努力在多大程度上是互补的,还是它们代表不同形式的 AI。或许你可以帮助观众区分一下。谢谢。
Yeah, there are different forms of AI. So, the, you know, the, the XAI so, GROC is like a giant model that you could not possibly squeeze GROC onto a car. That's for sure. It is a giant B-soil model. It's with GROC it's trying to say solve for artificial general intelligence with a massive amount of AI training compute and inference compute. So, for example, GROC 5 will actually only run effectively on a GV 300. That's how much of a beast that GROC 5 is. So, where is Tesla's models are, I don't know, maybe about less than 10% the size, maybe closer to 5% the size of GROC. So, yeah, they're really coming at the problem from very different angles. XAI and GROC are, you know, they're competing with your Google Gemini and opening at chat GPT and that kind of thing. So, it's some of its complementary, for example, for GROC voice, they're able to interact with GROC in the car. It's called GROC for, you know, optimists, voice recognition and voice generation is GROC. So, that's helpful there.
But they are coming at it from kind of opposite ends of the spectrum. Already Adam, let's give another try. When you're ready, please unmute yourself for the next question. Already, unfortunately, still having audio issues. So, we're going to move on to Walt from LightShed. Walt, please go ahead and unmute yourself. Did you hear me now? Yes. Perfect. Thank you. Just getting back to Austin, if you can remove the safety driver at your end, is the limitation in the Bay Area just regulatory or is it kind of the market by market learning process? And I guess similarly in the 8 to 10 markets that you mentioned to get added, is the decision there to put a safety attend in the passenger seat or the safety driver? And is that like your step-by-step process to opening up a market or is it really just a regulation in the individual market?
他们从整个范围的两个极端来看这个问题。好的,Adam,让我们再试一次。当你准备好时,请取消静音以进行下一个问题。很遗憾,仍然有音频问题。我们接下来请 Walt 来自 LightShed。Walt,请取消静音。你现在能听到我吗?可以,听得很清楚,谢谢。回到奥斯汀,如果你那边可以移除安全驾驶员,湾区的限制只是法规问题吗,还是说还要根据市场的不同来逐个学习?我想问你提到的 8 到 10 个新增市场,那里决定是安排一个安全员在乘客座位上还是需要安全驾驶员?这是否是你们为了开放市场所采取的逐步流程,还是实际上取决于各个市场的具体法规?
Well, I think even if the regulators weren't making us do it, we'd still do that as the right sort of cautious approach to a new market. So, just to make sure that we're being paranoid about safety, I think it makes sense to have a sort of either safety driver or safety occupant in the car when we first go to new markets to just confirm that there's not something we're missing. Because all it takes is like one in 10,000 trips to go wrong and you've got an issue. So, it's just to make sure that there's some curiosity about a city, like a very difficult intersection or I don't know, something that's an unexpected challenge in a city for that one in 10,000 situation. So, I think we probably could just let it loose in the cities, but we just don't want to take a chance. And like, you know what we're talking about here is maybe three months of safety driver in a new metro to confirm that it's good and then we take the safety driver out, that kind of thing.
Okay, and then on FSD 14, it has a different field than 13 and it's also I think a little different than what it feels like in Austin. Is it basically different development paths that you're doing in terms of the robot taxi stuff versus what you're dropping to the early adopters? And when you push these new builds, is it that you're looking for notable improvements in intervention rates? Or is that largely solved and it's more about adding the functionality like the parking, the drive metal, or just the overall comfort? Now, the first priority when we release a major new software architecture for autopilot is safety. So, it's also with safety, you know, obviously safety prioritized and then we solve comfort thereafter, which is why I don't recommend people take the initial version, like that's why I say like most people should wait until 14.2 before they actually download version 14, because by 14.2 we will have addressed many of the comfort issues.
The priority is very much safety first and then thereafter the comfort issues. That's why most people are like, I probably it'll be a little like it'll be safe but jerky. And we just need time to kind of smooth the rough edges and solve for comfort in addition to safety with the major news, the autopilot architecture change. But it really is, I mean I know what the, you know, the road map is for the Tesla real world AI and a brand new granular data detail obviously I show because leading that and I mean I spent a lot of time with the team going, you know, like excruciating detail here on what we're doing to improve the real world AI. And like I said, this car is going to feel like it is a living creature and that's what AI for before even AI5.
Yeah, the road map is super exhilarating like it's like so waiting so much like at least all the stuff we are working on in terms of like what we shift to customers versus robot taxi. It's more mostly the same obviously customers have somewhat features like you know they can choose the car wants to park in a spot or drive version thing that which is not super relevant for robot taxi, but there's no really like few minotions like those ones but majority of the algorithms. and architecture everything is the same between those two platforms.
Yeah, but that's a mission earlier like we'll be adding reasoning to, I don't know, I show you, is that like reasoning in like 14.3 maybe 14.4 something like that? Yeah, or by another scene for sure. Yeah, so with reasoning it's literally going to think about which parking spot to pick at this, so it's going to say this is the entrance but actually probably there's not a parking spot right at the entrance if it's a fool, you know if the if the parking light is fairly full the probability of an open parking spot right at the entrance is very low.
But actually what a little simply do is drop you off at the entrance of the store and then go find a parking spot. But it's going to get very smart about figuring out a parking spot. It's going to spot figure out it's going to spot empty spots much better than human. It's got 360 degree vision and it's going to yeah like I said just it's going to use reasoning to solve things. I'm putting that all in the computer that has the A4 is the actual challenge that's what the team is working on because obviously you can do reasoning on the server that takes whatever but then in car you need to make real time decisions.
So putting on the computer that's in the car that's the challenge. Yeah that's why I say like I'm pretty good understanding of like AI you know the sort of the giant model level with GROC and with with HEAZAN. Like I'm confident in saying that HEAZAN has the HEAZAN AI has the highest intelligence density when you look at the intelligence per gigabyte I think like HEAZAN AI is probably an order of magnitude better than anyone else and it doesn't have any choice because that AI has got a fit in the AI for a computer.
But the discipline of having that level of AI intelligence density will pay great dividends when you go to something that has an order of magnitude, order of magnitude and more capability like AI5. Now you have that same intelligence density but you got 10 times more capability in the computer. Great. The next question will come from Colin at Oppenheimer. Colin please unmute yourself when you're ready. I'll go ahead and unmute yourself please.
Thanks so much guys. You know I appreciate you bringing up the the challenges of hand-dexterity and humanoid you know along with the complexity of the supply chain and the vertical integration you guys are pursuing. Yeah I'm just trying to harmonize the the timeline for the start of production you know next year with the current state of the supply chain and what sounds like a fair amount of work remain on the dexterity before you can really freeze the hardware design and start to scale up production.
Well the hardware design will actually not actually be frozen even through startup production. There will be continued iteration because a bunch of the things that you discover are very difficult to make you only find that pretty late in the game. So we'll be doing rolling changes up for the optimist design even after startup production. But I do think that the you know the new hand is an incredible piece of engineering and you know that's you know we'll actually we'll have a production intent prototype ready to show off in you know Q1 probably February or March and then we're yeah we're gonna be building a you know million unit optimist production line you know hopefully with the production start towards that next year.
But that that production ramp will take a while to get to an annualized rate of a million because it's going to move as fast as the the slowest dumbest least lucky thing out of 10,000 unique items. But it will get to a million units and then ultimately you know we'll do optimists for that'll be you know 10 million units optimists five maybe 50 or 100 million units. I mean it's really pretty nutty.
Alrighty that is unfortunately all the time we have for Q&A today. Before we conclude though Bebob has some closing remarks. Thanks Tyrus. I want to take the time to talk about an extremely important word which is being held on November 6th. The meeting will shape the future of Tesla and we are asking you as our shareholders to support Elon's leadership through the two compensation proposals and the re-election of Ira, Kathleen and Joe to the board.
Note that it is a team support and here at Tesla the board is an integral part of the winning team. Shareholders are at the center of everything we do at Tesla and a special committee has laid out compensation package. Like Elon said we don't even want to call it a compensation package. Yeah it's not at the point is I just like it needs to be enough voting control to give a strong influence but not not so much that I can't be fired if I go insane. But you know and I think that's sort of numbers in the mid 20s approximately.
As a company that has already gone public there's no, that we've investigated every possible way to how do you achieve increased voting control without is there some way to have like a sub voting stock but there really is there is no way to have a sub voting stock after you've gone public. But for example Google, Metta, many other companies have this but they had they had it before they went public and so it sort of gets I guess grandfathered in. Tesla does not have that.
So it's just like I said I just don't feel comfortable voting robot army here and not and then you know being ousted because of some ass-9 recommendations from ISS and glass Lewis who have no freaking clue. I mean those guys are corporate terrorists and the problem yeah so let me like explain like the core problem here is that so many of the index funds the passive funds vote along the lines of whatever glass Lewis and ISS recommend.
所以,就像我说的,我只是不太愿意在这里投票支持机器人军团,因为我担心会因为 ISS 和 Glass Lewis 的一些无稽之谈的建议而被排挤。我是说,那些家伙就像公司里的恐怖分子,问题在于很多指数基金和被动基金都是按 Glass Lewis 和 ISS 的建议来投票的。
Now they've made many terrible recommendations in the past that if those recommendations have been followed would have been extremely destructive to the future of the company. But if you got passive funds that essentially defer responsibility for the vote to glass Lewis and ISS then you can have extremely disastrous consequences for a publicly traded company if too much of the publicly traded company is controlled by index funds. It's de facto controlled by glass Lewis and ISS.
This is a fundamental problem for corporate governance because they're not voting along the lines that are actually good for shareholders. That's that's the big issue I mean that's where it comes down to ISS glass Lewis corporate terrorism. Yeah and I would say you know especially committed to an amazing job in constructing this plan for the benefit of the shareholders.
There is nothing which gets passed on till the time shareholders make substantial returns. So that's why you know in the end I would say I would urge you to not only vote on the plan but also vote on all the three directors because of the exception, knowledge and experience and literally you know we at Tesla work with these directors day in day out when there is not even a single day that one of the directors I haven't spoken to or one of my colleague hasn't spoken to and we're the even the directors out here are not just reading out of you know powerpoint presentations.
They're actually working with us day in day out. So again I just urge you guys as shareholders to vote along the board's recommendation. Thank you guys. Great thank you bebob we appreciate everyone's questions today and we look forward to show them to you next quarter. Thank you very much and goodbye.
All right hey everybody let me know if you can hear me now hopefully how it goes good and we'll just chat about the call for a little bit if that's too loud let me know as well. Can you hear me now excellent sounds good. All right yeah so let's go through some of the notes from the call here. I think pretty interesting I mean some some parts that were a little repetitive to stuff that we've heard talked about many times right which is pretty normal for these calls these days.
So if I looked forward to hitting your points in there it's just because it's stuff we've heard right but there's some value sometimes to repeating some of those things obviously not everyone listens to every single minute of every single earnings call for the last 10 years but for those of us that have it's yeah some of it we've heard before but I think in general there were some really interesting things here I'll just kind of scroll back through just real quick on the vote we should probably talk about this a little bit before it's just really important to vote for your shares right.
I think Elon described the issue well in terms of just the ownership. First, first of all, the amount of assets that are now in these sort of passive funds compared to, you know, pretty much anytime ever is a lot higher. The market in general is a lot more concentrated in these large passive funds, and if those funds just vote along these recommendations from these, you know, advisors or whomever, then it kind of creates a situation where those advisors really have an outsized influence on directions of companies.
Specifically for Tesla, had Tesla followed recommendations of people like that, advisors like that, or whoever the case may be, I don't think Tesla would be in the position that it is in now. This is one of the things that's so incredibly frustrating about the Delaware thing with Elon's 2018 compensation plan. I mean, I was a shareholder then, and I was strongly in favor of it. It was a 100% at-risk compensation, and the milestones to achieve that were, you know, you put those in front of people, and they would like laugh at them.
It's like you're going to grow Tesla to be like this 100 billion dollar plus, like largest automaker in the world? Like you guys are selling what, 200,000 cars a year, not even making any money yet? That was kind of what the plan that they were putting in place, and if not achieved, no compensation. Great, that super well lines with shareholders. We saw what happened; everyone that was holding Tesla stock did incredibly well. Elon did incredible. Well, everyone is happy and then there's like this guy that's used with nine shares and it's like ruins it for everybody. It's absurd. So that's a little bit different situation, but it just goes to show when there's like this overly influential system or whatever in place that things like this can go wrong.
And that's why Elon's like concerned about his level of ownership; it's just directly related to those types of things of when that influences shifted out of control, then bad things can happen to the company and to the direction of the company. I think that you only think the company would be a very bad thing to have into the company. So yeah, I think just in general it's very important to vote. There are sometimes votes that a non-vote, like if you just forget to or you don't go take the time to do it, whatever, you don't think it's important, those don't count in favor of the proposal and sometimes the proposal needs a certain number of votes, so you're effectively voting no by not voting.
Some other times it will, depending on how you own your shares and the structure of that ownership, it will defer if you do not vote into someone else being able to vote your shares. So it's really important to do that. I would just echo those comments you know alongside what vibe outside there. So anyway, that being set aside, let's go ahead and just look through again some of these notes here. There was one that I bolded because I just kind of wanted to start with that. It's super interesting because fst is, you know, pretty much the most important thing right now; obviously, optimist maybe come that in the future, but I think just for right now that's really what it's about when do we get to unsupervised fst at scale.
Right? Version 14, like I said earlier today, I haven't had a chance to drive with it much yet. Unfortunately, just like the timing of the releases and things with my schedule hasn't worked out well. But so far, the few miles that I put on version 14 have been awesome. As they said, these first releases definitely prioritize safety over comfort, so I have not been surprised with like the brake stabbing or things like that, and to me it doesn't like bother me. I just am making sure that I'm paying attention so I don't get re-rendered or something like that. I think that's the risk there, but the vehicle is also looking behind it too. I think people don't realize that or take that into consideration a lot.
If there were a car that was approaching from, you know, behind in a way that might rear on the vehicle, it could probably react to that and make an adjustment as needed. So that's something that's forgotten about. That's a little bit of an inside point being version 14 has been more capable. It's able to do more things than version 13 was; for me, version 13 was already phenomenal as I've talked about before. So it's incredibly exciting to see that even in just the last week since 14.1.1 got released and we're now 14.1.3, even just those, you know, seven days or whatever it's been.
The dials to tune it in to be more comfortable have definitely been tweaked. It's definitely more comfortable, it's definitely smoother, and I think that'll just continue. Now, the thing that I bolted here: they'll be adding reasoning to the car. So this was something that was like a huge unlock for, you know, the lllm space was when reasoning was introduced into these models, into how they were operating. That unlocked a lot more intelligence from these models that just wasn't there before. It was really kind of a step change with some, you know, cons or whatever, some downsides of introducing that, primarily the just the amount of time that it takes, the amount of energy that it takes, the cost of it, all of those sorts of things.
Our problems that become introduced when you start talking about reasoning, that's why I showed said that like the challenge here is just making this operate on AI4, and this is why Tesla spends so much time talking about intelligence density. It's something that they don't get credit for and it's actually super frustrating to me because I see in the chat like I should probably shouldn't even just read the chat, but like I see people talking about like, oh, this is so dumb, like Elon's making all these promises. And first of all, that's just frustrating because like, yeah, Elon says a lot of stuff about what's gonna happen in the future; his hit rate's pretty good, so I would listen to what he says about what's happening in the future and not just write it off because like sometimes he's wrong it's a lot more difficult to like be sometimes right about precisely what's gonna happen in the future and be able to capitalize on it to the extent of billions of dollars that's a little bit harder than occasionally being wrong so just set that as your context.
Um but anyway the point being like they talk about this in information density intelligence density because it is critically important in making real world AI and maybe it doesn't look that impressive because of what happens outside of real world AI like all these advancements that we're seeing in AI in general and all all that we hear about it we're just inundated with like all this news and all this progress lately most of that stuff is relying on like massive massive data centers doing tons and tons of compute really really expensive that you know those the cost is coming down per performance over time but like it's just a different thing than what Tesla is doing it's a different problem it's it's using similar technology but it's just applying it very very differently and I don't think people appreciate that I don't think that Tesla gets the credit that they deserve to get for their capabilities in real world real world AI.
And Elon you know every single conference call he talks about it to the point where it gets like I roll on using because it's like yeah like we're still on unsupervised FSD like great it was like what is this doing for us it's getting us it's getting better and when you talk about going another step change in AI5 with 10 times the compute the point that Elon made there was that once you have that level of compute available to you you can really really realize how important that intelligent density is because right now it's doing things that are like we've kind of been promised this for a long time right like unsupervised FSD we've kind of had like autopilot we've had FSD for you know years now so it's kind of like yeah yeah all right sounds sounds nice if you 10x that and you're able to capitalize fully on that it becomes something like unrecognizable like that's how Elon is looking at it that's how he's seeing this development go and the roadmap go yes he's been off on timing in the past but the thesis that this is going to be better than people unquestionably I think is still on track and I think you know we're very close to reaching that and probably happens with hardware 4 and if not it's I like can't fathom that it wouldn't happen with hardware 5 or with AI5 so I just think that's really important.
Back to the reasoning points this is really cool because as we talked about it's unlocks capabilities that just it weren't currently possible with non-reasoning models that'll be the same thing applied to the car we'll do things that it could not have done without reasoning I think the the cost of that will be you know processing time so it's going to be situations where it's needing some time to think but there are tons of times like that in the car I'm thinking about like you know no turn right on reds I thought I think I saw Dirty Tesla posted that there was a version 14.1.3 maybe turn right on red that's something that you know this is just off the top of my head so maybe it's a stupid comment but that's something to me that it seems like a reasoning model could potentially assist with because it's just going to have a little bit it's going to be looking at things in a multitude of different ways rather than just like one streamlined stream of consciousness I guess it's probably a poor way to put it but hopefully that makes sense.
The analogy that they gave is that like it'll be able to assess parking environments a lot better which that's again a case where it's not like a time constraints necessarily of like this needs to happen in milliseconds instead it could happen in you know a tenth of a second or a half of a second or whatever and be totally fine or even you know a couple of seconds so that that whole point that about the reasoning model being added to the car sounds like version 14.3 version 14.4 I think you said before the end of the year we should probably just double check that quick it's just it's incredibly exciting. because it's another one of those things on their roadmap that they're talking about here that will again make this a more capable robust system that can do more things that's more impressive that feels a lot closer to the end state vision that we're all you know looking forward to so I'm excited about that that's I mean that that alone from the call to me is enough to be like this call was awesome I'm super excited.
Now that being said even the stuff I think we've heard a little bit more about AI5 in the past so like some of that stuff especially Elon talked at the all in summit about just the advancements and cheer capability from AI5 as a customer maybe people don't like hearing that you know hardware three hardware four hardware five it's like man now I'm gonna get left behind again I understand that perspective too as an investor it should still be very exciting to hear I think this is more of an investment focused group so I'm both I think a lot of us are both you've always got a little bit mixed feelings but for me I just want this stuff to work like if we get left behind I'm I'm okay with that I'll be a little disappointed I'll probably then upgrade I think Tesla will offer paths to do that and this is all premature I think I think things are gonna be great on hardware hardware four but the point being is that we're already I feel like so close on hardware four we're not that far away from hardware five which is so much more capable plus all these other things that they you know they talk a little bit about and they've shared on different conference calls about just like these vectors of improvement you know for various ways with with AI and with FSD like all of those things still exist and are still gonna happen and so you know we're gonna reap the rewards of those as well but it's just like mind blowing to me to sit here see this progress over the last two to three years and see this roadmap see the things that Elon's talking about here and being like yeah like man just another day at Tesla like just over promising again it's like it's really stupid to say that to me so if you're one of the people in the comments that said that I'm sorry if just that that's just a bad point.
All right well that's a good rant there um let's see what else do we have in the notes uh shareholder stuff optimist so yeah seems like everything that we've seen so far is like optimist version two and a half which makes sense I think that's kind of what everyone assumed um so it sounds like February or March probably for uh version three sort of demo or whatever the case may be there um yeah we're not getting far away from that so I mean could be delayed one one shock me but uh just nice to see them feeling I think more confident in where they're at on optimist at the moment robo taxi uh I feel like we were close to getting more information we got to figure out these questions man these are these are brutal and I'm sorry if you're out the question because I like a lot of these questions the intent is good the information we're trying to get is good not all of them uh like some of the questions that were like product based obviously they can't answer uh I think there was one of like are you going to make a cyber truck SUV you know we can talk about that too but anyway with these questions as I've said many times in the past you got to be specific you can't ask seven questions in one question they're just gonna pick out the easiest one or the last one or just whichever one pops in their head first they're not gonna like sit there and write down all of your questions and then go back to them even though they're already written there they could just read them but they're not going to do that uh they've never done that you got to be specific with your questions so please try to do that in the future if whoever is watching whatever it's not gonna make any difference all right unfortunately they don't let they don't let us influence those anymore uh I do think they've gone downhill.
All right well anyway uh safety driver removal so it still sounds like end of the year but Elon did say like maybe a couple or a few months so I'm not putting too much weight in that um I think they're right to be cautious I think all of us wish that we were further along and these cars were just like no one in no one in them at this point um but like you on said it's it's smart to be cautious like until until it's unquestionable Tesla shouldn't do it and there's not really much point to do it and by do it I mean like really like launch on supervised FSD um Tesla's in the leadership position I don't really think anyone else is anywhere competitive the only things that ever come up for me in terms of competition are like Waymo and for a laundry list of reasons I don't think that's really an important competitor and then China and I don't I wish I had a better understanding of like how it truly is in China and I'm hopefully working on better understanding that as time goes by but for me with any Elon company that's kind of always the open question is just like what's going on going on with China outside of there like the competition coast seems pretty clear so that's how I view the you know everything here with autonomy too.
So if you do it too early and you're not like if you're not to that point of this is unquestionable of like we're ready to do this then the risk reward is not worth it you can continue to scale in the exact same way as you would be doing even if there was no person in that car uh and they're doing that they're getting all the regulations in place and all the markets ready to go which is what they would be doing even if there was not a person in those cars so that's not slowing them down at the moment it would be something that we would love to see it would be a great sign of progress but that's not a good reason to do it the good reason to do it is that it's time it's unquestionable.
So when that does happen it's going to be an awesome very exciting very encouraging milestone uh but we shouldn't Tesla shouldn't feel pressured to do that from a competitive sense or from like a shareholder sense the pressure should just come from you know this is too good to not do it at this point that's where the pressure needs to come from and I think they're probably not too far off from that and I think Tesla probably feels some of that right now of like by not doing this we're potentially putting lives at risk um which is I mean that's a real thing so and a real thing that Tesla you know in my view cares about so I think that that exists and I think that'll you know push them as fast as they need to be pushed um that's that's kind of my my view on that again I'm looking forward to that very much so hopefully it'll happen soon.
Uh Tesla XAI stuff I mean that's been talked about quite a long time now um Optimus so yeah version three I do you want to yeah this is the other thing in the comments people talk about like these other humanoid companies like again China open question outside of there I'm I'm just not seeing the competition I mean I know people like figure I have to bite my tongue on that a lot um um I mean that how how is figure gonna get the level of real world AI that Tesla has how are they gonna get the manufacturing scale and capability that Tesla has how are they gonna get the capital that Tesla has I just I don't I don't understand how you answer those questions like with a straight face um it's always possible that I could be surprised or I could be wrong or just completely be missing something or you know Tesla could fail and someone else just took a different path and it ended up working for them I just that's that's not what I'm seeing from those other companies.
Um you know it's one of those things that people would be on add on this on this call like production or you know prototypes or easy production is hard like times that by 10 for humanoids right like a demo video you know Tesla does them too all these other companies do them doesn't mean anything to me it's especially when there's like 60 cuts like all right you did five seconds of like holding addition or some water and then you cut cool um but anyway so that's kind of my point of view like again it's one of those things like people roll their eyes at when Elon likes it starts to explain why Tesla is better positioned but one of those things that I also think is like fundamentally very true so just because we've heard it a few times and this is gonna unfold over years and we're gonna hear it many many more times doesn't make it less true.
Um AFI distributed inference I think that's fascinating I wish I was smarter to be able to understand the ramifications of that but to me my intuition says that that's a big deal and I think that's kind of like Elon's point to of just like hey there's a lot of resources to just be sitting there we can probably use those for something so that's I mean that's that's my point of view I guess I think that that's probably gonna end up being true uh parameter can we'll increase by an order of magnitude not yet in 14.1 so Elon had talked about this was kind of interesting he talked about this before like this order of magnitude increase and I'm wondering if he means or if he just means like it didn't happen in 14.1 because they didn't put that in their release notes which I thought was a little bit strange but they weren't as technical this time so I don't know I would have liked clarification on that would have been a good analyst follow a question instead of asking about an XAI versus Tesla again which the guy asked twice by the way he was just trying to like not be explicit the first time he asked so no one knew what he was asking.
Uh let's see yeah killer app the we talked about this I think after the shareholder letter um people are thinking about autonomy wrong it's not just robot taxis like it's just such a silly way to look at it like robot taxis is a subset of the autonomous vehicle market um um that's why I think he said like that's what people want and if you can deliver that then they're gonna want to buy that car which I fully agree with uh cyber cybercaps are production Q2 2026 I don't think that's anything new Elon's now comfortable to expand what that means I don't know I think they have the footprint right now to be able to expand and it's also going to be this period of like yes we're comfortable expanding but in a transition period you got a you got to know exactly like where the demand is going to be in terms of like what cybercaps versus model Y versus model three versus like another form factor it's going to be a little bit of a figuring out period so I don't think they're going to want to like you know just start building two more gigafactories right now or anything like that didn't that didn't sound like it was the plan for for Elon anyway.
Um but just like you know kind of keep that in mind as we're thinking about it uh semi so autonomy there sounds like they're just gonna need the the fleet data so I wouldn't expect anything on that for a couple of years other than just like we're gonna you know see it start to evolve in a similar way probably like on the cyber truck right like it'll eventually get there and then it's probably gonna be a little bit behind because there's not as much data um so I would just expect that with with semi um but eventually over time you know they'll get there and I think the iteration speed of FSD like comparing it to cyber truck I think from where we've been at the last year to where it'll be a year from now and a year from from then I think that that loop becomes shorter um to like catch semi up with with passenger vehicles.
Version 14 light for hardware three so I think a lot of people will be excited to hear that um again reiterating that they'll take care of hardware three owners um I think it was nice that they mentioned like hey we get it this is like you guys are the early adopters early supporters that meant a lot to us and we don't want to like take that for granted so as you know maybe a little bit of like uh I don't know whatever the phrase is for that like at any rate it's nice to see them say that um and hopefully that will carry through to their actions as well.
Uh so again we talked about this performance per watt stuff uh very important probably under appreciated probably under emphasized as much as they talk about it it is a critical critical advantage for Tesla. The Samsung and TSMC stuff was actually very interesting I was glad that Elon took the time to expand on all of that stuff um again it's probably a little bit beyond like my wheelhouse in terms of really understanding the nuance here but um I think the just the it's it reminds me of Dojo right which obviously hasn't really turned out to be what Tesla thought maybe it could be at one point in time which I think is understandable just because of how the AI market has developed since then it's really really change significantly since like the start of Dojo.
Um which was probably something that I don't know not many people could have foreseen that um not not saying that's the entire reason that Dojo's got the way that it has but um end-of-year-eight this reminds me of the thought process behind Dojo which is just because it hasn't turned into what maybe it could have been or maybe what the hope is worth that time I think Elon always expresses like hey this is no guarantee that this works but it's worth trying um which I appreciate you know his mentality on that this reminds me of that of this is something that's purpose built for like Tesla's needs which you can't just necessarily buy a chip off the shelf that is you know designed first principles to your exact use case and that's what Tesla is able to do because of the scale of their app because of the talent that they have uh and obviously this is a project that they worked really really hard on for a really long time and they're kind of nearing the point of end of like that design you know stage and they're obviously extremely excited about the results of that so I think that's important to recognize you know if you're you know looking at this from a shareholder perspective.
Uh start-up stuff Optimus walking around hands are hard so begin production of Tesla Solar panel so they talked about that in the earnings report as well I kind of just assumed that that would be like a partnership with someone but kind of interesting we haven't really seen much from Tesla on the solar business for a long time they even dropped that line off of the earnings report probably a year or two ago now uh so interesting to see them kind of like put their toe back in the water there and we'll see you know if we hear more on that in the future um 250,000 miles in Austin more than a million in the Bay Area uh somebody could do the math on that I can't do it off the top of my head but interesting to just kind of see like how many miles per day that is and what that means per vehicle and things like that I'm sure someone will crack that quickly.
Uh eight to ten metro areas by end of year I've seen on X I don't know who posted it but I think there's just a nice chart of like all of the areas that Tesla's like sought a provolion for robot taxi um so hopefully you know sure many of you have seen that as well but yeah it's it is really exciting that again they're they are getting the groundwork in place for this pretty massive expansion um that people will again continue to take for granted until like the drivers and safety passengers are out of the vehicle but someday that's gonna happen right and then you can't take it for granted anymore like it's too late by then because then it's obvious it's it's done it's completed by then so the only thing that you know is in question at that point is was it too soon and is it going to make a mistake that ruins the business uh so you don't want to have that question be a question so once I get to that point they'll they'll be about um okay so that's the opening comments I don't think anything too crazy in there.
Um all right so let's get into some questions here uh did see let me see did see a couple of super chats here uh hope I don't miss any I'll try to just go from the top uh mark per se thank you uh appreciate that not a question on that one um let's see a ton of Gary I can't actually put them on screen on this uh this streaming thing that I'm using uh uh Francis gonna see on here thank you appreciate that thanks again Rex I will do my best to get well yeah if you didn't watch the shareholder like I'm getting over I guess I'm kind of in the midst of a cold so I know it's a stopped running a little bit for earnings thankfully uh pop thank you for that uh just voted to approve Yon's performance award space cowboy thanks for that super chat feel like I missed a couple here uh here we go it's on I'll get it yeah I don't know why this didn't show up in the scrolling thing um well that's a big super chat thank you thank you I appreciate that.
Um Gary says haven't given up on hardware three from one who's shaking grace hoppers hand after flying from WDC to thank me for automating her then dying on the DOD vine cobble into ASC 2 allowing it to be today's most widely used business software I see no good reason why FSD 14 plus can't be similarly optimized to work in hardware three so yeah it'll be really interesting like obviously Tesla's and Tesla's goal right now is to get to unsupervised they're not putting that development priority on optimizing hardware three really any much really any more much at all but it sounds like they still intend to do that to see what level it can get to I think they they think that it probably won't get to fully unsupervised um but we'll see I mean maybe maybe it does so anyway thank you Gary for that I really appreciate that um yeah I think the chat just like cuts off let me see if I can fix this here yeah I think that I think the chat just cuts off in what I'm available.
able to see here um so I'm really sorry if I missed anything from anybody let me just see if I can find any other questions before we wrap up or if any other thoughts pop into my mind for the day uh I guess just in general uh let's see where's the stock down 3% so and kind of where we started at least after the first 10 minutes or so of the call I think it settled around there so I don't know seems fine I mean a 3% move for earnings for Tesla is kind of like nothing really happened right like unfortunately it isn't the negative direction but that's such a minor change for a stock as volatile as Tesla that it's pretty meaningless um you know last quarter I think we're probably down more than that and we've seen the results not the results but just the movement in the share price since then so that's kind of a yonder I guess um but overall I think you know nice to see some of the strength in the business with uh particularly energy awesome quarter for energy was maybe a little bit I don't know concerning but like maybe a little bit of a probably not a warning either but just a word of caution that they are seeing some headwinds there with increasing competition.
It's obviously a very hot market a very interesting market right now to meet all the demand for power and energy needs for AI for data centers for hyperscalers so you know it's something that a lot of people are going to be looking at a lot of people are going to be working on excuse me a Tesla is saying that they're starting to see some of that develop in the market but I think Tesla is in a position to compete really well but the caveat to that being that that may come with the results of a little bit of margin compression and that might be why Tesla is just pointing it out um I could be reading too far into that but that's just sort of my intuition with that comments um that being said they're also going to like scale volume massively here too and that comes with both cost advantages but also as you serve like a way of larger market something that's probably likely to double to triple over the next year two years um maybe three years when you scale up that dramatically like a lot of times you're doing that through economies of scale and a lot of times those economies of scale it's get passed on to customers for lower prices and that helps you grow the total investment market etc.
So wouldn't be surprised to see both average selling price costs and margins all those three come down for the energy storage business as that volume does increase um but anyway really nice quarter for energy services another nice quarter to it sounds like uh I think Antonio asked earlier it sounds like the robot taxi stuff is all just getting bucketed in there right now I don't think that really has any effect on those lines at the current scale again we could probably do the math now that we have the you know million miles in Bay Area 250 thousand miles and in Austin we could probably do the math on just you know how how much revenue maybe has been generated from that just like a ballpark so but I don't think that's anything significant at the moment or probably for you know next couple of quarters at least so we'll see how that develops but nice nice quarter for services another and then automotive pretty good quarter there I think too um nice to see the sequential growth and automotive growth margin I think that obviously buoyed a little bit by the expiration of the federal tax credit increasing demand that helps the delivery numbers and revenues and margins and now we have to sort of reap them reward of that here in the fourth quarter.
Some of that will be offset a little bit by the just the order placement timing uh some of that will bump into Q4 as well so we'll see Q1 could be a challenging quarter especially since you know Q4 we've got the introduction of standard range or the standard version of the three in the y at a lower price so um we'll see how all that comes to comes together but once we get in Q1 next year you know we're talking about optimists we're talking about semi we're talking about FSD version 13 14.3 and maybe you know probably a little bit early at that point to be talking about a version 15 but then we're starting to get close to cyber cam production starting to get close into AI5 production most likely and maybe inclusion in the vehicle I'm not sure I would expect that that would coincide with cyber cam but I guess I'm not 100% sure on that off the top of my head.
So yeah might be a little bit like a few rough weeks there but I think there's plenty to look forward to in in 2026 to be excited about for for Tesla so I think with that we can we can wrap it up again thank you all for joining really appreciate just the support when I come back and do this um I wish I could do a little bit more frequently can't make any promises but I'd you know I think I would like to do that at some point so we'll see but um if not you know at the latest we'll definitely be back next quarter and I gonna appreciate everyone joining and supporting it it really does mean a lot to me so thank you and we'll we'll keep an eye on Tesla and um just continue to see how these things advance and if I get a chance when I get a chance to do a little bit more driving an FST 14 I'll try to share some thoughts on X's there as well because it's a very exciting time with FST at the moment so thanks again and we'll talk soon.