Hey everybody Rob Maurer here and today we are going to be going through Tesla's Q2 earnings call. Sorry about the issues on the actual live call. Hopefully you guys can give me a heads up if everything is working now. But I do apologize for that. Obviously extremely frustrating for me. I did test it and everything was working good. Just couldn't get things fixed.
So we are going to go through just the normal call takeaways like we normally would do after the earnings call. I'm just going to wait a second and again make sure that everything is working here. Okay. So let me know in the comments and then we'll continue. Someone says no audio. Great. That's nice. I'm just going to wait a couple more seconds here. Perfect. Now.
Alright. So as usual I went through and you know took the normal notes on the call. So we'll kind of go through in sequential order. I've bolded a couple of things that are you know stuck out to me as major big news from the call.
But we'll start off you know Tesla said they're continuing to target 1.8 million deliveries. The slight decrease though expected in production in Q3 for what Tesla called a global factory upgrades. So kind of interesting to hear about that. You know obviously there's been a lot of rumors about Tesla and Project Highland. It would seem that that would be scheduled now for Q3 with Tesla talking about these upgrades to come. So that's going to not only hit production probably hit deliveries as well depending on how much inventory Tesla works through. And it will also hit margins as Zach mentioned later in the call due to downtime and just spend for those production upgrades. So we will have to wait you know and see on that but should expect declines in the third quarter.
Going from there Elon talked about the Robotaxi that they're working on the next generation vehicle said it should have quasi infinite demand. Talked about it being not only revolutionary from a software perspective with FSD but also from a hardware and production standpoint which we heard a lot about at investor day. He said it will be the highest units per hour ever created in terms of production for vehicles. Talked about AI with AI more training yields better results no one can come close to Tesla on training capabilities. He said that through Dojo and continuing to grow their Nvidia GPU cluster they may 100x or more they're known at training capacity or capability by the end of next year. So we've talked about that and that's just a ramp up of their training capabilities through their hardware like we talked about with Dojo and the A100 equivalents in terms of I think getting to 100x of flops by end of next year.
Licensing. So interesting here he mentioned kind of offhandedly they're not licensing supercharging so there wasn't really much discussion on that and interestingly not really any questions on how Tesla's structuring that from a business perspective but Elon mentioned not licensing it just opening up the network so we'll continue to wait for more information on that. But then he mentioned that they're actually very open and in early discussions with a major OEM about licensing FSD who that OEM would be who knows but I think Ford has been very receptive to working with Tesla they were the first to adopt an ACS it would seem like they would probably be the most likely candidate obviously they have their blue cruise system blues clues you know whichever you want to call it but they do have that although they have also mentioned that they specifically are only really going to be focusing or prioritizing development of sort of a level two level three type of systems and they've essentially given up on level four level five with Ford talking about how really their goal is to give people time back through those level three type of systems where maybe they can have eyes off of the road. So interesting we'll keep an eye out for more on that but that would be huge news we've seen the reaction since you know the initial announcement of the Ford supercharger adoption if they also announced FSD adoption I think that would be a pretty massive fundamental inflection point for the stock at that point.
Alright, back to the current business they noted as we talked about going into it as we talked about after the shareholder letter the current top priority for the for the business is just maximizing investment making sure that they are being able to make these investments in these things that they're so excited about in the product roadmap and the second priority alongside it is to maximize volume but doing it in a way that can support that expansion and that's what we talked about as being so valuable for Tesla right now they're able to grow these economies of scale grow their the infrastructure for their business and also put that through the cash flow on the current business.
Elon mentioned later on the call that it's pretty crazy that they're in this capital intensive business they're investing in an insane way I think was the words that they used and yet they're still able to be free cash flow positive while doing that so that's what Zach was talking about and really just reiterated the focus up in the next few quarters is going to continue to be that not necessarily a focus on margin for those specific quarters but I think Zach put it really well in and you know once these quarters go by they're in the past and businesses are valued off of the net present value of their future earnings so once the earnings are in the past it's done and like we talked about going into this report the reason people care about the margins and things like that is because of how they extrapolate into future quarters doesn't matter if Tesla earns two and a half billion dollars or three billion dollars this quarter but it matters what their margin is because then that will yield you know half a million half a billion dollar difference in every single quarter going forward if the margins stay the same versus a lower level so that's why people care about it but with Tesla they're going to be these new products that Tesla develops and integrates and unveils and releases over time that fundamentally change that equation so that was the focus you know right now the business is just about getting getting enough cash flow to build those things and those things change the business going forward that's kind of always been the story for Tesla but at a certain point they just got big enough where people were excited about the actual fundamentals of the business versus the future products and some of that long term perspective I think has shifted over time so a great reiteration there of what we you know talked about going into the call.
Alright so upgrades if we'll carry some costs that's just about the factory upgrades we talked about that 4680 progress it sounds like things are progressing really well so 80% increase in production at gigatexis for 4680 production quarter over quarter they surpassed 10 million cells produced in Texas so they'd given that update on Twitter it was a little bit unclear if that was total or in Texas our thought was that it was specifically for Texas that turns out to be correct and then he said they've they've achieved a 25% reduction in cost of goods sold on the cells at gigatexis quarter over quarter through a 40% scrap rate reduction so that's a massive reduction in costs quarter over quarter we talked about how this is hitting Tesla's average cost of goods sold on all their vehicles that gets amortized across vehicles made in Shanghai you know right now so as this continues that will help the business continue to look better from a fundamental perspective so great to see that they also mentioned that the energy density on their next generation 4680 cell which is sounds like it's you know either in production or going into production right now would be 10% higher than the current cell which it's roughly in line with energy density from the Tesla's other vehicles we've talked about that with the standard range Model Y so it's it's sort of right now coming in around you know the benchmarks that Tesla would have with their other cells so for them to now be able to do a 10% higher energy density would be you know I think fantastic progress in that sort of short period of time I don't feel like a long time but relatively short period of time that Tesla's been producing these cells and they said that that was without silicon and without additional cathode improvements which would continue to drive energy density up and cost down so pretty big updates there on 4680 and I was glad to hear about those so maybe I mentioned this but they're calling that next generation of the cyber cell so it sounds like that would be used for the cyber truck and they're confident in having that up to enough volume production to support volume production of the cyber truck next year.
Okay, so 4680 system so although these are cell based improvements a lot of what is being done with 4680 is the entire production process. Tesla focused a lot on that at Battery Day. Drew said that they're you know realizing those advantages as Texas scales. up so good at kind of reiterate and focus on that as well.
Energy so we talked about the margin they didn't focus too much on margins in this call but for energy products at least but they did say that they can't talk about future products. With the current products, Lathrop is you know the mega factory and Lathrop with 40 gigawatt hours it's ramping up to meet demand for the second half of the year and the second line is scheduled ahead of the full the second line of production for the Lathrop facility is on schedule ahead of the factory ramp in 2024 so it sounds like it'll be probably still a bit of time maybe a year from now where Lathrop is really at that sort of 40 gigawatt hour capacity. So we may see the growth stall out a little bit until that second line comes on and then you got a little bit of a jump there.
500,000 power walls installed they recently hit that milestone so we'll have to go back and see what the previous milestone was I don't have that handy but we can kind of extrapolate production and install rates from that.
Question was asked about costigood sold per unit from the IRA. Zach reiterated the previous guidance so kind of a waste of a question but $150 million to $250 million per quarter they said that you two came in in that range they said that they split that benefit 5050 with Panasonic I think that's before they're you know considering the range that they gave there so Panasonic probably benefiting in a similar of a similar magnitude commodity prices improving lithium most notable as we talked about before the call heading into it in the preview seeing benefits and other commodities like steel and aluminum as well and they said that the improvements there were similar to the benefits from IRR a quarter of a quarter
SNX mix increased so that helps ASP but it also increases the average cost of goods sold which as we talked about did decline $1200 quarter of a quarter so if you take out SNX from the mix that likely means off to do the math on it but that likely means that the decline sequentially for Model 3 and Model Y would have been bigger than that $1200 so nice to see that.
FSD transferability I had to laugh when this one came up because obviously I wasn't a huge fan of the question I'm still not a huge fan of the question the reason for that isn't because of any opinion that I have on this topic although I do have an opinion on it it's more so that I just don't think it's a really appropriate question for an earnings call I think it's more of a customer based question so that's that's my frustration with it but Elon did say they're gonna allow a transfer in Q3 so congratulations to those people that wanted that he said this is gonna be a one-time amnesty where they'll allow this transfer the timing is interesting because that's definitely a lever for Tesla you know that's gonna cause people especially if it's just a one-time thing like hey do it now or don't do whatever if that's the case that's gonna probably trigger quite a few orders so an interesting level for Tesla and I guess you know that does have some business relevance for a short period of time over the long term it's I don't think it's very relevant but it'll be interesting to see how they handle that this quarter maybe they would temporarily increase prices too I don't know we'll have to see on that but it's also gonna mean a lot of new or used Tesla vehicles hitting the market at the same time so we'll see you know what their plans are for that for this quarter.
Cyber truck demand is off the hook a lot of new tech a lot he reiterated so just like we saw in the shareholder letter which by the way make sure you go back and watch that you know reaction in the shareholder letter we're focusing on the call here but for the cyber truck reiterating that there's just a lot of new technology the ramp up is gonna move as slow as the slowest part of the ramp up across you know 10,000 different parts are thinking something of that magnitude so just trying to caution people that this is going to still be a slow process probably painfully slow that we're now this close but still confident high volume production next year and delivering the first vehicles this year I don't think that there was any mention of specifically in Q3 so I guess we'll just have to stay tuned on that.
Alright giga casting repairability so just kind of a question there quickly answered they said it's you know the people overestimate the simplicity of current vehicles in terms of their repairability there's a lot of different parts that have to all be fitted together versus just swapping out the casting potentially Tesla said this is 10 times cheaper and three times faster than the Model 3 so just kind of a red herring in terms of those questions.
And then for optimus Elon said that there you know currently there's maybe five or six bots or ten it just kind of depends on what you view as a bot and what stage of development but said that they're making more more bots every month lots of interesting things right now they they talked about the actuators for the the Tesla bot which they've talked about before none of them are really available off the shelf Tesla has to design and produce these and they should be able to produce the first optimus with fully in-house actuators sometime in November and then try to ramp up production after that obviously at first they're going to use these in their own factories and over time expand from there but Elon thinks that they can start using these doing something useful in the factory at least sometime next year so I think that's going to surprise a lot of people but if we really do see you know sort of exponential or logarithmic growth in Tesla's AI capabilities which is what Elon does expect if that happens we you know optimus will surprise a lot of people so exciting on that and then he also mentioned just the capabilities of combining Neuralink with optimus and some of the things that could be done with that kind of cyborg-esque type of type of things which obviously would be pretty cool.
Order intake, demand roughly tracked production, Tesla's got very high confidence in the long term growth of Tesla but mentioned on a number of occasions things could be volatile in the short term nothing new there. Elon reiterated though he does see a path to Tesla 10x from here and then he thought about well the stock price is quite a bit higher than it was in recent times in recent months so Elon said maybe something more like a 5x these days which would obviously put Tesla at around 4.5 trillion dollars as potentially the largest company in the world.
Yeah, investment so we talked about that. Dojo R&D they said they're going to be spending north of a billion dollars throughout the next year so this is a decent chunk of Tesla's R&D spend if you look at where they've been running for R&D and it depends on what bucket things fall into some R&D spend can sometimes fall in other buckets but strictly talking to R&D line Tesla's been spending about 800 million dollars there per quarter that jumped up a bit this quarter but we're talking somewhere in the order of 3 to 4 billion dollars per year so it's a big chunk of their spend and obviously right now that's doing nothing for the business right like it's going to but it's not doing anything to help the business right now yet it is still impacting operating expenses which is something we've talked about going back a long long time in Tesla's history.
Those operating expenses those are hitting before they're yielding real benefit especially the R&D line so that's why I said like I don't mind seeing that line jump up and cause the operating margin to decline because it's from things like spending on Dojo which don't really have any relevance to actual operating margin of the business today but hopefully will improve things significantly going forward. So excited to hear some comments on that talked about how it makes sense to sacrifice margin for volume due to autonomy the more vehicles you get out there the more you can turn on flip on to being autonomous and reap the rewards of doing that they were asked about just progress in general Elon said he's the boy who cried FSD at this point but continues to believe that it'll be better than a human by the end of the end of the year in the US not to say it's approved so nothing too new on Elon's thoughts there but he remains confident and then he reiterated the price of FSD as low relative to obviously what the future value would be if this were to happen.
XAI they briefly touched on whether that would be like a conflict of interest with Tesla or whether it would benefit Tesla Elon noted specifically that part of the reason it exists is because when interviewing talent they had no interest in potentially working for a company like Tesla that's a $900 billion company even if there is potential upside in that I'm sure there's equity considerations there to be made and then in addition to that it's just a different type of a team like we've heard you know JB Straubel talk about how where Tesla is at these days it just wasn't quite the same as it was many years ago where you've got a smaller team and potentially that gives you different roles or different tasks that you're required to do so it's just a different environment basically Elon's point was that there are people that want to work in that environment and you can either let them go to some other company like OpenAI or whomever else and then they're not going to benefit Tesla at all or you can have an XAI startup and that can work side by side to an extent with Tesla like SpaceX and Tesla have done for many years and then hopefully that can actually be beneficial to Tesla versus just kind of losing out on that talent so it's a tricky situation but the explanation I do think makes sense.
and then kind of the last thing just some comments on costs commodity trends they said to be said seem to be deflationary nothing new on that that's been the case for Tesla for six months now or so and economies of scale continue to grow with the exception obviously of this next quarter with the production downtime so overall I mean again as I said at the at the outside of or I guess that the after the shareholder letter came out I think this was a great quarter average selling prices were better than expected despite pricing adjustments throughout the quarter I think cost of goods sold coming down more so than average selling prices came down is obviously a huge positive we saw amazing margin from Tesla energy going from about 11% up to 18% and hopefully continuing to grow from that because we actually saw a sequential decline in volume and obviously as we know higher volume usually yields higher margins so excited about energy and all of these numbers were achieved you know beating analysts expectations with with a relatively low number for regulatory credits probably one of the lowest regulatory credit numbers and you know the last couple of years so I don't think there's a lot here to be disappointed with I think most things either come in came in at expectation or above expectations which is really good and I think Tesla showed a lot of focus on the right things on the call they're talking about the things I want them to be talking about no surprise like this is a management team that I've invested in for a decade and will continue to invest in for a long time so I'm excited about how they're viewing the business it's obviously a bit of a rough patch right now while we're you know waiting to get this next next generation stuff waiting to get to FSD but I think the way that they're approaching these problems and the way that they're viewing the business are the right way so a lot to be excited about I'm pretty happy with the results I haven't looked at the the stock for a bit I've been you know trying to get this this streaming stuff in order it looks like we're down 4% right now which is frankly pretty surprising given the magnitude of the beat versus expectations and I don't think anything too negative on the call but you know perhaps I'm missing something that's causing a little bit of that negative reaction alright so I think we'll probably wrap it up there again really happy with the quarter again apologize for the issues on the live stream trust me nobody hates that more than me I practiced you know did a test run beforehand and everything was fine so I don't know what what caused that and it's obviously frustrating just me here I don't have like a tech support team that can jump on fix things live so we'll try to get those things work through and again apologize for that but that'll wrap it up for today so as always thank you for listening make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications you can also find me on twitter at tessell podcast and we'll see you tomorrow for the Thursday July 20th episode of tessell daily thank you.