So You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Tesla's second quarter 2023 Q&A webcast. My name is Martin vehicle of invest relations and I'm joined today by Elon Musk, Zachary Kirkhorn and a number of other executives. Our Q2 results were announced at about 3 p.m. Central time in the update deck we publish at the same link as this webcast. During this call we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. These comments are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our most recent filings with the SEC. During the question and answer portion of today's call, please let me tell yourself to one question and one follow up. Please use the raise hand button to join the question queue. But before we jump into the Q&A, Elon has some opening remarks.
Elon? Thank you, one. So just a Q2 recap. In Q2, we achieved record vehicle production and deliveries and record revenue of about $25 billion in a single quarter. Model Y became the best selling vehicle of any kind globally in Q1, surpassing the likes of Corolla and Gold. So it was the number one vehicle of any kind, including vehicles that are at a cellular parlor price. This is I think an incredible achievement by Tesla team and just a huge thank you to our customers for their support.
So in this case, despite of high interest rates and a lot of macro uncertainty and nonetheless, we managed to achieve operating margin of about 10%. We continue to target 1.8 million vehicle deliveries this year. Although we expect that Q3 production will be a little bit down because we've got summer shutdowns for a lot of factory upgrades. So just probably a slight decrease in production in Q3 for sort of global factory upgrades.
In the long term economy, we think is going to just drive volume through the ceiling next level. And our sort of future rubber taxi products, dedicated rubber taxi products, we think have like quasi infinite demand. So, and the way we're going to manufacture the rubber taxi is also itself a revolution. So it's a revolutionary design made in a revolutionary way. It'll be by far the highest units per hour of any vehicle production ever. So we're very excited about that.
With respect to autopilot and dojo in order to build autonomy, we also need to train our neural net with the data from millions of vehicles. With the more, I mean, this has been proven over and over again, the more training data you have, the better the results. And there are times where we see basically in a neural net. Basically, it's sort of at a million training examples. It barely works at 2 million. It's slightly works at 3 million. It's like, wow, we're seeing something for that. It's like 10 million training examples. It's like it becomes incredible. So, there's just no substitute for mass amount of data. And obviously Tesla has more vehicles on the road that are collecting this data than all of the companies combined by, I think, maybe even an order of magnitude. So, I think we might have 90% of all, or a very big number. So, you know, the success in AI and Dev as a function of talent, sort of unique data and computing resources. And we have outstanding capabilities and all three arenas. And I really just don't know how anyone could do what we're doing, even if they had our software and had our computer, if they did not have the training data.
So, speaking of which our Doge training computer is designed to significantly reduce the cost of neural net training. It is designed to, it's so optimized for the kind of training that we need, which is a video training. So, you know, we just see that the need for neural net training, the quasi and things is just enormous. So, I think having, we expect to use both Nvidia and Dojo to be clear. But this, this, we just see a demand for really vast training resources. And we think we may reach in house neural net, neural net training capability of 100 x o'clock by the end of next year.
So, to date, over 300 million miles have been driven using FSD beta, that 300 million mile number is going to seem small very quickly. It'll soon be billions of miles, then tens of billions of miles. And then FSD will go from being as good as a human to them being vastly better than a human. We see a clear path to full stop driving being 10 times safer than the average human driver.
So, and between autopilot, Dojo computer, our inference hardware in the car, which equals sort of hardware 34, you know, it's really dedicated. It's a high efficiency inference computer that's in the car and our optimist robot tells us the only of the cutting edge of a ad.
With regard to our cyber. Which we continue to build release candidates of the cyber truck on our final production line in Austin. I'm actually here in Austin at the factory.
This is the first truck that we're aware of that will have four doors over a six foot bed and foot into a 20 foot garage. So, it's a sort of biggest on the outside, but it's even bigger on the inside. So, I think that's one of the elements of good design is it should feel bigger on the inside. Then it looks in the outside. And this is this is no small car, but we we're really cared about the exterior dimensions of the cyber truck down to the last millimeter. So, just trying to get rid of the gold, a lot.
So, not too big, not too small. And then really maximize the utility of the volume. And we can't wait to start delivering it later this year. Some other highlights are global supercharging network. Now stands over 50,000 roughly 50,000 connectors and over 5000 locations. As I think a lot of people are aware. The Tesla starting the Tesla charging standard, which we made open source. We're deeply honored that for GM, Mercedes and many other Williams have signed up to use our connector and gain access to our charging network. We strongly believe in helping other companies to accelerate the evolution and just trying to do the right thing in general. So, that's all there.
Then something I think I want to emphasize very strongly. As with the North American charging standard, although we're not licensed in the case of licensing, we're just making it available. But we are very open to licensing our pull stuff driving software and hardware to other car companies. And we are already in discussions with only discussions with a major OEM about using Tesla FST. So, we're not trying to keep this to ourselves. We're more than happy to license it to others.
And lastly, our new lithium refinery and cathode facility are progressing well.
最后,我们的新锂矿冶炼厂和正极材料设施的建设进展顺利。
In conclusion, we continue to focus on making as many causes as we can while maintaining healthy financials. Our artificial intelligence development is obviously entering a new era. And we're incredibly excited about what's to come. Our other businesses, such as mega pack supercharging service and what not all started to become a meaningful contributor to overall profitability. And then lastly, I'd just like to profusely thank all of our employees who are making it a lot of extra effort during uncertain times. Thank you very much for your hard work and impact your making. Thank you very much, you long and I think Zach is some opening remarks as well.
Yeah, thanks Martin. As you one mentioned, Q2 was another record quarter of production and deliveries, as well as records and profit for energy and services and other businesses. Congratulations again to the Tesla team on the continued progress.
As we navigate through a period of economic uncertainty, rising interest rates, volatility and consumer confidence and regulatory change, I want to comment on our financial approach.
First, the single most important priority is to ensure we are continuing to invest heavily in the core technologies that will drive the long term value of the business. This include increasing spending on AI related technologies, such as full self driving, optimist and dojo, as well as new products such as cyber truck, our next generation platform and the semi as evidenced by the continued growth in our R&D spend.
This also includes continuing our investments and capacity expansion, not only in our vehicle factories, but also our supercharging network service, internal applications and battery processes as we continue with meaningful capital expenditures to lay this foundation for the future.
Second, we continue to work towards our goals of maximizing volumes on both our vehicle and energy business, but most importantly doing so in a way that generates the capital to continue our pace of R&D and capital investments.
This requires a strong focus on per unit cost reductions in each of our key businesses, as well as working capital improvements on raw materials, working process inventory and customer AR, all of which progressed appropriately in Q2.
If we look specifically at our automotive business, our gross margin showed a modest reduction and remain healthy. Despite action taken to further improve vehicle affordability early in the quarter. We recognize we realized per unit cost improvements in nearly every category, including material cost and commodities, manufacturing costs and logistics, while also continuing to rapidly increase the build rate and our Austin and Berlin factories.
For our energy business, we improved margins and gross profit driven by cost reductions and deal economics, particularly with Megapack. As a reminder, storage volumes are typically volatile sequentially based on the types of projects and their specific revenue recognition milestones.
As we look forward to the rest of the year, I want to reiterate Elon's comments on Q3 volumes driven by planned down times for factory upgrades. These upgrades will also carry some amount of factor idle cost, however we are working to minimize as much as possible. It's also important to keep in mind the uncertainty in the macro environment, which can impact our execution positively or negatively in the near term. Regardless, we continue to remain dynamic with a focus on fundamental efficiency and a long term outlook. Congratulations again to everybody on a great quarter.
Thank you very much, Zach, and let's go to investor questions. The first question on licensing FSD we've already answered. So let's go to the second one. The second question is, what is the status of 4680 cells? How far are you from the specs you laid out on battery day? When do you expect to achieve what you laid out on battery day? Yeah, first I'll just start with a little bit of a production update. So in Texas 4680 cell production increased 80% Q2 over Q1 and the team surpassed 10 million production cells produced here in Texas. So congrats to the team for that. Their focus on yield reduced our scrap bill by 40% quarter over quarter and that resulted in a 25% reduction in cell cogs. Here in Texas we're preparing to launch our Sauber Truck Cell, which is 10% higher energy density than current production. That was accomplished through process and mechanical design optimization. As we scale cyber cell production through the end of the year and early next we should be in a comfortable place on cost per cell. Against our battery energy density targets the cyber cell is at our expectations on a like for like electrochemistry basis, where you get to integrate silicon or in house cathode production both reviewed on battery day, which do bring significant further energy density and cost improvements, but that is a topic for another day. Lastly, it is important to remember that most of what we focused on a battery day was the Tesla engineered 4680 production system and the improvements we strove to achieve on equipment, factory density, capital cost and utility cost reduction, all of which we were realizing in our Texas scale up to date. Thank you very much.
The next question is, can you talk more to the upcoming Tesla energy products and how your thinking has evolved on the revenue model? Given Tesla's AI capabilities, how do you see the long term mix between hardware margin and recurring software margin from auto bidder as the segment accelerates? We can't comment on future product roadmap, but I can provide a quick energy Q2 update. Megapack continues to show strong demand globally with Lathrop ramping successfully to meet our contracted projects in 2023. As stated last quarter, Megapack margins are in a reasonable place in line with our target market vehicle target margins. The second final assembly line at Lathrop is progressing on schedule, eventually doubling Lathrop capacity ahead of our full factory ramp in 2024. We have several exciting large projects in construction or nearing completion, including the KES project in Hawaii, the River Gina project in Australia, several projects in California, and one here at Gigafactory, Texas, that I toured today, actually. We want to thank our customers, utilities and grid operators for trusting us with these projects.
On the auto bidder question, we continue to grow auto bidder contracts in wholesale markets like Australia, Texas, UK and California with over 6 gigawatt hours under Tesla's dispatch next year. In the UK, our project performed best in the industry in Q2.
Auto bidder does have software margins and is an enabler for hardware sales, but it's a relatively small contributor to revenues given how much deployment growth on the Megapack hardware side is occurring.
It's important to remember that these large projects, these large capital projects have lifetimes of 20 years of occurring revenues on an analyzed basis relative to upfront capex are small.
On the residential side, we have some fun things happening. We recently surpassed a half million power wells installed. Just this week, we were launching charge on solar, which allows Tesla power wall and vehicle customers to charge their vehicles using their access solar and drive only on the sunshine that hits their roof.
在住宅领域,我们有一些有趣的事情正在发生。我们最近安装的电源井已经超过了50万个。就在本周,我们推出了太阳能充电(Charge on Solar)计划,它允许特斯拉的Power Wall和车主利用他们接入的太阳能为电动车充电,只使用他们屋顶接收到的阳光行驶。
Yesterday, we began paying customers in Texas for participating in our virtual power plant to provide grid support to ERCOT. We expect these credits to lower our median customer's annual bill by a third and to increase these credits over time as ERCOT expands market access.
And today we were expanding Tesla electric enrollment to new Model 3 owners in Texas, followed by all Texas vehicle customers over the rest of the quarter.
Unfortunately, and somewhat similar to Tesla insurance, bringing Tesla electric and BPP capabilities to our customers requires working through a fractured regulatory environment on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis.
In the long run, the value of residential energy software and hardware will be driven by the level of market access that utilities, market operators and regulators permit. For power walls eligible to provide the full stack of energy services, like peak or peak or capacity and system buffering, such as in Australia, we can more than double the value of ownership relative to a typical system today.
Thank you very much. The next question is, could you quantify the benefits to COGS per unit from the IRA battery manufacturing incentives and secondly battery raw material declines year to date.
All right, I can take that. First part of the question for IRA manufacturing incentives, we provided previous guidance that we expect these to be for the course of this year in the range of 150 million to 250 million per quarter. We are staying within that boundary as we got it previously. So that was the case in Q2 as well.
I will note, I think we've mentioned this before, that this includes a 5050 sharing of credits for qualified cells from our long term battery partner Panasonic. On the commodity side, we are continuing to see improvements there as we've discussed previously. Lithium is the most notable improvement so far. I think I commented on this on the last call, because typically we see this coming about a quarter before it actually is realized in our financials.
And also just as a reminder, we're not fully exposed to the price of lithium. Our supply chain team has done a terrific job in partnership with another bunch of other companies to put in place some long term agreements here, but we do have some exposure that moves up and down. We're also seeing benefits in aluminum and steel, which I think is great. Not as large as the lithium impacts, but they contribute nonetheless.
So if we add up the total impact of this in Q2 relative to prior quarter, it's about the same size and magnitude as the IRA benefits that we also received. Just to put this in context, as you look at Cog's per unit sequentially from Q1 to Q2, I think there's two things to keep in mind there.
The first is that our Sx mix for deliveries increased quite a bit from Q1 to Q2. So as you think about fundamental cost reductions, it's important to adjust for that. And then secondly, as we continue to work on reducing our Austin and Berlin costs, which we did quite a bit of that from Q1 to Q2, these factories are still a slightly above model Y production costs elsewhere. And in the quarter, our mix of Austin and Berlin related builds increased. And so that's something to consider as you model out the impact from Q1 to Q2 in terms of Cog's per unit.
I do want to ask, if there's anything else on the commodity side, or just more generally you want to add here?
我确实想问一下,如果在商品方面还有其他事情需要补充,或者更一般地说,你想在这里添加什么?
Yeah, as you mentioned, Zach, we've naturally been a little bit hedged from the lithium position because of the long term contracts we have in place. But we have seen reduction in pricing across the board for all commodities that specifically go into batteries, such as nickel, cobalt, and graphite.
And the reductions in pricing translate into thousands of dollars when you look at it from a ProVIA-colon pack. We're taking advantage of the historically low commodity pricing in certain areas to kind of expand some of those fit fresh contracts through the end of the decade.
So it's a playbook that will continue to kind of go back to as we look to the future. Thank you.
所以这是一本我们在展望未来时会一直回头参考的手册。谢谢。
The next question on FSD. Have you considered allowing FSD transferability as a lever to allow existing customers to upgrade to a new Tesla instead of being locked into an existing car due to the price of FSD? Yeah, this is a question we get asked a lot. So we're excited to announce that for Q3, we will be allowing transfer of FSD. This is a one time MSD. So it needs to be taken advantage of it in Q3, but or at least place the order in Q3 within reasonable delivery timeframes. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, please make people happy. But we're not going to do this one time thing.
Right, the next question, when will we give more information about the cyber truck orders, estimated delivery schedules, pricing, and specifications? So demand is so far off the hook, you can't even see the hook. So that's really not an issue. I do want to emphasize that the cyber truck has a lot of new technology in it, like a line. It doesn't look like any other vehicle because it is not like any other vehicle. So the production ramp will move as fast as the slowest and least like the elements of the entire supply chain and internal production. So, you know, I wouldn't expect, you know, I hope it's smooth. We're certainly better at production ramps than we've got a lot of experience with production ramps. But, you know, first order approximation is like 10,000 unique parts and processes in the cyber truck. And if any one of it will go as fast as the least lucky, you know, least well executed element of the 10,000. So, always very difficult to predict the ramp initially, but I think we'll be making them in high volume next year. And we will be delivering the car this year. Thank you.
The next question is critics of gigacast thing, contented that process makes vehicles harder and more costly to repair, essentially pushing costs onto the customer. You share some details about the initial repair experience with gigacast vehicles. That must be why everyone's copying us. Yeah, thanks. That's like simply not true. There's a misconception that traditional bodies are easy to repair, but they are made of multiple materials and multiple joining methods. Spot wells and rivets have to be drilled out. Panels and structural adhesive have to be chiseled out. Tried adhesive has to be removed. Stamped links cut. Blah, blah, blah. It's a crazy patch. Yeah. And so putting that back together means time and money using an example of replacing a rear cast rail on a model Y. To do that versus like what we replaced it with from the model three, it's 10 times cheaper and three times faster to do it with the cast rail. My design team works with our collision repair team since we're closed loop on this with insurance and we design specific parts that are making it easier and faster to repair. And we have an incentive to do that because we have our own insurance and our own body shops. We expect that we'll continue to do this and collision repair will continue to become cheaper and faster over time. And we already made this available for all body shops or a test rope clear body shop training. Yeah, closing loop on collision repair. Factoring that into design is a big deal. It's crucial. I don't think anyone else can do it with that ecosystem that we have. Yeah. And we are actually able to change the details of the casting with inserts. And we actually do that all the time. So because the answer is actually we're out and need to be replaced anyway. So we can actually make design changes to the inserts and tweak the castings. But the cast, basically cast the rear body or front body is lighter, cheaper, better for noise vibration, harshness, much easier to manufacture. And it's better in every way. And that's why so many other car companies are copying us. Because probably they don't know. They certainly put out a lot of press releases. I think it's basically going to be how all cars are made in the future.
Thank you.
Next question. How many optimus bots have been made and when will they be able to start performing useful tasks? 10 million. Yeah, I think we're around five or six. I would say how many are working in what phase. It's sort of. Yeah. There's more more every month. There's a lot of interesting things about the options. We found that there are actually no suppliers that can produce the actuators. There are no off the shelf actuators that work well for a human robot at any price. Certainly not compelling. Yes, not a human robot that can do stuff that you know, things that a human could do. So we've actually had to design our own actuators that integrate the motor of the power electronics, the controller. The sensors and. Really everyone of them is custom design. So. And of course we'll be using the same inference hardware as the car. So. You know, and we are in designing these actuators, designing them for flying production. So they're not just lighter, tighter, more and more capable than any other actuators where that that were where that exists in the world. It's also actually. Me factorable. So we should be able to make them in volume. The first. Optimists that is that will have all of the tells that designed actuators. So production candidate actuators. It integrated and walking should be around November. So. And then we'll, we'll start wrapping up after that. So we're going to do some useful things. We'll first be trying this out in our own factories and just proving out this utility. But I, I think, I think we'll be able to have it do something useful in our factories sometime next year. I would be. Yeah, I'm pretty, pretty confident of that. So. Yeah, and it's going well. I should say another cool thing about optimists is that, you know, there's just in the US loan, there are 2 million amputees. And I was just talking to the neural link team and by combining a neural link. Implant and a robotic arm or leg. For someone that has had their arms on the leg or arms and legs amputated. We believe we can give you basically a cyborg body that is incredibly capable. Six million dollar man. It in real life. Don't worry cost six million dollars. Six thousand dollar man. It's a thousand impressive, but it's, it'll actually, you know, so, so that actually could be a really, I think would be incredible to potentially help millions of people around the world. And, and give them, you know, a whole armor like that is as good, maybe a long term better than a mileage going. Thank you.
The next question is, how has the ordering take trended relatively to production levels during Q2 and how is it trended in the quarter to date period conceptually. How does this look inside? When is it appropriate to reduce prices or at other sales incentives to increase demand.
Yeah, I guess demand is roughly track production. So, which is what we aim for is, is. You know, so it's something that we have that really, I think no other car maker has is that we have real time demand and real time production. Like so, seven days a week. You know, I get an email or an order generated email shows output from all factories and orders globally. So it's like a real time thing around the pulse of earth, basically. And, and we just, we're just course, according to what the murder of the public is.
You know, buying a new car is a big decision for. That's majority of people. So, you know, anytime there's economic uncertainty, people generally. Pause on your car buying at least to see to see what happens. And, you know, and then obviously another challenge is the interest rate environment. As interest rates rise, the affordability of anything bought with that decreases. So effectively increasing the price of the car. So when interest rates rise dramatically, we actually have to reduce the price of the car because the interest payments increase the price of the car. So, and this is at least up until recently was the, I believe the sharpest interest rate rise in history. So we had to do something about that.
And if somebody's got a crystal ball for the global economy, I really appreciate it. I got far that crystal ball. Yeah, exactly. Damn, yeah. It should be not a Twitter. So, I mean, one day it seems like the world economy is falling apart. And the next day everything's fine. I don't know what the hell's going on. It'd be totally frightening. I wish I did.
So, I mean, that's why I say like, I always, you know, on Twitter, I posted like, you know, just really advising. Because I care a lot about the small shareholders, especially ones that stuck with us through a thick and thin. I love you guys. And so. We can't control these macro shocks, you know, or the, the manic depressive nature of the stock market. So that's why I recommend against module loans in times that are turbulent. If times are not that turbulent, actually a module loan can be a smart move within reason. But we're in, I would call it turbulent times.
I like I have very high confidence, confidence in the long term value of Tesla. Like I see it really, you know, see a path to a 10 X. Well, maybe it's a value. They call it a five X increase in the value of the company, maybe a 10 X. And where things go along the way, the trials and tribulations and the mood of the mood of the markets. One cannot predict. And so. You know, the old adage of buy and hold is right. You know. For investment advice, I say like identify a company whose products you love. See if they, you know, does it seem like they'll continue to make good products or great products. Right, that's stock and hold it. That's it. You all went.
The reason companies exist is to make goods and services, ideally great goods and services. They don't exist for any other reason. They shouldn't. So that's why I should buy a software company that makes products and has a great future pipeline. It's. Comments and actually. And then, and then generally if you see. If you provide your company about what that company's products or services are. When the market panics by and when the market is, you know, overly exuberant, you can sell. I'm not recommending yourself terms with that. But. Yeah. Bylaws sell high. You know, Warren Buffett actually has a saying in power phasing him, but. You know, publicly created company is like, it's like measuring living in your house and some. Crazy manic depressive guy comes to stance at the outside your house and yells property prices at you. You know, so it's a different price every day. The house is still the same house. So. This is a stock market. You know, credit that to Warren Buffett.
Thank you. Let's go to the next question with the emphasis of price cuts to drive volume growth eating into automotive gross margin. Can investors expect to see automotive gross margin. Stabilize or even rise due to efficiencies out basing the cuts. And if so, when. Who is that crucible again?
If I mean, it's like, look, the short term. Variances in gross margin and profitability really are minor relative to the long term picture. Autonomy. We'll make all of these numbers look silly. I'd recommend looking at our investors. I think their analysis is very good. The best that you know. I mean, and generally. Find to it or like the finance. Smart finance people on Twitter follow their accounts. The great. So. That's what that's that's in my opinion where you will get the best. The best info.
So. You know, I strongly believe Tesla is a long term investment. And that's where when you know things go up and down. In fact, the market panics by. If you're from Oxford to exhibit cell time, but just generally. Like I feel a component, you know, we will deliver a long term. But can't control short term.
So and these the economy is really where it's at. I mean, Zach, what are you. I fully agree with you. I mean, I think the only thing in the short term that matters. Is is what I said in my opening remarks. Which is, you know, are regenerating enough money to continue to invest. And you know, the portfolio products and technologies that. The technical teams are investing in right now. This is intense. It's intense in terms of investment. It's intense in terms of potential.
I think it's ridiculous that we have positive free cash flow. In a capital intensive business, while investing. Massive amounts of money in your technology. That is super hard and vertical integration. It's not even just like new products, but also. Yeah, we actually make our shit. Yeah. And so others, but. And sorry, you're in question.
And so at least from my perspective, what matters is continuing to generate the cash to invest. You know, that means continuing to be hyper focused on your term cost reduction. Because everything we do in your term cost reduction provides capital to reinvest. Hyper focused on working capital management. Which we've made quite a bit of progress there. On the raw materials and with a side of that. We've been very focused on accounts receivables as well. To ensure that we can continue to reinvest reinvest the cash. You know that this is what we're focused on. Yeah. And you know, so there's, you know, a set of this that we control. You know, we have a pipeline of cost reductions. We are getting tailwinds in the commodity space right now as Kern mentioned. That's helpful. And variability around average selling prices, you know, goes back to Elon's point. We don't control interest rates. We don't control macro consumer sentiment. But we have an obligation to be responsive to that to ensure that we're matching supply and demand and keeping things balanced. And so this is how we're managing the next handful of quarters. You know, soon enough, these quarters will be behind us. They won't be part of the present value of future cash flows of the business. And so we want to make sure we keep that view and make sure that the long term of the business is exactly the way that we want it to be. Well said.
All right. Thank you very much. And now let's go to analyst questions. The first question comes from Dan Levi from Barclays. Then feel free to unmute yourself. Great. Good evening. Thank you. Wanted to start first with a question about your efforts in AI and Dojo. It's pretty clear. It sounds like you're accelerating your focus. Can you maybe provide us with a sense of what the process is of refining a product is it more machines and maybe you could give us a sense of. You know, when the pay out starts to when you start to see the payout and what the resource outlay is, you know, what should we expect on the off X front.
I'm going to talk about this. Sorry, are you saying how much are we going to spend on dojo or. Yeah, it was the door. Yes. Well, we're not going to be open loop on our dojo expenditure. So. But I mean, I think we will be spending, you know. For the north of a billion the next year on on the court through the next year. It's one of a billion dollars in dojo. And. Yeah. So. We forgot it truly staggering amount of video data. To do training on. And this is another thing I like into order to copy us. You also need to spend billions of dollars on training compute. I mean, it's like. And it's, it's also hard to. You need the data. You need to train computers like. Think, think, well, things needed to actually achieve this at scale to work generalized solution for autonomy is. This is one of the hardest problems ever. You know, you see a lot of companies doing, you know, L O M's and whatnot. And I'm saying, if they're so great, why can't they make a self-agreed driving car. Because it's harder. That's why.
So. But I do think that's, I think there's some great, great, great companies out there, but. But, but this fundamentally, the, the, the staggering amount of data, we've got a process, a good process somehow. And custom silicon is the best way to do that. So that that's what dojo is designed to do is, is. Yeah, optimize for for video training. It's not optimized for L M's. It's optimized for video training. With with video training. You have a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, ratio of compute to memory bandwidth. So. So that's, that's it. I mean, but like we also, we have some. We're using a lot of Nvidia hardware and we continue to, you. You know, we'll, we'll, we'll actually take Nvidia hardware as fast as Nvidia will deliver to us. A tremendous respect for Jensen and Nvidia. They've done an incredible job. And, and frankly, I don't know if they could deliver us enough. GPUs, we might not need to do it, but they can't. So, they got so many customers. They've been kind enough to, you know, not less prioritized some of our. GPU orders. But, um, yeah, that the, the sheer magnitude of video training. Because they like, said, we're not trying to just get as good as human. We want to get to, you know, 10 times better than humans, maybe a hundred times better than human. Right now, I believe that something on the order of a million automotive deaths per year. And, um, and then if you say permanent serious injuries, I think it's probably closer to 10 million per year. Um, and, um, you know, so it matters if you, if you're, you know, It twice as good as human 10 times, you know, like 10 times, but then he would, would still mean a hundred thousand deaths. Um, and, and, um, severe permanent injuries. So it's like, okay, we'll would rather be a hundred times better. So there's, there's really, you know, it's a march of nights. And we want to achieve as perfect safety as possible. Um, and, uh, it's fast, truly mind-boggling amounts of video and, and, and computer needed for that. So, uh, and then I do, you know, I do think this, this other applications will photoge over, but we just desperately needed for video training. Right. Just to, just to add to what Elon mentioned. So, you know, the numbers that he mentioned are, um, you know, between R&D spend and capital spend. And, you know, this is moving quickly. Um, you know, uh, and so we provide a three year outlook on our capital expense. We are considering these, these expenses in that outlook. Um, and as that moves up and down, we'll continue to update our guidance in the queue.
Yeah, I want to say the, the, the fundamental rate limit on the progress of both self-driving is training. But that's, if, if we had more training compute, we would get it done faster. So. That's it. And it's just difficult to predict how quickly we can execute on it. Great. Thank you. Um, just as, as a follow up. Um, I recognize, you know, there's, uh, incredible macro uncertainty right now, but you're sticking with your, um, near term, your volume target 50% Kager.
Um, as we just think about sort of in the, in the year ahead, you know, cyber truck is going to be some contribution. Um, you know, there's going to be some help from further, Ed penetration growth. But. To what extent are you willing to sacrifice on pricing to keep that 50% volume Kager intact? Um, or, you know, are you thinking differently about margins versus your prior commentary of willing to sacrifice on margins to get more share?
It's sort of like getting more share. It's just that you can think of every car that we sell or produce that that has a full autonomy capability as actually something that in the future may be worth as much as five times what it is today. Um, because, you know, average, average passion is big pasture vehicle is doing like maybe 10 hours of driving a week. You know, one of the sort of one of the sites one half hours a day on average that's 10 hours a week. Um, yes. Uh, if you've got an autonomous.
If that vehicles able to operate autonomously and, um, and, and use be used in some, either either dedicated autonomous or posh to autonomous like, like Airbnb, like, maybe sometimes you allow your car to be used by others. Sometimes you want to use it exclusively just like, you know, Airbnb, you know, during Airbnb with a room in your house. You know, the value is just tremendous. So, I think it's sort of it would be. I think it makes it does make sense to sacrifice margins in favor of making more vehicles because. We think in the not too dozen future, they will have a dramatic valuation increase.
I think the test of fleet value increase at the point in which we can upload a full self, you know, full self driving and it's approved by regulators. Um, will be the single biggest step change in asset value, maybe in history. Thank you.
Let's go to the next analyst, the question comes from an, Emil Rosner from Deutsche Bank. Thank you very much. Um, two questions for me as well. First following up on, on the autonomy. So, you know, before you start launching these dedicated robot, actually vehicles on, on existing vehicles. You know, for improving FSD, you know, incrementally. What is your latest target timing to essentially release a non beta version or an eyes off version that would trigger much higher take rates. And would Tesla benefit from lowering the price of FSD?
Yeah, you know, as true of sort of made fun of me and perhaps quite fairly made fun of me. My predictions about achieving a full self driving. Have been optimistic in the past. The reason they've been optimistic is what it has to look like is the. We'll make rapid progress with a new version of FSD, but then the cook it will curve over logarithmically. So, so first, like log logarithmic curve looks like, you know, just sort of fairly straight upward line diagonal out. And so if you travel like that, then you, you have a great thing that then.
It's actually not lovely to make a curves over and then there been a series of local stack logarithmic curves. Now. I know I'm the boy you cried FSD. But I mean, I think I think will be better than human by the end of this year. That's not to say we're approved by regulators. And I'm saying that that would be in the US because we got to focus on one market first. But I think we'll be better than you and by the end of this year. I've been wrong in the past. I may be wrong this time. And the price of FSD.
So the way it is the price of FSD is actually very low. It's not high. We go back to what I say earlier, if the value of the car increases dramatically, if it is actually autonomous. You know, $15,000 is actually a low price, not a high price. And now we will offer. And we do sort of offer FSD as a monthly subscription, although most people don't know that. So I'd recommend like maybe trying it out as a monthly subscription so you don't have to go with the $15,000 thing. But I think.
Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, if the car is worth several times, it's a really high price. $15,000 is actually a low price for FSD. Thank you. And the next question comes from William Stein from Troyst. William, go ahead and unmute. Great. Thank you very much for taking my question. I'd like to ask about the stick on this topic. Would read, you know, with great interest, the developments in dojo today and you've spoken about FSD. But you've also, Elon, you've started this X.ai company and, you know, for investors that think that there might be quite a bit of value in the AI features and products of Tesla. It might be concerning to see you, you know, pursuing another endeavor where AI is the focus. So can you talk about how X.ai might overlap might. Perhaps compete with Tesla or in other ways, perhaps it enhances the value of what Tesla does. Thanks very much.
Yeah, I think we'll actually enhance the value of Tesla. They're really just some of the world's best AI engineers and scientists that were willing to join a startup, but they were not willing to join a large sort of relatively established company like Tesla. So it was like, that's actually how it got started. I was interviewing a few people and they're like, no, we want to do a startup. And that's all I can convince them to join Tesla. So, so it's like, okay, well, you know, better to start up that. That I run this, then then they go work somewhere else. That's kind of the genesis of X.ai. And X.ai is focused on a sort of AGI. Yeah, so it's a bit of I'd like to say, I think there will be some value that X.ai brings to Tesla. You know, also some of the best for the very best people in the world. They really just want to work on interesting problems. So if you take say, you know, our material science group, you know, really what convinced the Charlie Komen to leave Apple, we're very happy and well compensated. And both at the end both. Or we think it's the best material science group in the world was that he got to work both Tesla and SpaceX. He wasn't willing to leave Apple if it was just Tesla videos, willing to do it was Tesla and SpaceX. So sometimes you get the best out in the world. That's the kind of thing you know you need to do. And that actually has been very beneficial to Tesla.
If, you know, if I can squeeze one more mundane question in. I wonder if you think you can hit the 1.8 million unit number with current pricing or do you anticipate needing to continue to lower prices because it seems like they've. Or stabilize the trends of stabilize in the last maybe month and a half. Should we expect a sort of continued decreases or more stabilization for the rest of the year. Sure. You know we have, we have really sort of restarted the referral program, which I think will be quite effective. Yeah, you know, as Zach was saying earlier, we don't control the macro economic conditions. So if interest rates continue to rise that reduces the affordability of cars. You know, and for a lot of people they're really kind of balanced, but just rarely breaking even every month. In fact, if you look at the rise of credit card debt, they are in fact not breaking even every month. I credit card debt is looking as scary. So. You know, we like which is dark control macro conditions. If the conditions are stable, I think prices will be stable. If they're not stable, then we would have to lower prices. Yeah. Thank you.
Let's go to Colin Rush from Oppenheimer. Thanks so much guys. You know, as you're building out dojo and implementing what really is going to be a highly complex set of software. Can you speak to the maturity of the operating system and how much software software you're expecting to use in that system. This is a custom software stack. So, but it is designed such that you can run at the high level pie torch and jacks. So, but then we have to customize it to actually run on our custom silicon. So this the software stack is a combination of open source software and then and that tells us software all the way to the bare. So, which is the case for the inference computer in the car. Okay, thanks so much. That's super helpful.
And then can you speak to how you're managing some of the geopolitical risks relative to your capacity expansion. You know, obviously, as you guys continue to grow up this rate, you're going to be putting some folks out of business. And there's going to be some impacts around regional economy. So just want to understand how you're thinking about that in terms of some of your CAPEX plans and how you're managing some of those relationships with with different countries and regions. So, you know, this is a period of unusual geopolitical risk. So, I think we're the best we can do is, you know, have factories and many parts of the world such that if things get difficult in one part of the world we can still keep things going in the rest of the world.
The next question comes from Mark Delaney from Goldman Sachs. Thank you very much for taking the question. Tesla has been making progress reducing cost and did so again last quarter. Can you give an update on when you think automotive cost per vehicle could be under the historical $36,000 per vehicle level and what are the key puts and takes together.
This is, I think it was asked this in the past is a very difficult to forecast. You know, there's a series of costs that we manage. There's a series of costs in which we don't control. And so, you know, particularly on the commodity side, where labor costs go, etc. It's just hard to say. Yeah, we saw very inflationary practice like strong inflationary pressures for a while last year. And now we're, which obviously makes very difficult to reduce costs. And, you know, now we're seeing what seems to be deflationary pressure is certainly deflationary. But, but, if deflation is a pressure. But we're seeing, you know, commodity prices dropped dropping as was mentioned, you know, as Karen mentioned, a moment ago. And I think, I mean, what do you think? I mean, basically the trade simply deflationary at the commodity level. Definitely. There's that. And then there's also the economics improved as volumes grow.
Let's see. The other thing we're seeing as we're becoming a bigger and bigger part of a lot of suppliers, the economy is still coming to play. There's equipment depreciation that comes into play equipment that was commissioned five to seven years ago. That used to be a part of the piece price. That's completely amortized. So we'll see situations where piece price comes down because that equipment contribution has gone away. And then just we continue to have this mentality of continuous improvement in terms of labor, reducing labor, improving automation, and just continuing to get better at what we do. So we have seen, I think every quarter we have seen an improvement. Of course, the commodities spiked up and down. Just in general, the trend is towards being more efficient.
Yeah, and totally agree. And look at prices went absolutely insane there for a while. Yeah, and they're recovering now. But also what I used to be. Yeah, and you know, we're still early in the ramps. Well, not early in the ramp, but early in the cost down curve of Austin and Berlin. Yeah. So it takes time to work the cost out at first. It's a focus on ramp. Ramp brings cost. And then you're going to quality cost. Yeah. And then once that stabilizes, we can divert bandwidth to cost reduction. And so. Austin and Berlin saw quite a decent amount of cost reduction on a fundamental basis from Q one to Q two will continue to do that work that will be helpful. And so we're just going to keep shipping away at it. Yeah, that is a big element to it. Yeah, logistics to logistics is normalizing, which is great. You got a cue about utilization, something that the team has been very focused on. So every bit of it. Yeah, it's hard logistics is, I don't appreciate it. Yeah, so I'm saying it's like, I was the one with tactics was a one with logistics. And we made tremendous improvements in the cost in the on front. You know, express costs, we have done a down pre pandemic. Express cost levels now. And our goal is to go further. Yeah, so when we look at our progress from Q one to Q two on cost, the way that we look at internally. Normalize for the impacts of makeshift with Austin and Berlin being a higher percentage of our mix normalized for us and acts being a higher percentage of from mix. In Q two versus Q one, the sequential cost reduction, it might be the largest we've had in a while. So anything is it's great work on behalf of the test, the team, and we just got to keep it up. It's a game of pennies, it's like Game of Thrones book pennies.
Mark, do you have a full off question? I think you're muted. Yeah, yeah, thank you very much for all the details on that. You know, maybe you could put a finer point on the downtime impact that you spoke about in your prepared comments in terms of production impact and then also to what extent there's a margin impact from those factory upgrades that you're planning this quarter. Thank you.
Yeah, the downtime, you know, we don't know exactly the number of cars impacted because, you know, kind of the way that we go into downtime with us for upgrades is, you know, we set aside a period of time, but then the team is challenged to go as quickly as possible so that we can get the factories up and running again and minimize that. And isn't that a profound reduction, you know, it's small. I think we're getting too much into the weeds here. I mean, like we were asking for a level of precision that is not possible to answer. So let's move on. Yeah, I think this is unfortunately all the time we have for today. Okay. So we'll speak to you all in the next three months. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.