And we believe there's still meaningful room for improvement there. Regarding autopilot and AI, our vehicles now driven over half a billion miles with FSD beta, full self-driving beta, and that number is growing rapidly. We recently completed a 10,000 GPU cluster of H100s. We think probably bring it into operation faster than anyone's ever bought that much compute per unit time into production since training is the fundamental limiting factor on progress with full self-driving and vehicle autonomy.
We're also seeing significant promise with FSD version 12. This is the end-to-end AI where it's a photon count in, controls out, or really you can think of it as does a large bit stream coming in and a tiny bit stream going out. Compressing reality into a very small set of outputs, which is actually kind of how humans work. The vast majority of human data input is optics from our eyes. And so we are like the car photons in, controls out with neural nets, just neural nets in the middle. It's very interesting to think about that. We will continue to invest significantly in AI development as this is really the massive game changer. And success in this regard in the long term, I think, has the potential to make Tesla the most valuable company in the world by far. If you have fully autonomous cars at scale and fully autonomous humanoid robots that are truly useful, it's not clear what the limit is.
Regarding energy storage, we deployed all gigawatt hours of energy of storage products in Q3. And as this business grows, the energy vision is becoming our highest margin business. Energy and service now contribute over half a billion dollars to quarterly profit. The Cybertruck, I know that people are excited about the Cybertruck. I am too. I've driven the car. It's an amazing product. I do want to emphasize that there will be enormous challenges in breaching volume production with the Cybertruck and then in making the Cybertruck catchload positive. This is simply normal. When you've got a product with a lot of new technology, or any new brand new vehicle program, but especially one that is as different and advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you're trying to solve at scale.
I just don't emphasize that one I think is potentially our best product ever. I think it is our best product ever. It is going to require immense work to reach volume production and be catchload positive at a price that people can afford. Often, people do not understand what is truly hard. That's why I say prototypes are easy production is hard. People think it's the idea or you make a prototype. You design a car. As soon as the design car is, does anyone can do it? It does require taste. It does require effort to design a prototype. The difficulty going from a prototype to a volume production is like 10,000% harder to get to the production than to make the prototype in the first place. It is even harder than that to reach positive cash flow. That is why there have not been new cars start-ups that have been successful for 100 years. Apart from Tesla. I just want to temper expectations for Cybertruck. It is a great product, but financially it will take a year to 18 months before it is a significant price of cash flow contributor. I wish there was some way that to be different, but that's my best guess. The demand is off the charts. We have over a million people who have reserved the car. It's not a demand issue, but we have to make it a price that people can afford. It's a very difficult thing.
In conclusion, we continue to focus on ramping production while maintaining positive cash flow. We continue to target and expect to have around 1.8 billion vehicle deliveries as stated earlier this year. The Tesla AI team is, I think, one of the world's best and I think it is actually by far the world's best when it comes to real world AI. I'll say that again, Tesla has the best real world AI team on Earth, period, and it's getting better. Lastly, I wanted to thank all of our employees who are making a lot of extra effort during uncertain times. Thank you very much for your hard work and the impact that you're making.
Thank you very much, Elon, and our CFO wydebound for some opening remarks as well.
非常感谢你,埃隆,以及我们的首席财务官wydebound的开场致辞。
Thanks, Martin. A week of deliveries in Q3 outpace production, and we had yet another record quarter of profitability in our energy business. Congratulations to the Tesla team for the continued focus on operational excellence as we navigate through a period of economic uncertainty, higher interest rates, and shifting consumer sentiment.
As Elon mentioned, our Q3 operational and financial performance was impacted by planned downtowns for our factory upgrades. This was necessary to allow for further factory improvements and production rate increases. Despite such factory shutdowns, our cost per vehicle decreased to approximately 37,500. We saw sequential decreases in material cost and freight. Producing the cost of our vehicles is our top priority.
On the operating expenses front, R&D expenses continue to rise due to cyber truck prototype builds and pilot production testing combined with spend on AI technologies like folks are driving optimists and doger. We have and will continue to make investments in these areas, and hence our capital expenditure and R&D will continue to grow in the near term. However, our focus is to continue making investments through positive cash flow from operations. This year itself, we have generated operating cash flows of approximately 8.9 billion and three cash flows of approximately 2.3 billion.
Another businesses are becoming more prominent on a standalone basis with energy business leading the charge primarily from the growth in megabyte departments. Our services and other businesses on a year-on-year basis also continue to show positive momentum as we benefit from ongoing fleet.
As regards our pricing strategy, in addition to what we have shared before, I want to elaborate that most car buying happens with one or other form of financing. And hence, we also view pricing in terms of monthly costs for the customer. And therefore, as interest costs in the US have risen substantially, it has required us to adjust the price of our vehicles to keep the monthly cost in parity. We've tried to offset such adjustments via a focus on reducing costs. However, there is an inherent lag in cost reductions, which in turn impacts margins. To that extent, we recently announced a partner vehicle leasing program in the US whereby you can get a standard rate model Y for as low as $3.99 a month.
In conclusion, as we navigate through a challenging economic environment, we'll focus on reducing costs, maximizing delivery volumes, and continuing making investments in the future in particular AI and other next-generation platform. We believe this strategy positions as well for the long term. Once again, I would like to thank the Tesla team for their efforts in the last four. Thank you very much. And now let's go to investor questions.
The first investor question comes from Craig. How many cyber truck deliveries do you anticipate for 2024? I simple to make an accurate guess at this point. Going back to what I said earlier, that the ramp is going to be extremely difficult. Like I said, there's no way around that. If you try to make, if we just try to do some copycat vehicle design of which there are literally 200 models that are slight variations on a theme in the combustion engine world, just distinctions without a difference, then it's really not that hard. But if you want to do something radical and innovative and something really special like the cyber truck, it is extremely difficult because there's nothing to copy. You have to invent not just the car, but the way to make the car. So the more uncharted the territory, the less predictable the outcome. Now I can say that if you say, well, where will things end up? I think we'll end up with roughly a quarter million cyber trucks a year. And I don't think we're going to reach that output right next year. I think we're probably going to reach it sometime in 2025. That's my best guess. Thank you.
The second question is, can you provide a progress update on the 4680 cell, particularly progress, though, with performance improvements and cost savings, South line on battery day? Thank you.
Sure thing, Martin. 4680 cell production in Texas increased 40% quarter over quarter in gross to the Texas team for producing their 20 million cell off of line one. Texas is now our primary 4680 facility. We're heavily focused on quality. Scrap is down 40% quarter over quarter with the increased volume and yield improvements. Cell costs consistently improved month over month within the quarter, although we have a lot more work to do to achieve our steady state goals. And that is our priority.
The cyber truck sell with 10% higher energy than our Model Y cell started production online to in Texas. This quarter we convert to building 100% cyber truck cells to simplify and focus the factory as we ramp all four lines in phase one over the next three quarters. Phase two of the Texas 4680 facility is currently under construction. The additional four lines incorporate further capital efficiencies over phase one and our target is for them to start producing in late 2024.
Lastly, in Cato, we're retooling to enable large scale pilot runs of our next generation cell designs. Cato's long term goal is to be the launch pad for new cells. One generation ahead of our mass production facilities, enabling faster iteration and smoother ramp ups of new designs. Thank you.
The next question from institutional investors, could you please provide an update on capacity expansion plans for companies, factories in Berlin and Austin and the opening schedule of Gigafactory Mexico.
Berlin and Austin factory, the current priority is actually maximized the output from our existing lines by laser focus on efficiency improvement. As always, maintaining a high quality and reducing per unit cost will be as critical as growing production volume. For Mexico, we're working on infrastructure in factory design in parallel with the engineering development of new production that will be manufactured there. That's I can share from that. Mexico, we're laying the groundwork to begin construction and doing all the long lead items. But I think we want to just get a sense for the global economy is like before we go full tilt on the Mexico factory. I'm worried about the high interest rate environment that we're in. I just can't have said this enough that the vast majority of people buying a car is about the monthly payment. And as interest rates rise, the proportion of that monthly payment that is interest increases naturally. If interest rates remain high or if they go even higher, it's that much harder for people to buy the car. They simply can't afford it.
We're tracking at this point for Model Y to be the selling car on earth, but not just in revenue, but in unit volume. If you compare that to the other vehicles that are number two and number three and whatnot, they cost much less than our car. We're just hitting low of large numbers situations here. I know people want to advertise and we are advertising. I think there is something to be gained on the advertising fund. I don't think it's nothing. In forming people of a car that is great, but they cannot afford, doesn't just really help. So that is really the thing that must be sold is to make the car portable or the average person cannot buy it for any amount of money. Or they can't afford it. They can't afford it. So this is a great deal. Okay, thank you very much.
Current social consensus assumes that Tesla will deliver 2.3 million vehicles in 2024, representing 28% growth versus 2023 guidance. Is this growth rate achievable without any mass market launches in 2024? And when does Tesla expect to return to its 50% long-term cagor?
Next to the question, when you look at 2024, there are a lot of moving pieces. Elon just talked about what is happening in the micromic environment. So we'll focus on growing our volumes in a very cost-efficient manner and are carefully reviewing all our options and we'll be able to provide a much more meaningful update at our next earnings call. Yeah, I mean, there is good state in the obvious. It is not possible to have a compound growth rate of 50% forever or you will exceed the mass of the known universe. So I think we will grow very rapidly and much faster than any other car company on Earth by far. Thank you.
Next question is, do you have an approximate time light in mind for the Robotaxy driven or non-driven? What excites you most about how this project is progressing?
The Robotaxy is like necessarily non-driven. I guess I'm very excited about our progress with autonomy. The end-to-end, nothing but nets. I saw driving software is amazing. I drives me all around Austin with no interventions. So, this is clearly the right move. So it's really, really, really amazing. And Robotaxy, that same software and approach will enable optimists to do useful things and enable optimists to learn how to do things simply by looking. So extremely exciting in the long term.
As I mentioned before, given that economic output is a number of people times productivity. If you no longer have a constraint on people, effectively you've got a humanoid robot that can do as much as you'd like. Your economy is why is the infinite? For infinite for all intents and purposes. I don't think anyone is going to do it better than Tesla, not by a long shot. If bus dynamics is impressive, but the Robot lacks a brain. They're like the Wizard of Oz. You also need to be able to design the humanoid robot in such a way that it can be mass manufacturing. And then at some point the robots will manufacture the robots. Now obviously we need to make sure that there's a good place for humans in that future. We do not create some variants of the Terminator outcome. So we're going to put a lot of that into localized control of the humanoid robot. So basically anyone will be able to shut it off locally. And you can't change that even if you're like a software update, you can't change that. It has to be hard-coded. Thank you.
The next question is why was the price drop on FSD if it is getting better and robot taxis expected so soon? Well, we just wanted to make it more affordable. As an over-wook triad, I think over time the price of FSD will increase proportionate to its value so it would regard the current price as a kind of a temporary low. Thank you.
The next question is again on FSD. Mercedes is accepting legal liability for when it's level three autonomous driving system drive pilot is active. Is Tesla planning to accept legal liability for FSD? And if so, when? Well, there's a lot of people that assume we have legal liability judging by the lawsuits. We're certainly not being left out of the hook on that front. Whether we would like to or wouldn't like to. I think it's important to remember for everyone that Mercedes' system is limited to a few roads in Nevada and some certain cities in California that doesn't work in the snow or the fog. It must have a weed car marked by only 40 miles per hour. Our system is meant to be holistic and drive in any condition so we obviously have a much more capable approach but with those kind of limitations it's really not very useful. You know, I think some people understand the profundity of Tesla AI system, but it's very very few. It's basically baby AGI. It has to understand reality in order to drive. Yeah, baby AGI. Thank you.
The next question on optimus, will optimus be working on Gigafactory lines next year? If so, how many would you guess will be deployed? I think at this point we are not ready to discuss details of the optimus program, but we will provide periodic updates online so as you can see, where optimus a year ago could barely walk and now it can do yoga. So, a few years from now, it can probably do ballet. Sounds good.
And the last question from investors is, neural net path planning represent a significant advance in capability and safety for FSD. What steps is Tesla taking to make this technology available outside the US? Yeah, our approach has been to try to get it, like the more places we try to make it work, the harder the problem is. So, the reason we don't do it in all countries simultaneously is that it would take much longer to make it work anywhere at all. So, that's why it's currently just North America. And also, for most parts of the world, you have to get approval before deploying things. Whereas in the US, you can deploy things at risk or at least take liability for your flight. So, it's where most countries require some sort of extensive approval program. So, we only want to go through that extensive approval program when we think it's kind of ready for prime time in that country.
I apologize, it's not out in those countries, but we keep in many ways to make it better. It needs to drive such that it exceeds the even unsupervised, significantly exceeds the probability of injury of a human. It's significantly better. It's a lower probability of injury than a human by far. I think we're tracking to that point very quickly. Obviously, in the past, I've been overly optimistic about this. The reason I've been overly optimistic is that the progress tends to sort of look like a log curve, which is that you have rapid initial improvements and that if you were to extrapolate that rapid, fairly linear rate of improvement, you get to self-driving quickly, but then the rate of improvement curves over logarithmically as soft as the asymptote. That's not happened several times. I would characterize that progress in real world AI as a series of stacked log curves. I think that's also true in other parts of AI, like LLMs and whatnot, series of stacked log curves. Each log curve gets higher than the last one, so if you keep stacking them, if you keep stacking logs, eventually you get to have a stay. Thank you.
Let's now go to Adelis Questions. The first question comes from Will Stein from Truist. Will, please go ahead and unmute yourself. Great. Thanks so much for taking my question and thanks for all the updates today. We learned earlier on the call, it sounds like you don't think the truck will ramp to significant volume until its third year of production. Should we have a similar anticipation for the ramp of the next gen platform or is there any reason that we should be maybe more optimistic or pessimistic about the ramp profile there? Thank you. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, it's not really the third year of production. It's kind of like the 18th month of production is roughly, I guess. So it's just that they happen to, it'll happen, it's that the, it starts this year, spans next year and gets to 2025. So technically there are three calendar years in there, but there's actually only 18 months, not three years. That would be very disappointed if it took us, and that would be shocking if it took us three years. But 18 months from initial deliveries to have to reach volume and reach prosperity was an immense, I can't tell you how the blood sweat and tears level required to achieve that is just staggering. I've been through it many times. And then here we go again. Similar path for the next gen platform? I mean, there's like unique complexity to cyber. Yeah, I mean, cyber truck is speaking of speed up.
Yeah, I mean, we dug our own grave with cyber trucks. You know, nobody, generally, everybody dictates they're great better than themselves. And so, you know, it is, it is, it is, you know, cyber trucks, one of those, one of those special products that comes along only once in a long while. And special products that come along once in a long while are just incredibly difficult to bring to market, to reach volume, to be prosperous. It's fundamental to the nature of the newness. So now the sort of high volume, low cost, smaller vehicle is actually much more conventional. In terms of like the technologies we're putting into it, we didn't have to invent how to then full hard stainless steel or that mega 9,000 ton castings or the largest hot stamping in the world or new. Yeah. So, I think it will be quite a pastram. So, as I was saying, we're doing everything possible to simplify that vehicle in order to achieve a units per minute level that is unheard of in the auto industry. Yeah, I mean, the same location makes it easier to automate. It also makes it lower cost. Yeah, in terms of lower cost.
Yeah. This is where it will be cool, but it's utilitarian. It's not meant to be familiar with Owen Magic. It's an easy way to be. It will be so beautiful, but it's a utilitarian. It's a utility. That's not 14 inches of travel. It's a suspension. Yeah, it's an example. Yeah. So, I mean, the Cybertruck has a lot of bells and whistles. All right. Thank you very much. Let's go to Pierre Ferragout from U Street Research. Hey, can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Hey, I have a first like a follow up question on the FSD and pricing and adoption. So, I agree with you that as FSD improves, we should see its value increasing, but I guess like the ultimate value of FSD, which is to be able to handle like a robot taxi is not going to necessarily interest everybody and you have a bit of a degraded version that would be like a chauffeur service where the car drives by itself, but you still have to be in the car and around. And then there is like the hands-on, eyes-on version of the service. And I guess, you know, there should be like much lower cost, lower future kind of that the violence of the service that could have a very large penetration on your install base and more expensive one that would remain at the lower penetration level. So, I'm just wondering if you're taking that.
是的。这将是很酷的地方,但它是实用的。它并不意味着要和Owen Magic熟悉起来。这是一种简单的方式。它将是如此美丽,但它是实用的。它是一种实用工具。它不是14英寸的行程。它是一种悬架。是的,这是一个例子。是的。所以,我的意思是,Cybertruck有很多花里胡哨的东西。好的。非常感谢。让我们来看一下来自U Street Research的Pierre Ferragout。嘿,你能听到我说话吗?是的。是的。嘿,我首先有一个关于FSD(全自动驾驶)以及定价和采用率的问题。所以,我同意您的观点,随着FSD的改进,它的价值应该会增加,但是我猜终极价值的FSD,也就是能够处理像机器人出租车这样的事情的能力,并不一定会吸引所有人,而你们也有一种降级版本,就是能够自动驾驶,但你仍然需要在车上附近。然后还有一种需要手脚并用的版本。我想知道你对此有何看法。
And last but not least, like the simplest version of FSD are available and are going to work from a technical perspective probably before like the ultimate robot taxi version can work if ever. And so, I'm wondering how you take that into account in how you're thinking like the financial contribution of FSD over time and whether you could evolve your pricing along that kind of tiers to increase adoption.
Yeah, I mean, for the autonomous vehicle, I think you're sort of the economics of the autonomous vehicle, our truly astounding in a positive way. You look at past vehicles today, they only get about 10 to 12 hours of usage per week. That's, you know, if you drive an hour and a half a day on average, that's roughly 10 hours a week out of 168 hours. And then there's also, you're going to have parking and insurance. You got to take care of the car. It's like there's a lot of overhead. So, I mean, yeah, it's like the economics of the system aren't just insanely positive if given that the car, like all of the cars were making and have made for a while, we believe a capable of full autonomy. So, then if you're able to say, increase the utility of that car by a factor of five, which slowly means that you've been used for maybe 50 hours a week out of 168. So, just don't notice your source, that source seems less than the third of the hours of the week already. It is doing something useful. You've increased the value of that by by five, but it still costs the same. Like you have something, then we're a hardware company with software magic. Here, do you have a follow up?
Yes, I have a key for the comment on a different topic for you. If that's okay, it's about like your gross margin in the quad, or could you give us a sense of like in how the gross margin evolved sequentially, how much was the impact of idle costs, how much was the sequential benefit that you imagine of production ramping at the Berlin and Austin. Then I saw this massive jump in the energy storage, very strong positive surprise. So, if you can give us the background on that and tell us how you should think of a Zagos margin going forward.
Thanks for that question. In terms of you have a few different aspects of your question. So, if I just look at from Q3 perspective, obviously factory idle time had an impact. It did impact by, I mean, I won't give you the exact percentage, but it had decent impact for the quarter. When you look at the other pieces which we're trying to do, we did see certain of our other factories ramping up pretty well. They actually contributed pretty well to the margin for this quarter. In fact, one of the factories came pretty close to in terms of per unit costs to where we are for another established factory which is Fremont. So, that was a positive in the quarter. When it comes to energy margins, you know, megapack deployment was the key driver there. That product has done well. I mean, on the Costco also we've been able to do a lot there. But I do want to caution that megapack deployments are a bit lumpy. So, yes, we had a great quarter of this period. But depending upon where we are trying to deploy that product in different markets, you would see periods where there would be downward pressure on deployment because of us trying to get the product to that back-place where it was.
Really nice to see the rate of vehicle cost improvement despite the downtime that you took. You've taken now about $2,000 out of the average vehicle costs over the past year. Can you give us maybe a sense of the rate of improvement that you see from the changes that you alluded to, the factory changes you alluded to? Is there a way maybe to convey the speed of improvement on your existing product from here and then related to that? Can you share the timing of your next gen that the lower priced product that you talked about earlier this year?
Yeah. So, just in terms of product margins, there are lots of puts and takes when you look at this. There are certain things which we control and there are certain things which we don't control. We expect that we'll get some benefits from our cost reduction efforts, which are on the way. On the other hand, we just finished our factory of rates late in Q3. Some of these factors are still in the early ramp phase in Q4. We're still not up to where we want those factors to be. So, they'll impact in the near term. Plus, like Elon mentioned, we're going to be ramping Cybertruck, which is going to be another head when which we're dealing with. On top of all, there's overall uncertainty in the microeconomic environment, which even makes it harder to predict precisely as to where we land. But, yes, this is something which it's an evolving thing which we're observing every day and reacting to it on a daily basis.
I would just say that on the cost reduction efforts, like we are not, we are unflagging in our pursuit of additional cost downs for 2024. We do have a good pipeline of them and work on both the engineering side and the factory operation side. Our intention is to maintain or exceed the trend that you saw. We're trying as hard as we possibly can.
The timing of the next gen product. Can you share that? I'm not at this time.
下一代产品的时间安排,你可以分享一下吗?我目前还不知道。
Okay. And just as a follow up, obviously, price is also a driver of demand, but that's obviously not happening in a vacuum. And you mentioned that, I think you mentioned at some point during this call that you're also maybe hitting a law of large numbers on some of your products. Can you just share how you're thinking about price elasticity just at this point and this macro environment and any thoughts along those lines?
I think that this very significant price elasticity, I mean, to totally frank, if I car class the same as a rev board, nobody would buy a rev board. Or at least that very unlikely too. It's worth noting that a lot of these incentives, like the tax credit or not, but they're actually very difficult for the average person to access because most people do not have 10 grand for even 75 dollar, burning a hole in their bank account. Large number of people are living paycheck to paycheck and with a lot of debt, like a credit card debt, more debt. So, yeah, that's reality for most people. It's sometimes difficult for people who are high income owners and I'd say high would be like, somebody who's earning over 200,000 dollars a year to understand what life is like for someone who is earning 50 or 60 or 70,000 dollars a year, which is most people. So, so they'd like for a lot of people like these tax credits just, they can't front 75 dollar for in 18 months or even six months to get for the tax credit and they actually don't, it's okay to even have that, then I'm sorry, I would call it taxes. So, it's really just, the vast majority of people is how much money they have to pay immediately and how much per month, that's it. I think it's tough right there. And that card is still much more expensive than a wrap-up when you look at it that way.
Yeah, one other thing which I'll add, when you look at car buying in general, we're trying to get to the next set of EV adapters. Not an EV adapter, just next, who wants a great car? Exactly. It's not a, you know, so now you get these like, you know, honestly, I'd say it's like somewhat correlates with the why doesn't everyone work from home crowd? I'm like, I mean, this is like some real mariachiun at vibes from people that say why does everyone work from home? Like, what about all the people that have to come to the factory and fill the cars? What about all the people that have to go to the restaurant and make your food and deliver your food? It's like, what are you talking about? You, I mean, how detached from reality does it work from home crowd have to be? While they take advantage of all those who do, who cannot work from home? So, I mean, you have to say, like, why did I sleep in the factory so many times? Because it mattered. So, um, so I just can't emphasize how important cost it is. It's not an optional thing for most people. It is a necessary thing. We have to make our cars more affordable so people can buy it and I, you know, I keep harping on this interest thing, but I mean, it's just, it just raises the cost of the car.
I mean, we're looking at an internal analysis, which I don't know, we think is more or less on track, that when you look at the cost or the price reductions we've made in, say, the Model Y, and you compare that to how much people's monthly payment has risen due to interest rates. The price of the Model Y is almost unchanged. If you factor in the Kingdom then trust it. Yes, which is, this is what I'm trying to say, the thing that matters is the monthly, it's, it's, it's how much money do you have to put down, and do they literally have that in the bank account or will it check that? And then, well, what is the monthly payment? And it doesn't matter how, if that monthly payment is principal interest or whatever, it's just a number and that number has to not cause their bank account to go negative. That's it.
So, you know, going from near zero interest rates to the current very high interest rates, the actual monthly payment is basically the same. It's just a bunch more of it is going to interest. And there are some incremental challenges beyond that, which is the difficulty of getting credit at all has increased. And so, the number of people who simply cannot get credit, period, even if they've got a job and everything's solid that, you know, the banks are, you know, a little gun shy on handing out credit, given that a bunch of them kick the bucket earlier this year.
Yeah, there's also just fewer options, even if they plan that credit, there's a few banks together because like, this your banks will exist. Well, if your bank does not exist, you have to establish a relationship with a new bank. And, you know, so a lot of regional banks are, you know, died and I mean, even credit suites, I mean, geez, that was a shocker, you know, you know, a 160 year old, if Swiss institution that doesn't exist anymore. That's mind blowing. And I think there's still quite a few shoots to drop on the bad credit situation. I mean, commercial real estate obviously is in a terrible shape. You know, credit card debt has been rising significantly. The credit card interest rates are userious rates over 20% interest rates, meaning like, which over time is just becomes of the extremely punishing because if somebody's paying 20% interest on the credit cost, it means they cannot pay them off. And you cannot pay them off and you're still improving interest to 20%. That's headed to a bad place.
Thank you. Let's go to the next question from George from KindaCords. Thank you for taking my question. Just to focus on the cost per vehicle, you know, coming down in future quarters as you discussed in your written remarks, I'm curious as to what the levers of that could be. Is it more scale, more factor utilization? Is it material cost reductions? Are there things like gigacasting? I mean, you just kind of give us some data points to give us confidence that that's going to come down over time.
And if I can sneak one in, please, there are press reports. And I know how perilous it is to believe some of these. But they say that you've included radar as an option in some model wise in China. And I just hear to ask if that's true. And if so, why? Thank you. We've not included radar. We have radar as a Tesla designed radar as an experiment in the model SNX. That's it. We'll see whether that experiment is worth it. But there are no plans to integrate radar into 3 and Y. Just as humans drive well, and in fact, an excellent human driver can drive with amazing safety simply with their eyes. The car will far exceed the average human safety just with vision far, far, far. Because the car is looking in all directions at once. We don't have eyes in the back of my head. The computer never gets tired and never gets distracted, get drunk, hopefully. Radar is, you know, it's not, what really matters is how much does it affect the probability of an accident. And in order for the radar to be effective, you have to be able to do radar-only braking. You have to do actions that are radar-only. Otherwise, you get this ambiguation problem between vision and radar. That's why we actually turned off the radar in cars historically that we had shipped it. All three and Y used to have radar, but we turned it off. Because the radar actually generated more noise than signal. Now, the Tesla design radar is a high-resolution radar that has some potential to be useful that the jury is still very much out on whether that is in fact the case.
On the cost question, I guess from the vehicle side, like, you know, as Drew mentioned earlier, we are always trying to engineer our products to be cheaper to make and more efficient to make. That comes obviously on the engineering side as we come up with new innovations, but as well on the supply chain side with our partners, we work with them to automate some of their lines and move their, you know, bottlenecks and their high costs as well. On the logistics side, getting parts of the factory, it's not, it's not equal. It's not like a one thing that you have to, you have to attack cost everywhere. And we do it ruthlessly at all times. Operations efficiency, all of the above.
Yeah, I mean, I would say there's a whole long list of things which we are chasing. We internally call it the cost attack. We're literally going line by line and saying, how can we make it better? And it's a grind. The grind line. It's a game of pennies. It's like game of thrones, but pennies.
I mean, first approximation, if you've got a $40,000 car and roughly $10,000 items in that car, that means each thing on average cost four bucks. So in order to get the cost down and save at 10%, you have to get $0.40 out of each part on average. It is a game of pennies. We play it willingly. Yeah, we've done it many, many times.
And even something as simple as like a sticker, like there's too many stickers internally in the car that nobody ever sees. There's something as simple as a QR code. You might think, well, putting a QR code on part one, I just put them on there. It's like, well, are we actually going to use that QR code? Also, painting.
Yeah, exactly. And then, inevitably, sometimes the QR code doesn't go on properly, or you can't read it properly. And it stops the line for more than a penny.
Yeah, absolutely. So, there's chipping away with it. I mean, it is trying to, it is, it does feel like digging a tunnel with a spoon at times. Very much escaping prison.
Yeah. You know, on top of it, like we said, you know, we did some factory upgrades. So we expect volume to go up. That would also bring some savings from higher production. But then, on the flip side, we're going to be ramping a new product like Cybertruck, which we talked about. So, yeah. So those are the real potential things that we are working for. Yeah, but there's not like some accidentally, you know, some brick of gold that we've gotten to go up, unfortunately.
And it's, you know, we're trying to be very rigorous about improving the quality and capability of the car, because, yeah, it's like, any fool can reduce the cost of a car by making it worse. And just, you know, deleting functionality and capability. And that's the best I've called this sort of any fool. Like, if you want to lose weight, and you said, well, I need to lose whatever 15 pounds, right away, well, you could top your arm off. But then you're sitting with one arm, you're still fat. So, it's sort of like, yeah, I got to work out it. Yeah, you actually have to eat less food and work out. That's the actual way. And doctors, yeah, so, you know, super fun, because we're just delicious. And personally, I'm not a huge, but I don't love working out. I know some people do, I wish I did, but I don't. Unless moving the mouse consists of working out in which case I love moving the thought.
All right, let's go to Colin Langam from Wells Fargo. Colin, can you unmute yourself? Oh, sorry about that. You hear me now? Yeah, I'm good. Thanks for your questions. You said in a commentary that you're not going full tilt on the plant in Mexico until there's signs that the economy is strong. Can you continue out of 50% Kager without that plant? And where would that come from? And any color on what you mean, sort of not going full tilt? Could that plant get delayed indefinitely or we're talking about?
No, we're definitely making the factory in Mexico. We're feel very good about that. We put a lot of effort into looking at different locations and feel very good about that location. And we are going to build a factory there. It's going to be great. The question is really just one of timing.
And I'm just going to be a broken record on the on the entrance front. It's just interest rates have to come down. Like if if if interest rates keep rising, you just fundamentally reduce portability. It is just the same as right, increasing the price of the car. So I just don't have visibility into it. If you can tell me what the interest rates are, I can tell you when, you know, when we should we should both factory, we're going to bullet and I think we'll we'll start the initial phases of construction next year.
But I am still somewhat scarred by 2009 when if General Motors and Chrysler were in bankrupt. So well, that's now 14 years ago. It's that that is seared into my mind with a branding iron. Because, you know, Tesla was just hanging on by thread during that entire time. And with it, I mean, we closed off of financing around 2008 on at 6 p.m. December 24th, Christmas Eve. And if we had not closed that financing round, we would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas. So we we actually closed that round on the last hour of the last day that it was possible. Trustful to say the least. And then barely made it through 2009. So I'm like, I want to just I don't want to be going at top speed into uncertainty.
A lot of war is going on in the world, obviously, as well. So we have room here, like in King of Texas, you said, we still have it in this building. It's not full with Cybertrapt and Hawaii and, you know, there's plenty of growth opportunities still to have inside the building where our tomb already is. We also have 2000 acres here. There's also a bunch of that. We're actually only occupying a tiny corner of the land that we have. But, you know, we could technically do all the scaling. Let's read just here. So, that mean, personnel is our biggest challenge in that the greater Orson area only has, as generously the greater Orson area only has 2 million people. So people are moving here and they're willing to move here. But there is somewhat of a housing crisis. They got to look somewhere. So, so, I don't know. I mean, I just curious, like, I just I'm not saying things really bad. I'm just saying they might be.
And I think like like Tesla is an incredibly capable ship. But it is, but if, you know, we need to make sure like as if the macro economic conditions of stormy, you know, even if the best ship is still going to have top times, the weaker ships will sink. We're not going to sink, but you know, even a great ship in a storm has challenges. Now, that storm will apply to everyone, which starts and not just not just the auto industry, apply to everyone, I think. So, you know, apart from the necessary sort of staples like food and stuff, but, you know, so just, I don't know. If interest rates start coming down, we will accelerate.
All right. I think it's good. It's good. It's good. Got any any any guesses on this? I, you know, I'd love to be less wrong. And I apologize if I'm perhaps more paranoid than I should be, because I might also be the case because I am I've PTSD from 2009, big time. And in 2017 through 19 or not picnic, either that was very tough going. So, you know, the auto industry is also so much cyclic. It's because there are people can't hesitate by a new car. And if there's uncertainty in the economy. So, so, you know, part companies do very well in good economic times, and they have, but don't do as well in tough economic times. So, it's just, you know, whereas if somebody's selling bread, then I think, you know, that people swing to have bread. Yeah. Yeah. You need bread. You free need for all the time, but you, car, you don't have to have bread. Especially if there are wars going on, and then that impacts your sentiment. Yeah. I mean, if people are reading about wars all over the world, if this, you know, playing in your car tends to not be fun of mine.
All right. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have today. Thank you very much for all of your good questions, and we'll see you again in three months. Thank you very much. All right.
Hey, everybody. Let's do some recapping in that call. Let me know if you guys can hear me. Okay. I'll give it a second here. Things try to get things into position. Let me know on the audio level if that's, if this is all right for you guys. And we'll talk about, yeah, let's talk about sounds good. Okay. Thanks. Hear you. Audio good. All right. Yeah. Let me know if the levels are okay. Just kind of guessing a bit here. All right. Well, I've seen a lot of comments. I've seen a lot of comments about people saying that the call was depressing. Yeah. I mean, obviously not the, if I had to line up my favorite earnings calls, this certainly would not be not be the tops.
I think this kind of extends what we had talked about. Hopefully you guys had seen the shareholder letter and their reaction to the financials and all that stuff. But I think this kind of carried forward what we had talked about during that recap, where on the vehicle capacity page, Tesla had talked about for Gigatexis for Gigabrelin, and then for Shanghai, all three of those factories Tesla gave comments about relatively slow ramp ups from here.
So Berlin and Texas, they said, you know, slow ramps. And then for the Gigashang high, they said, you know, we're basically fully ramped for the time being. So I think what we heard from Elon here confirmed what we had sort of guessed at that point was that Tesla is taking their foot off the accelerator a bit in terms of production growth during this period of time, obviously higher interest rates than we've had for the last few years, still relative to historical interest rates.
Obviously there have been times in the past where it's been higher, but as Elon said, it is obviously impacting payments. And despite significant price cuts from Tesla, when you're financing a vehicle, like most people are doing, that's going to impact affordability. The EV tax credit obviously should be offsetting a significant portion of that in the United States, not necessarily internationally, obviously. However, as Elon pointed out, because it's not a point of sale credit right now, it's also non refundable credit right now. The eligibility for that and the impact of that is a little bit limited.
So hopefully those things both improve a little bit heading into next year, even if we do see some reductions in credits. So hopefully those are, you know, positive factors. And hopefully we're also at the top of the interest rates. I mean, we've heard fed comments now about maybe pausing for a bit. So we seem to be getting closer. And I think the market's expectations are kind of indicating that right now too. So, you know, hopefully things are getting to a point where we're starting to change a bit in terms of the trajectory, which will be pretty potentially pretty meaningful.
So outside of that, I mean, I don't know that there's, you know, a whole lot that we learned that was kind of new on this call. Obviously, we got some details on Cybertruck, Elon talking about how this is going to be pretty difficult to ramp. We should have known that now for a while, obviously at the unveiling part of the pitch of Cybertruck was that this was going to be a little bit of an easier to produce vehicle because of how it's designed. But over time, that, you know, sort of narrative changed from Tesla.
And as there are a lot of new things with this, unsurprisingly, I think, you know, it's going to be a long time, it's going to be a long ramp to profitability as any new vehicle would be. So just want to keep in mind, especially next quarter as that starts to hit. I'm just going to kind of cycle through my notes here and we can go point by point because I know there's things in here.
Sorry for the audio dropping a couple times. That was on on Tesla's end on YouTube. Nothing I could do here. Sounded like maybe the X version of the audio for the interview or for the earnings call was okay. So I might have to switch to that as the feed next time we'll we'll see if that was okay. And we'll see what we missed if that did actually get captured. But again, apologies for that.
Alright. So just looking through here, you know, sort of opening comments, kind of stuff that we've all talked about either in the shareholder letter or prior to this in previous episodes or earnings calls. So Cybertruck, flying production, a difficult, difficult all stuff that we kind of know.
I think I'm maybe I didn't quite understand or I couldn't quite hear or maybe it dropped a bit when they were talking about energy margins. We'll have to go back and review that. Obviously that was one of the real big highlights this quarter was energy margins going to 24%.
As Elon noted, that's their best margin business now with non X credit automotive gross margin coming in at like 16.3% I believe. But even including regulatory credits in the 18% range. So for mega pack to now be 24%. That's super, super exciting.
Obviously that business continues to grow quickly. And right now Tesla's doing about 16 gigawatt hours annually, but they're ramping their production to 40 gigawatt hours just from their California facility. And then they'll also add the China facility as well and ramp that up to 80. So there's a lot of growth left in that business, which is exciting, especially as Elon's comments indicate, we're probably at a little bit of a plateau period now for Model Y and Model 3.
Now obviously us and X have reached that for quite some time. So at least we've got a little bit to look forward to there with mega pack kind of continuing to drive some growth. As we wait for some next generation vehicles like Cybertruck, like semi like next generation vehicle, the lower cost vehicle to help drive growth again. And then obviously macroeconomic changes could contribute to that as well.
Let's see. So no answer on Cybertruck delivery isn't not surprised. Elon's never really ever given, and you know, a specific number like that. He always talks about things in terms of run rates. So basically saying they'll get to, you know, 5000 a week sometime in 2025, probably reaching that rate. That doesn't mean 250,000 produced in 2025. It just means, you know, reaching that rate sometimes in 20, sometime in 2025. And obviously on the earnings report letter, Dussell indicated greater than 125,000 as the production capacity. So I would, I would expect they're kind of initially ramping to that. And then continuing to ramp in sort of like a phase two way up to 5k a week. Again, in about 18 months.
4680 drew always list those stats off super quickly. So it's kind of hard to catch them. But he did say the production increased 40% quarter over quarter. I think that's actually not quite as rapid of growth as we'd seen in Q2. I think it was 80% if I remember correctly. But obviously that base is going to be significantly higher as off of those types of growth rates, annualized. That's still, you know, very strong. And then it sounds like they're going to be making probably the next step change sometime in early 2024. Drew mentioned that they've got four lines of 46 a production capacity under construction. I can't remember what face he quite said that they were in again, that was pretty quick. But target to start producing that in May 2024, which, you know, we're going to be there before we know it. So that'll be, I think, a pretty significant bump for 4680s.
And hopefully that's the point in time where, you know, a lot of questions on the call about like, okay, cost reductions. How do we, how do we go from here? Is this trend that we're seeing going to continue in cost reductions on the average vehicle? One of the things that's going to drive that is obviously 4680s. That's been sort of artificially inflating cost of good sold per vehicle right now. As they do this, certainly once this phase two is ramped up, that's going to go from an economic drain to something that is hopefully positive. I think Drew maybe said something on a cost there that they're, you know, kind of working towards that, but still have improvements to make.
Cato, that's going to be their next generation sort of test facility. No, no big surprise on that right now. But they're kind of working on retooling it for the, presumably sort of like phase two cyber cell right now, which maybe that is, you know, aligned with their plans there for May, but maybe another generation after that.
Berlin and Austin. So I mean, we've, we've kind of been talking about this now for a while when we got back, you know, if we go back to those reports about shifts and things like that that we've been hearing about, particularly for Berlin. At the time we were getting those rumors, you know, I made the call out that I wouldn't be too surprised if Tesla is rather than focusing on continuing to ramp up production more focused on cost of production for their current, you know, level of production. So I think that's where we're at, you know, Austin, a little bit different.
We had the downtime there this quarter that'll have to re ramp up from that downtime. But presumably Tesla put in some cost improvement things in place during that downtime. But I think for both these factories, then Tesla is just saying, hey, we're not going to bump these up to 500,000 a year on the Model Y because of this environment that we're in right now. So, you know, if Tesla felt better about it, I think there's production capacity on the table there that, you know, Tesla could go after.
This is one of the first times that we've heard of Tesla, you know, not being sort of constrained by production, I would say, which will be an interesting period for them because they'll be able to, not that I'm trying to spend that. It's a good thing. I would prefer that they, you know, obviously have as much demand as they as they would like. But since it is kind of a unique period in Tesla's history, it'll allow them to do things a little bit differently, take a little bit of a different approach and focus on some things that, you know, they normally maybe would put to the side during a period of time where they're a little bit more focused on growing production, which can have some long-term benefits.
Again, I'm not saying that's, you know, better in terms of those two scenarios. But I do think it's worth, you know, considering that there will be different sort of targets and goals for Tesla during a period like this that might have some interesting learnings and improvements that can be put in place for them longer term as well. Mexico. So same kind of story there with Berlin and Austin, just not really going, you know, full pedal pedal, pedal to the metal on Mexico at this point. Set Elon said that, you know, he thinks that they'll start construction next year. I think originally, you know, sort of the original communication we heard was, I don't know, like nine months or something. I think we kind of thought that it would start this year, 2023.
So if they do start next year, it's not like it's the, you know, most significant delay in the world. And really, you know, the point in time, from which they start to when they actually start producing vehicles is probably the most critical factor. But as we had talked about, Tesla's kind of already made the decision to rather than kick off the next generation vehicle in gigamaxico to kind of move that over to gigatexis. So I don't think that Mexico is really a gating factor for, you know, really anything in the next year or maybe even two years. So, you know, obviously, my preference would be for them to kind of get started on that earlier, just so it's ready to go when they when they feel like it can go. But at the same time, there's probably some time that we've got here where they can, you know, wait a bit before it starts being super impactful to, you know, longer term things.
Now, obviously presents a little bit of a gap next year and maybe 2025, even where, you know, probably one of the the more disappointing things from this call was, I don't know where in the notes this was, but yeah, so 50%. So yeah, that was something I was really disappointed to hear from Elon, you know, originally the plan, this probably goes back to I don't know, like 2020, 2021, I think is what Tesla says it was in their earnings report. But I think even before that there were comments about, yeah, 50% compound annual growth rate is kind of the target that gets us to 4 million or so in 2024, or sorry, in 2025, gets us to 20 million in 2030, actually above that. But, you know, that was that was kind of the targets that were laid out, right? It was 50% kegger, and it was, you know, roughly 4 million in 2025, although a little bit less specificity around that one, and you know, 20 million in 2030.
This to me sounds like an early indication of like, hey, that's that's not the benchmark anymore, at least for right now, which that's obviously super disappointing. Now things can change when there's less economic uncertainty, those targets can come back on the table, but the longer they're delayed for, you know, as we kind of talk about gigamexico and how that fits into these things, longer, those are delayed for the less aggressive that Tesla is, which I don't think they're getting like super less aggressive, just, you know, less aggressive than we know Tesla to be historically, which is probably pretty hyper aggressive. I think Tesla is still being aggressive, they're just not sort of, you know, the Tesla aggressive that we've, we've come to know and obviously love.
So, and I think this is a, you know, this along with the indications about, you know, gigamexico, Berlin, Austin, etc, are indications of that. And I think, you know, long term that that will have an impact in terms of pushing out some of these targets that that Tesla's kind of laid out. So again, that that part of the call and even in the shareholder letter, you know, we kind of started started to get an illusion to that is definitely disappointing.
Robotaxy stuff. I mean, we've we've heard it so many times now. Yeah, not sure there was anything too new on that. I wish we would have heard a little bit more about FSD 12. The little bit that we did here, I think was not super encouraging because Elon said, you know, the more geographies or regions or localities that we tried to put FSD in, the heart of the problem gets. Obviously, it's already an extremely hard problem. So, that's very intuitive and not at all surprising. But at the same time, FSD 12 N10 neural network, that is supposed to be something that kind of not alleviates those problems, but hopefully kind of addresses them. So for him to talk about FSD 12 at the same time as talking about how it's harder to do in different geographies and things like that, while it does make sense is also, you know, I wish it would have just been presented a little bit more bullishly, I guess, if that makes sense, than how it was.
So not something I'm necessarily like super disappointed in on that front, but I don't think we got anything like excellent or super exciting about FSD 12, which is probably one of the things that, you know, right now, as we talked about in the shareholder letter, right now when we're kind of waiting for those next generation of products, if FSD can make some good progress, that also something that kind of bridges that gap potentially, but we obviously have to wait and see.
Optimists, we kind of heard about that. Elon didn't want to give any indication of, you know, production or whether or not that'd be useful next year. He had previously said it was, so I wouldn't say it's, you know, necessarily tempering expectations on that, but seemed a little bit less bullish than the last update. But obviously, we just saw, you know, the video that Tesla put out, which I think was was pretty exciting price on FSD.
So temporarily low, basically, you know, Elon didn't say it during this part one of the rare parts. It didn't come back to interest rates, but I do think, you know, obviously with the higher interest rates, Tesla lowering the price of FSD is somewhat commensurate with those interest rate increases as well. So I think that's probably played a role there.
The Mercedes level three stuff. I like the question, actually. Some people might be surprised by that. I usually don't love all the questions, but the question is interesting because, you know, Tesla's system is obviously on a holistic level, just not even really comparable with Mercedes that so far ahead in terms of what it can actually do. But Mercedes has decided to focus on just a very narrow operational domain. And in that narrow domain, accepting the liability for it. So I wish it would have been framed differently than it was so that we could have gotten a better answer on it.
I mean, sometimes it's difficult because you can frame a question perfectly and Tesla can answer it however they want. They don't have to answer it. But it, you know, it is an interesting thing to think about, especially again, during this period where maybe there's not as much growth in the other parts of the business, if Tesla were to say, hey, while FSD is still in development, can we dedicate a very small portion of our time to starting to, you know, conquer some of these domains essentially, where, you know, Tesla's starting to accept liability. And when they do that, I think that creates a tremendous amount of value for customers, even if it's not the solution that Tesla's working towards. And ultimately, they have to make the decision because whether or not the work, the work that would go into something like that is worth it. That's, you know, a decision that I don't think any of us could make without that information about how much work it would be. But if it were easy enough, and Tesla could offer something like this in a broader area, in under broader circumstances, I think that customers would would really appreciate that. If you can sort of get your time back, I mean, that's kind of what Ford has talked about that they're just working on that now instead of FSD. But like, like, just imagine that, you know, you've got the split of autopilot and FSD. And the autopilot functionality, although it's limited in terms of where you can use it, if you could use it, and it takes over the liability and you don't have to pay attention, I think people would be much more willing to pay for a monthly subscription for that, or, you know, we talked a little bit earlier today about paying per mile or something like that. I think that that becomes instantly more valuable, and people can recognize the value of that a lot easier as well. So it's interesting, again, you know, we didn't really get into that in terms of the answer. But I do wonder as the longer that FSD takes, the more something like that, I think is going to make sense. And that's where it's just kind of the balance of like, how much effort do you want to spend on that versus just trying to, you know, get the full solution. And obviously Tesla so far has picked to dedicate everything to the full solution. Which ultimately I think is the right move, but, you know, there's some space in there for other decisions that could be interesting.
Optimists, we talked about that progress tends to look like a log curve. Kind of talked about that. You know, on's mentioned those things before. Ramp of the cyber truck. So yeah, this was a little bit more positive than I think initially, maybe people would have interpreted as 18 months, you know, I don't think anyone should be surprised by that we've we've seen vehicle ramps many, many times. And best case scenario, you're talking about something in Gikushang, hi, that's already been produced somewhere else. And even that's going to take a year.
You know, maybe best case kind of like nine months. So no, no surprise on that, especially with obviously the unique complexity with the cyber truck that they mentioned. High volume low cost smaller vehicle much more conventional in terms of technology. I didn't catch the exact comment from Lars, but he said something about like there's no stainless steel invention that they need to make. I know a lot of people wonder if it's going to be cyber truck to ask those comments to me definitely indicated not that direction, which has been my opinion for a while.
So maybe I'm just biased in terms of my interpretation of it. But, you know, he could mean that since I've already done it with cyber truck, it is no longer new then for the next generation vehicle. But just based on everything that they said, they're more conventional, utilitarian, like, I don't think that it's going to be, you know, cyber truck style. Audio cut out, we'll have to kind of figure out what that is.
Elon again, saying it's, it's a utility, still beautiful, but utilitarian. FSD stuff, we've heard a thousand times. I don't think Pierre quite got his got his question answered on that one. sequential margin changes, mega pack. And yeah, pricing stuff. Just looking through to see what else we may not have covered yet.
So we have not included model Y radar. So we talked about that a couple of days ago, it's just something that was an option in the paperwork. I don't think anyone necessarily thought that they were putting it in already. But maybe and Elon's answer here didn't exclude this possibility. Maybe Tesla just has left it open in case that you want to add, you know, the Tesla designed radar at some point.
The game of pennies. Elon had some good jokes in there. That was laughing. volume. It's unclear exactly the volume comments. I mean, the volume is going to increase, obviously, from where we're at now in Q three because of the downtime. But at the same time, they said that volume is not going to ramp that much further. So I think see if I was talking about just how volume will increase from where it was at this quarter. But I don't expect that that also meant that they'll continue to significantly increase that.
As for next year, you know, I was asked about what the unit guidance might be for next year. And they said, you know, we'll have an update on that on the next call. I think this is another good time where it's really helpful for people to just sit down and like model the business. It doesn't have to be anything like super detailed or crazy, but just kind of look at production by factory and see what you think makes sense.
It is difficult to find a path to, you know, really significant increases next year. And that becomes even more difficult, which is kind of what the analysts are trying to capture here. You can kind of tell by their questions that with with updates about not much increases in Shanghai, Berlin, Texas, obviously, Mexico is not going to contribute next year. Fremont, we kind of know what it is, right? Like, I don't think anyone expects any major increases there.
So after the highland ramp, it's just kind of difficult to see where any additional volume starts to come from. And then when you're in that scenario, you're kind of capped on what the what the volume can be for next year. So that kind of comes back to the plateau thing. And this again, this is why I've been talking about sort of that for a while, is because you know, you sit down there and you have to model these things out.
And at a certain point, it just kind of kind of stops. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. Like, obviously, we'd all prefer that model three and model Y just kept going to infinity. But obviously, that's not possible. At a certain point, you just you got to wait for the next generation platform.
Tesla was at this point back in 2016, 2017, as we waited for model three. Model Y was quick enough that we didn't have much of that with the model three, but we would have had that eventually with the model three and had to wait for model Y. But because it was so similar, we just kind of, you know, test to kind of stack those on top of each other, which was nice. But now, you know, we're at the tail end of that ramp. And we're just kind of waiting for to get to the next generation.
So obviously, if if interest rates had stayed at zero percent for longer, then Tesla probably could have continued to ramp it, you know, more aggressively, like they sort of initially, I think, had in mind with Berlin in Texas. But with that being not the case anymore, you know, Tesla just adjusting as as they should be to be good managers of the business.
I know we'd all love it to be a little bit different than it is, but it is probably prudent for Tesla to just, you know, assess the information that they have at this point in time and adjust accordingly. And although that might set them some things back, you know, I still have full confidence that Tesla's well equipped to manage these things, these periods, which, you know, they're not quite as fun as the periods that we had in whatever 2020 and 2021.
But again, same same thing with the stock. You can't expect years like that every every single year either. Many people that have been in Tesla forever obviously know the not necessarily like the pain that comes with holding, but just like the the patience that you have to have with a long term investment. That's why a lot of early Tesla investors kind of preach that that patience and long term mindset, because, you know, they're plenty of periods different different things, but plenty of periods like this that were tough and, you know, not super exciting about the business.
I'm sure people remember, you know, some of the some of the things with like Model X and some of the guidance that Tesla gave and it ended up being way off and it's just like, oh, man, this this is looking not good. But again, long term, everything's great. And I think we're probably in a situation like that again where, yeah, the business is not increasing as quickly as it was at one point.
我确信人们还记得,你知道的,特斯拉 Model X 和一些特斯拉给出的指导方针,结果相差甚远,简直是太糟糕了。但是再说一次,从长远来看,一切都还好。我认为我们可能再次处于这样的情况,是的,业务增长速度不再像过去那样快了。
But there's still so many different things to be excited about with the business. Like someone yesterday made a comment of like, Oh, you're you've got this $800 billion company. And all of that value or 500 billion of that is is coming down to FSD. I mean, not really you've got FSD, but you've also got Cybertruck, you've got semi you've got the next generation vehicle, which is going to be bigger than Tesla's entire unit volume right now.
Like people do people understand that? Probably by a significant margin. So that's, you know, those are those things are all on the horizon. And so many other things supercharging Tesla insurance energy, like 24% gross margins on Tesla energy. That's phenomenal. I don't think many people would have except for maybe a small little Twitter Twitter crew that were probably a little bit over optimistic. But you know, certainly in the analyst community or in Wall Street, I don't think anyone would have really expected that. And that's a very exciting business.
I mean, that was what a third of Tesla's profit or, well, more like a tenth of Tesla's profit this this quarter, but growing and growing more quickly. So I think there's tons to be excited about with the energy business. And you know, there's a long, long list of things in the business that the Tesla's doing.
And then you got to consider competition, right? Like, yeah, things aren't as exciting in in the financials for Tesla right now as they were a year ago. But like, look at, look at the announcements that we're hearing from Ford, look at the situation that Ford GM is the landest around right now at the UAW. We just heard from GM earlier this week that they're delaying investments in EVs.
Like, that's, that's going to hurt them. Just like, you know, just like we talked about with Tesla not being quite as aggressive. My shift some of Tesla's things back a little bit. That probably goes double or triple for a company like GM. How much prefer to be in the situation where Tesla's in, and you know, have the capability of delivering these products earning cash flow and reinvesting that cash flow into their future growth, both in, in terms of AI, and in terms of vehicles and energy and all the other stuff we just listed, then be in a position like GM where it's like, Oh, man, we're kind of reliance on these ice vehicles, which are becoming more and more expensive because of interest rates.
And then we also have to be making all these new investments in this EV business that we really don't know much about that we really have no historical success with that only looks like it's going to be draining our profitability and by the way, Tesla's out there and they just don't really care. They're going to cut prices and make things more affordable and and they can manage to do that because they're already at scale.
That's what you got to compete with. Like, this is just night and day in terms of the comparison with Tesla's businesses. And you know, you've got BYD out there that's that's doing well, but that's that's pretty much it. You know, Volkswagen looked like maybe it was taking the steps in the right direction, but they've they've regressed so far in the last year. Toyota continues to just do nothing. So the market's wide open. And you know, Tesla's continues to be significantly better position than anybody out there to take it. So that's where we say like, yeah, this is maybe a disappointing quarter.
Still a lot to be excited about long-term. It's we talked earlier about like holding two thoughts in your mind at the same time. And that's one of it. People, you know, again, sitting here saying in the chat, like, depressing call like Rob looks depressed. People just say that all the time. We talked about that earlier today as well. But no, it's it's fine. I mean, again, long long long list of things to be excited about. And I don't think any of those. I don't think that list of things changes, right? Like the only thing that maybe changes a little bit today is that we, you know, we probably get a little bit lower peak ramps for Model Y in Berlin, in Texas. Like, well, do I own Tesla stock because I thought that Berlin in Texas, we're going to produce 250,000 more Model Ys than they might know. Like, that's not really a contributing factor at all. So while I would love if they could do that and Tesla earns more money and the stock prices better faster, that'd be awesome. But it's also not why, you know, why I'm an investor in Tesla, why I've been an investor in Tesla for more than a decade. And probably will continue to be an investor for a decade, because I'm excited about these other things, not just about, you know, Model 3 and Model Y.
All right, well, that was a long comment. Definitely making Mexico. You get to Texas, we talked about some of the things there. Yeah. All right, yeah. So I mean, a lot of stuff there. Again, people are saying like Elon's depressed too. It's just stop, stop reading into stuff like that. It's it's rarely accurate as I have found from people assessing my own mood on a daily podcast. Like, Elon's got a lot going on, doesn't necessarily reflect on anything that he's talking about at that moment. Obviously, there's things that aren't super exciting that he has to share here. But so it could be, but just it's not a very accurate route to go down, which I can say from my my own personal experience pretty confidently.
All right, looking at the stock here. So down about 4%, obviously we started off a lot higher before the call. I'm not surprised again. I think the there's there's not a lot in the call to be like really happy about or really support the stock in the short term certainly. So I'm not surprised. I was actually surprised as we talked about earlier that the stock was up after the report, because I think that it alluded to a lot of the stuff that we heard on the call. Maybe people just didn't quite catch that yet, but I'm not surprised.
I think, you know, I wouldn't I also wouldn't be surprised if it gets a little bit tougher from here. Analysts are going to go back now and I'm not sure what consensus is for 2024 right now, but anyone that kind of had significant growth is going to have to probably come back and cut that sort of stuff out. So if anything, price targets are probably coming down from here, not that that's really the main factor that's going to drive the stock or anything like that. But I'd be surprised if we get a lot of upgrades or anything coming out of this call.
So all right, what questions you guys got? This is usually we kind of wrap these up a little bit quicker, but I'll stick around and if people want to just kind of ask them questions, I know it's again calls like this, not the most fun. So I'm happy to stay a little bit longer and just kind of chat. Probably a little bit better for X spaces, but I did see some super chats come through. I can't this software is different. Luckily, we made it through the call. If you guys remember last quarter, I had issues. I had completely set this up on a new computer now. So seems like we were okay except for Tesla's drops. Rex, thank you. Appreciate that. Good to see you on here. You want to come on Tesla daily every few months to talk about anything and everything and stay off these calls to make it happen or off. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would take that.
Um, let's try and see. Somebody asked, did I miss Highland release dates? No, Tesla just kind of punted on that, but Motor Trend did say it was going to be January and then Tesla apparently requested for them to update to Q1. So that seems to be at least the best information that we have right now, which I think people were kind of already expecting that based on some rumors previously.
Alec asks, Alec asking, do you see more price cuts? I don't know. I mean, there's quite a few things that are going to work in Tesla's favor here. Obviously, Highland, that's going to help. And Tesla's actually raised prices on the Model 3 internationally where that's been introduced. So that should help both ASP and margins. But we'll see, you know, how long that can be sustained. Tesla might drop that over time.
As we talked about, the point of sale change for the EV credit. That'll be offset a bit by the possible reductions, particularly for Model Y. But those being point of sale and those being refundable, effectively refundable, I don't know technically worded that way, but becomes effectively refundable. Those are big changes that are very positive that should help in the beginning of the year.
And then like we heard from Tesla today, they've sort of decided, I think, to sort of take their foot off the gas or off the pedal for ramping production. And, you know, even though earnings are down this year, deliveries are still up. Tesla's still going to grow deliveries by like 50%. Right? So when you do that, you need to do that through pricing most likely. You don't just get to sell 50% of the same thing at the same price. Otherwise, you're probably significantly underbricing it before.
So I'm not surprised with production increasing that prices would come down. Obviously, it's a little bit faster than I think most of us would have modeled for. But obviously that trend, you know, or that relationship shouldn't be surprising. So if there is now a period of time where Tesla is not increasing production as significantly, like not at this 50% rate anymore, there should be less downward pressure on pricing at that sort of stagnant level of production. Now, which of those is preferable up to people to decide, but just again, that relationship exists.
So one thing we skipped over here that I meant to mention, I just didn't catch it in the notes because I think it was just a one short one. But Elon did say, you know, we are advertising, he seemed relatively positive about how that could affect the business in terms of the benefit that it could have. So I think that'll be a welcome thing for people as they kind of process things. You know, there's a lot to sort through here. But I think as people kind of circle back around to that, that'll be something that at least analysts and Wall Street kind of view as a positive.
And I'd expect that we'll see more efforts from Tesla on that, especially as they kind of, you know, operating, operating margins come lower and they've got less room. Like when you're sitting there at a 19% or 15% operating margin, it's pretty easy to just say, okay, let's just cut prices, right? When you're sitting there and you're at 7% boosted by half a billion dollars in regulatory credits, that type of a decision is much less simple. Tesla wants to continue to be free cash flow positive. They want to continue to earn money to support the business, which has always been the argument in favor of advertising, right? Is to help boost margins so that Tesla can have money to continue to grow in the ways that we want them to grow.
I don't know why that is sometimes so difficult, but that's always been the argument for it. And I think, you know, that that argument becomes stronger as you both as you bring costs down and as you get your margins lower, because you just need to figure out something to kind of sustain those. And advertising can be a lever that can help with that. And as pricing comes down as a key part of that too, because, and I've always said the sense of the beginning, I have no problem with Tesla lowering prices, I just wanted to also kind of see them do things to maybe help support on the margin side, where I think there's a little bit of opportunity and as you want to be acknowledging here, there probably is. And rather than even arguing that they should do it more of just like they should try something and understand the effect.
So with with prices coming down, I think that's always been the right move, like Tesla was never going to continue to sell 2 million cars a year at whatever $60,000 or $58,000 or whatever the ASP peaked at. So they needed to come down, but you can also do things during that period to help support profits as you work prices down to.
So it's maybe not how I would have organized it time wise, but if Tesla ends up doing both of those things where they've got prices down, they're trying to help boost awareness through whatever methods advertising being one of them. And I think that both of those things work well in tandem.
All right, that was getting kind of a long rant. Did see, I think a couple of super chats here. Tesla pilot saying he's only doing the minimum advertising to appease. I mean, that's what it seems like so far. I'm not going to make that quite as harsh of a judgment on that yet, because again, there's, you know, plenty of time to go forward and do these things. Obviously, I would say Tesla's advertising efforts so far have been pretty extremely minimal. But there's nothing wrong with starting slow and learning about it and, you know, making bigger bets as you as you go and as you learn. So we'll see, you know, what they have in store in the future. If we're sitting here a year from now and they've only, you know, done some airport advertising and, you know, a few Google ads, then yeah, that's a different conversation, I think. But I don't really have a problem with sort of a slow start to it.
Okay, let's see. Rob, thanks for the super chat. Did they mention why they borrowed 2.2 billion? No, this was something that I meant to come back to you from the shareholder letter. I don't know that I want to, we can come back to that tomorrow and tomorrow's episode. I don't want to dig through it while you guys are watching here. But yeah, Tesla did mention 2.3 billion raised in cash from financing activities. So we need to go back and just kind of look at what that was. I don't know that there was a, yeah, I'm not sure we just need to go back and look at that one. It's a good question though. Try to get that figured out for tomorrow.
Okay, just trying to get caught up with the chats here. Victor saying, folks thinking increasing advertising will fix everything is just wrong. Sorry, it makes no sense. Yeah, I mean, if that's the sort of black and white line that you want to draw of like, is advertising going to fix everything? Heck no, definitely not. I think there's probably a small portion of people that are saying that. I think most people that are arguing for it are probably thinking that it's something that will be helpful and something that they would like to see Tesla do. Certainly there's going to be people on, you know, across the spectrum of that argument that they're making. I don't know that many people see it as like a silver bullet that's just going to fix things. I think it's more of just like, hey, people don't really get what's going on here with pricing and how good these vehicles are. We should maybe try to tell them a little bit and maybe that can help margins a bit at the same time.
Alright, well, my mouth's getting dry. I'm going to wrap it up though. Again, not depressed. Obviously, it's a little bit disappointing earnings release in terms of financials, a little bit disappointing in terms of some of the updates from the call. But a lot still to look forward to long-term for Tesla, which is always what it's been about.
Any business is going to go through periods of time that are difficult. Tesla, as much as they are normally the exception to almost everything. They're also going to face difficulties just like this. Again, I'm fully confident in Tesla's team that's working on this stuff day in and day out to try to make this business as strong and as beneficial to the world as they can. I think that's just kind of a good reminder to bring people back to.
Obviously, we were invested. We want to make money on our investments. No question about that. If we can do that though and also support a company that's doing what Tesla is doing and doing it in a way that I think we can all feel really proud about, that so much better. We are seeing Tesla do that.
It's not GM sitting here and saying, oh, we're just going to delay this. We're reevaluating our capital, whatever investments. We're just going to do this next year, maybe, late next year. Actually, late 2025, I think it was. That's a while.
Tesla's going as fast as they can and still survive. I don't want to put it in black and white terms like Tesla's going to go bankrupt or something. That's not going to be the case. They're going to manage the business around challenging periods of time. We're just going to have to work through those periods. That's going to work right now.
That'll wrap it up for today. We'll be back tomorrow. If there's plenty more to talk about, it stocks down 5% now. Tough reaction. I want to be surprised again if it continues in that direction. We'll see. Let me know in the comments. I'll just try to keep an eye on them. If there's specific topics that you feel like we need to spend a little bit more time on tomorrow, let me know and we'll come back to you within.
That'll wrap it up for today. As always, thank you for listening. Make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications. You can also find me on X at Tesla podcast. We'll see you tomorrow for the Thursday, October 19th episode. Love to.