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Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Test loss third quarter 2023 Q&A webcast. My name is Martin Vika, VP of And I'm joined today by Elon Musk, and a number of other executives. During this call, we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. His 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 filing statements.
During the question and answer portion of today's call, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Please use the race and hand button to join the question queue. But before we jump into the Q&A, Elon has some opening remarks.
Elon? Thank you, Martin. So just a Q3 recap. Our last quarter was impacted by downtime for global factory upgrades that will help us reduce cost per vehicle, as well as increased production. We remain focused on three main objectives, which is the cost reduction of our products, investments in artificial intelligence, and other growth projects, like optimus, and continued pre-casual generation.
Regarding vehicle cost, our team was able to reduce the cost per vehicle further in Q3, despite headwinds from factory atel cost and wrap up of new factories. 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 brought to 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. Really, you can think of it as a large but stream coming in and a tiny bit stream going out, an impressing 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's 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 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 cashflow positive. This is simply normal for 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 to the product. And advanced as the Cybertruck, you will have problems proportionate to how many new things you're trying to solve at scale.
So I just want to emphasize that while I think this is potentially our best product ever, and I think it is our best product ever, it is going to be requiring immense work to reach volume production and be capital 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. And as soon as the design car is, is there just anyone can do it? It does require taste. It does require effort to design a prototype. But the difficulty going from a prototype to a volume production is like 10,000% harder to get to volume production that to make the prototype in the first place. And then it is even harder than that to reach positive cashflow. That is why there have not been new cars start up that have been successful for 100 years, apart from Tesla. So, you know, I just want to temper expectations for cyber truck. It's a great product, but financially it will take a year to 18 months before it is a significant price of cashflow contributor. I wish there was some way to be different, but that's my best guess.
So, the demand is off the charts. We have over a million people who have reserved the car. So, it's not a demand issue, but we have to make it a price that people can afford. And it's saying the difficult things.
In conclusion, we continue to focus on ramping production while maintaining a positive cash flow. And we continue to target 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. But I'll say that again, Tesla has the best real-world AI team on Earth, period. And it's getting better.
And 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 YBAF have some opening remarks as well.
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 full-side driving, optimus, and dojo. 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.
Other 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 our going 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 another 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 or 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 the 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 sippy to make an accurate guess at this point. Going back to what I said earlier, that the ramp is going to be extremely difficult. And 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 something 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 probably 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, performance improvements, and cost-saving South line on battery day. Thank you.
Sure thing Martin 4680 cell production in Texas increased 40% quarter quarter. And gross to the Texas team for producing their 20 million cell off of line one. Texas is now our primary four to six eighty facility. We're heavily focused on quality scrap is down 40% quarter of a 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 cell 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. And these 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, and Cato, we're retooling to enable large scale palette 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. Austin factory, the current priority is actually maximize the output from our existing lines by laser focus on efficiency improvement, as always maintaining a high quality and the reducing per unit cost will be as critical as growing the production volume. For Mexico, we're working on infrastructure and factory design and parallel with the engineering development of the new production that will be manufacturing there. So I can share for that. And next, 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. It's, I just can't have says 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. So, that's, if interest rates remain high, or if they could even hire, it's that much harder to for people to buy the car, they simply can't afford it. So, and we're tracking up with this point for Model Y to be the selling car and not just in revenue, but in unit volume. If you compare that to the other vehicles that are, you know, number two and number three and whatnot, they cost much less than our car. So, you know, we're just hitting low of large numbers situations here. I know people want to advertise and we are advertising. I think there is some. There's something to get there is something to be gained on the advertising fund. I don't think it's nothing. In point, people have a car that is great, but they cannot afford. It doesn't just really help. So, that's, that is really the thing that must be sold is to make the car portable. Or, you know, the average person can't buy it for any amount of money. Or they just, they can't afford it. They can't afford it. So, this is a big deal. Okay. Thank you very much.
The next question is, when do you expect model three highland to be available in the US? I just wanted to address that. Unfortunately, we don't answer product related questions and timings on earnings calls. So, let's go to the next one.
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 cager? Next to the question. When you look at 2024, there are a lot of moving pieces. You know, I'm just talking about what is happening in the micro, make environment. So, we're focused on growing our volumes in a very cost efficient manner. And are careful 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 the 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, but I think we will work very rapidly much faster than any other car company on earth by far. Thank you.
Next question is, do you have an approximate timeline in mind for the robot taxi driven or non driven. What excites you most about how this project is progressing. The robot axis like that's fairly non driven. The. I guess I'm 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. You know, this is clearly the right move. So it's really, really pretty amazing. And obviously that same software and approach will enable optimists to do useful things and. And enable optimists to to learn. How to do things simply by looking. So. Extremely exciting.
In long term. As I mentioned before. Given that economic output is. Number of people times productivity. If you no longer have a constraint on. People effectively you've got a human robot that can do as much as you'd like. Your economy is. Why is the infinite. Tans and purposes. So. I don't think anyone is going to do it better than Tesla. Not by a long shot. The first dynamics is impressive, but the robot lacks a brain. Like the. Visitor bars or. Yeah, thanks. And then you also need to be able to design the. You know what such way that it can be mass manufacturing. And then at some point the robots will manufacture the robots. Now, so we need to make sure that there's a good place for humans in that future. And we do not create some variants of the terminator. Outcome. So we're going to put a lot of it into localize control of the human robot. So you know, basically anyone will be able to shut it off locally. And you can't change that. Even if you. Like a software update can change that it has to be hard coded. Thank you.
So the question is why was the price dropped on FSD if it is getting better and robots actually is expected so soon. Well, we just wanted to make it more affordable. Ask them over will try it. Yeah, I think over time the. Price of FSD will increase proportionate to its value. So it regard the current price as a cover. 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 this not 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 like would like to or wouldn't like to. So I think it's important to remember for everyone that Mercedes system is limited to. He roads and Nevada and some certain cities in California doesn't work in the snow or the fog. It must have a weed car marked by his only 40 miles per hour. Our system is meant to be holistic and. Driving any conditions, so we obviously have a much more capable approach, but. With those kind of limitations. Really not very useful. No, I think. So some people understand the profundity of Tesla AI. System. Very prepared to very few. It's basically baby AGI. It has to understand reality in order to try. Maybe maybe 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 this point we. I'm not ready to discuss details of the optimize program. But we will make. Provide periodic updates online. So as you can see, where you know optimus a year ago. And now it can do yoga. So. A few years from now. 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. 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, so 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 a. So we only want to go through that extensive 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. Anyways, to make it better. And it really needs to drive. Drive it needs to drive. Such that it exceeds the. Even on sale of lives. Significantly exceeds the probability of entry over human. They are significantly better. Low low a low probability of entry 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 a log curve. Which is that you have. Rapid initial improvement improvements. And that if you were to extrapolate that. Rapid. Really linear rate of improvement. You get to self driving. Quickly, but then. The rate of improvement curves over logarithmically. As soft asymptote. That's not happened several times. I would characterize that progress. Stacked log curves. I think that's also true in other parts of AI like. LOMs and whatnot. Series of stacked log curves. Each log curve gets higher than the last one. Keep stacking the move. Keep stacking logs eventually. Get to FSD. Thank you.
Let's now go to analyst 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 it's 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. My guess. So it's just that they happen to still happen. So 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, 18 months, not three years. I 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 and reach prosperity with an immense. I can't tell you how much blood sweat and tears level required to achieve that is just. That green. I've been through it many times. And then here we go again. You know. Similar path for the next gen platform. I mean, there's like unique complexity to cyber.
Yeah. Yeah, maybe cyber truck is speaking. Yeah, I mean, we dug our own grave with cyber trucks. Nobody in general, like everybody, big digs are great better than themselves. And so. You know, it is. You know, some of those. Special product that comes along only once in a long while. I just incredibly difficult to. Bring to market to reach volume to be price per us. It's it's fundamental to the nature of the the new.
So now the. Sort of high volume low cost. Smaller vehicle is. Actually much more conventional in terms of like the technologies were putting into it. We didn't have to invent how to bend full hard stainless steel or that mega. 9,000 ton castings or the largest hot stamping in the world. New. Yeah, high voltage, low voltage architectures. It's it's learning from everything we've done. So we hope that we'll ramp faster than the technology. We also have a roofless investigation exercise.
Yeah, we did significantly less parts and yeah, your only is the slowest part. And if you have less of those, that means you could probably do faster. Yes, exactly. I mean, that's it. It's, you know, it's so. So pretty revolutionary and how we're going to build it. It is. Yes, it's it's a. The manufacturing approach for the high volume small vehicle is a revolutionary. I'm not level revolution or quite in the same way as the savage. I think it will be. Quite a past round.
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 order industry. Yeah, I mean, the same location makes it easier to automate. It also makes it a lot of cost. Yes, it's intrinsically lower cost. Yeah. This is because there is. It'll be cool, but it's you. It's not meant to be. You know, with. You know, or magic. So. Can get you from a to be. It'll be. So beautiful, but it's a. It's a utilitarian. It's utility. That's not 14 inches of travel. It's a suspension. Yeah, as an example. Yes. So. I mean, the cyber truck has a lot of bells and whistles.
All right, thank you very much. Let's go to Pierre Farragou from use read research. Hey, can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Hey, I have a first like a follow up question on the. 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. The 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 the version of the service. And I guess, you know, there should be like much lower cost lower feature kind of. But 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.
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 a FSD over time, and whether you could evolve your pricing along that kind of tears to increase adoption.
Yeah, I mean, the. If we're a ton of a spickle. I think you're you know sort of the economics of a autonomous vehicle are truly astounding in a positive way. And you look at past vehicles today, they only get about 10 to 12 hours of usage per week that's. 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 are just insanely positive. 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 all notice your source. That's what seems less than the third of the hours of the week. This is doing something useful. You've increased the value of that by five, but it's still cost the same. Like you have something, then we're a hardware company with software markets.
Here do you have a follow up? Yes, I have a key to your friend to speak for you. They have that's okay. It's about like your gross margin in the quarter. 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 like the sequential benefit, I imagine of production ramping at Berlin and Austin. And then I saw like this massive jump in the energy storage. Very strong positive surprise. So if you can give us the background on that and tell us, you know how we should think about that gross margin going forward. Thanks for that question. So in terms of you have a few different aspects of your question. So for if I just look at from Q three perspective. You know, obviously factory idle time had an impact. It did impact by when I won't give you the exact percentage, but it had decent impact for the quarter. And, you know, 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. Right. And they actually contributed pretty well to the margin for this quarter. In fact. One of the factories, pretty, getting pretty close to in terms of for unit costs to where we are for another established factor which is three months. So that that was a positive in the quarter. When it comes to energy margins, you know, the megapack deployment was the key driver there. And 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 you know megapack deployments are a bit lumpy. So, yes, we had a great quarter this period, but depending upon where we are trying to deploy that product in the war in different markets. You would see that's where there would be. Downer pressure on deployment because of us trying to get the product to that back. Yeah, product and product and transit. Yes. Okay. Thank you very much.
Let's go to road lash from both research. So, you're all to feel free to unmute yourself. Thanks. 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. 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 price 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. And there are certain things which we control and there's certain things which we don't control. You know, we get, 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 a factory of rates late in Q three. Some of these factors are still in the early down phase in Q four. We're still not up to where we want those factors to be so they'll impact in the near term. Plus, like, you know, mentioned, we're going to be ramping cyber truck, which is going to be another head when which we're dealing with. On top of all the, you know, there's overall uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment, which even makes it harder to predict precisely as to where we land. Yes, this is something which, you know, it's, 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, we are not. We're 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. And, you know, our intention is to like maintain or exceed the trend that you saw. Trying as hard as possible can. The timing of the next gen product. Can you share that? I know at this time. Okay.
And just as a follow up, obviously price is also a driver of demand, but it that's obviously not happening in a vacuum. And you mentioned that I think you mentioned that at some point during this call that you're also maybe hitting the law of large numbers on some of your products. Can you just share how you're thinking about pricey elasticity just at this point and in 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 over to buy a wrap for. Or at least that very unlikely to. 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 they most people do not have 10 grand, you know, for even $75 for a dollar is running a hole in their bank account. A lot of large number of people are living paycheck to paycheck and with with a lot of debt, they could credit card debt more debt. So, yeah, it's a that's that's reality for most people. It's, it's sometimes difficult for people who are, you know, high income numbers, you know, and I'd say hi, be like.
Someone who's earning over $200,000 a year to understand what life is like for someone who is earning 50 or 60 or 70,000 dollars a year. Most people. So, so that like for a lot of people like these these tax credits just that they can't they can't front $75 for $18 months or even six months to get for the tax credit and they actually don't. In some cases, even have that.
And I'm sorry, I read all those in taxes. So, you know, it's it. 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. And I think it's tough right there. Great call. Exactly. It's not a, you know, so nice to get these like, you know, honestly, it's like somewhat correlates with the why doesn't everyone work from home crowd. I mean, this is like some real mariachi and advice from people to say why does everyone work from home. Like, what about all the people that have to come to the factory and and fill the cars. And fill 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 to tap from reality doesn't work from home crowd have to be. And so they take advantage of all those who do 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, so I just can't emphasize how important cost 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 and and I, you know, I keep harping on this interest thing, but I mean, it's just. It just right raises the cost of the car. I mean, we're looking at an internal analysis, which. And are we. If you like we think is is more or less on track that. When you look at the cost or the price reductions we've made in. So, I say the Model Y. And you compare that to how much people's monthly payment has risen to interest rates. The price of the Model Y is almost unchanged. If you factor in the Indian and trust it. Yes, which is the thing that matters. It's the monthly. It's how much money to put down and do they literally have that in the bank account will check that out.
Well, what is the monthly payment and it doesn't matter how that must be payment is principal interest or whatever it's just a number and that number has to. Not cause their bank category 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 some incremental challenges beyond that, which is. The difficulty of getting credit at all has increased. And so. The number of people who simply can't get credit. Period. Even if they've got a job and everything's solid that. You know, the, 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.
And there's also just fewer options, even if they plan that credit. There's a few banks together. This is like this your banks will exist. Well, it's 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, buying and. I mean, even credit suites. I mean, geez, that's that was a shocker. You know, you know, like a hundred and sixty year old. If Swiss institution. That doesn't exist anymore. That's mind blowing. And I think there's still quite a few shoots used to drop on the bad credit situation. Resid, 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 usurious. It's over 20% interest rates, meaning like which over time is just becomes. I was extremely punishing because if someone is paying 20% interest on the credit cost means they cannot pay them off. And you cannot pay them off and you still recruiting interest at 20%. You had that's headed to a bad place. Thank you. Let's go to next question from George from kind of courts. 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 factory utilization? Is it material cost reductions? The 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 here to ask if that's true. And if so, why? Thank you.
We've got included radar. We have radar as a Tesla design radar 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 three and why. 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 I mean, the car is looking in all directions at once. We don't have eyes in the back of my head. And the computer never gets tired and never gets distracted. Get drunk, hopefully. And so radar is, you know, it's not really matters is how much does it affect the probability of an accident. In order for the radar to be effective, you have to be able to do radar only breaking. You have to do actions that are radar only. Otherwise, you get this. This evacuation problem between vision and radar. That's why we actually turned off the radar in cars. It started to be that we had to. All three and why used to have radar, but we turned it off. The radar actually generated more noise than signal. The Tesla design radar is a high resolution radar that has some potential to be useful. But 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're 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 or move their, you know, bottom next center 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 have to attack cost everywhere. And we do it ruthlessly at all times. And we have a lot of operations efficiencies. All of the, 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 where we literally go in line by line and saying, how can we make it better? And it's a grind. A grind line. It's a game of things. It's like Game of Thrones, but pennies. Is I mean, the 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 for books. So in order to get the cost down, save by 10%, you have to get 40 cents 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.
Yeah, 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 pending. Yeah, exactly. And notably, sometimes the QR code doesn't go on properly or you can't read it properly. And then it stops the line. For more than 10, absolutely. So chipping away with it with it. I mean, it is trying to. It is. It just feel like digging a tunnel with a spoon at times. Very much escaping prison. Yeah. So, 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 high production. But then on the flip side, we're going to be ramping a new product like Cybertrack, which we talked about. So, yeah, so those are the real puts and takes which we are working for. Yeah, but there's not like some accidentally, you know, some goal. Break of goal that we've got to go. Unfortunately. And it's. We're trying to be very rigorous about improving the quality and capability of the car because. Yeah, that's like any fool can reduce the cost of a car by making it worse. I just, you know, deleting functionality and capability and. That's best I'm cool. That's sort of the any fool that it's like if you want to lose weight and you said, well, I need to lose. 15 pounds, right away. Well, you could top your arm off. But then you're sitting with one arm. You're still fat. So. So, like, yeah, it worked out. Yeah, you actually have to eat less food and work out. That's the actual way. And doctors, folks. Yeah, so. You know, super fun because we're just delicious and. Personally, I'm not a huge, but I don't love working at. I know some people do. I wish I did, but I don't. Let's moving the mouse consists of working out in which case I love moving. All right, let's go to. Colin Langam from Wells Fargo. Can you unmute yourself? Sorry about that. You hear me now? Yeah, I'm good. Great. Thanks for your question. You said in a commentary that you're not going full tilt on the plan 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, sir, to not go on full tilt could that plant get delayed indefinitely or talk about?
No, we're definitely making the factory in Mexico. We 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 go to back to there. It's going to be great. The question is really just one of timing and. You know, just going to be a broken record on the on the entrance front. It's just interest rates have to come down. Like like 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 want to, you know. When we should we should both factory. We're going to bullet and. And I think we'll. Well, we'll start the initial phases of construction next year. But I am still somewhat. Scared by 2009. When. If General voters in Christ, they went bankrupt. So well, that's now 14 years ago. It's. That that is served into my mind with a branding iron. Because you know, Tesla was. Just hanging on by thread. During that entire time. And with the, I mean. We close off of financing around 2008 on at 6 p.m. December 24th, Christmas Eve. And if we had not close that financing around. We would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas. So we, we actually closed that around on the last hour of the last day that it was possible. Stressful 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 wars going on in the world, obviously as well. So. And we have room here. Like in the Texas, you said, but we still have it in this building. It's not full with cyber truck and more. And you know, there's plenty of growth opportunities still to have inside the building where our team are. We also have 2000 acres here. There's also a lunch. We're actually only occupying a tiny corner of the land that we have. But, you know, we could technically do all the scaling. That's for you. Just here.
So. That mean, personality is our biggest challenge and. It can that the greater was an area only has generously the greater or some area only has two million people. So people are moving here and they're willing to move here, but. There is. Similar housing crisis. They got a little somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, I don't know. I mean, I'm just curious. Like, I just, I'm not saying things will be 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, as. Economic conditions of stormy. You know, even if the best ship is still going to have. Top times the weak are ships will sink. We're not going to sink, but. You know, even a great ship in a storm. It has has challenges. Now, that's still will apply to everyone. Not just us. And not just not just the auto industry. But it's not just the. It's just the. It's just the. I think. I think it's a. I think it's a. You know, apart from necessary. Sort of staples like. Food and stuff, but. Yeah.
So I just, I don't know. If. If interest rates start coming down, we will accelerate. And then we will go to the. And then we will go to the. Any, any, any guesses on this? I, you know, I'd love to be less wrong. And I apologize if I'm, if I perhaps more paranoid than I should be. Because I might, that might also be the case because I am. I've PTSD from 2009. Big time. And then 2017 through. 19 or not. So.
The auto industry is also somewhat cyclic. It's because. People can hesitate by a new car. And if there's uncertainty in the economy. So, so it's. Part companies do very well in good economic times and they. But don't do as well in. In tough economic times. So it's just. We are, whereas if somebody selling bread, then I think, you know, that people swing at bread. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You need bread. We free the full time, but. You are, you don't have to have bread. Especially there was going on. And then that impacts your sentiment. Yeah. You know, playing your car tends to not be fun in mind. 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.