A new study shows that only 26% of U.S. households are familiar with EVs but this is about to change. In the recent study by Parks Associates, it was noted that as Tesla became a household name, purchase intention for EVs has gone up 6%.
I wrote about this here, and Teslarati was invited to attend to the virtual session where Chris White, the senior analyst who conducted the study, led a virtual presentation.
According to the study,
“Only 26% of US broadband households report high familiarity with electric vehicles but that’s about to change. These sessions address the coming surge of EVs on the market, the potentially explosive EV growth in adoption, and the implications for consumers, the grid, and needed infrastructure.”
Electric Vehicles: A New Era for Consumers
During the virtual session, Chris White explained some of the findings of the study. Some of these include current EV owner demographics, EV owner interest in clean energy, EV owners’ high-tech affinity, lack of knowledge of EV features, and how other issues such as the chip shortage are affecting both EV and non-EV markets.
The report was based on data from Q4 2021.
Understanding Current EV Owners
Current EV owners are young affluent and have dual incomes. Many are from a multifamily environment and use their EVs for work and school.
They use their vehicles regularly. It’s important to highlight since EVs have the image of a rare or exotic car that doesn’t have enough range. This is changing.
As the EV market continues to grow, the demographics of the current EV owners will most likely change. For now, there’s a 16% high intention of purchasing EVs among non-owners. Previous that was 10%.
That number didn’t include the current EV owners who either want to add a new EV or replace an old one.
EV Owners 3x likely to use renewable energy
Chris White’s research showed that EV buyers are three times more likely to live in solar communities or have an interest in renewable energy powering their homes. They are also 2.5 to 5 times more willing to pay more for renewable energy.
The research shows that EV owners care about their carbon footprint and the impact on the environment.
EV owners are much more likely to own a security system or a smart home device than non-EV owners, according to the research
They xcare about technology and have a higher affinity for tech than non-EV owners.
Lack of familiarity with EV features.
One of the key points in the study shows that although EVs are more popular today, there is a lack of familiarity with their features.
Chris pointed out that 18% of the consumers polled indicated familiarity with EV features. That isn’t a lot.
Features that many aren’t familiar with include EV charging at home minimizing cost when automatically charging during off-peak hours, auto insurance savings for EV owners, second-life EV batteries reused as a power source in disaster areas, and available tax incentives.
Second-life EV batteries are expected to reach over $34 billion by 2027 according to Research and Markets. You can read more about this here.
EV Features that could persuade non-owners to buy an EV
The study included the top features that could persuade non-EV owners to switch to electricity. The number one feature was for an EV to run 400 miles or longer on a single charge.
During the session, Chris pointed out that this is still rare and that most EVs are in the 200-300 mile range.
Other features included widespread charging stations and electricity plans that make owning an EV more affordable than owning an ICE vehicle. These are coming and soon people will see for themselves that EVs meet the criteria they are looking for.
Purchase Inhibitors.
The number one purchase inhibitor that non-EV owners are concerned about are the cost of an EV and charging.
The research showed that 51% of the consumers who participated in the study cited charging-related issues.
Another issue was the lack of trust in the design of EVs,
Issues that impact both EV and non-EV purchases
We often see issues such as the semiconductor chip shortage and critical minerals for EV batteries impacting the EV market. However, something that impacts both markets includes the chip shortage, Putin invading Ukraine, and the national gas prices being on the rise.
The latter can create pain at the pump which is something that encourages people to make the switch to EVs. Last month, I wrote about Dobson who purchased a Tesla due to several factors but especially high gas prices.
EVs will be everywhere soon.
The research also revealed that soon, EVs will be everywhere.
Chris spoke about the Amazon and Rivian partnership, Walmart’s purchase of Canoo EVs, Revel’s fleet of Tesla taxis in New York, and the contract between NASA and Canoo.
And this is just on the commercial side. Other automakers are producing and marketing their own EVs to compete with Tesla.
Disclaimer: Johnna is long Tesla.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
News
SpaceX is following in Tesla’s footsteps in a way nobody expected
In the span of just months in early 2026, SpaceX has transformed itself into one of the world’s most ambitious AI companies. The catalyst: its February acquisition of xAI.
When Elon Musk founded Tesla in 2003, it was a plucky electric car startup betting everything on lithium-ion batteries and a niche luxury Roadster.
Two decades later, Tesla is far more than a car company. Its valuation increasingly hinges on Full Self-Driving software, the Optimus humanoid robot, the Robotaxi program, and the Dojo supercomputer cluster purpose-built for AI training.
Musk has repeatedly described Tesla as an AI and robotics company that happens to sell vehicles. The cars, in this view, are merely the first scalable platform for real-world AI.
Now, SpaceX is tracing an eerily similar path, only faster and in a direction almost no one anticipated. Founded in 2002 to make spaceflight routine and eventually multiplanetary, SpaceX spent its first two decades perfecting reusable rockets, landing Falcon 9 boosters, and building the Starlink megaconstellation.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
It was an engineering and manufacturing powerhouse, not a software play. Yet, in the span of just months in early 2026, SpaceX has transformed itself into one of the world’s most ambitious AI companies. The catalyst: its February acquisition of xAI.
The xAI deal, announced on February 2, was structured as an all-stock transaction that valued the combined entity at roughly $1.25 trillion—SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. In a memo to employees, Musk framed the merger as the creation of “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.”
The new SpaceX now owns Grok, the large language model family that powers the chatbot of the same name, along with xAI’s massive training infrastructure. More importantly, it has a declared mission to move AI compute off-planet.
Earth-based data centers are hitting hard limits on power, cooling, and land. Musk’s solution is orbital data centers, or constellations of solar-powered satellites that act as supercomputers in the sky.
SpaceX has already asked regulators for permission to launch up to one million such satellites. Starship, the company’s fully reusable heavy-lift vehicle, is the only rocket capable of delivering the necessary mass at the required cadence.
Each orbital node would enjoy near-constant sunlight, vast radiator surfaces for passive cooling, and zero terrestrial real-estate costs. Musk has predicted that within two to three years, space-based AI inference and training could become cheaper than anything possible on the ground.
This is not a side project; it is the strategic centerpiece Musk has envisioned for SpaceX. Starlink already provides the global low-latency backbone; next-generation V3 satellites will carry onboard AI accelerators. Rockets deliver the hardware, while AI optimizes every aspect of launch, landing, and constellation management.
The feedback loop is self-reinforcing, too. Better AI makes better rockets, which launch more AI infrastructure.
Just yesterday, on April 21, SpaceX doubled down.
It secured an option to acquire Cursor—the fast-growing AI coding tool beloved by software engineers—for $60 billion later this year, or pay a $10 billion partnership fee if the full deal does not close.
Cursor’s models already help engineers write code at superhuman speed. Pairing that technology with SpaceX’s Colossus-scale training clusters (the same ones powering Grok) positions the company to dominate AI developer tools, much as Tesla dominates autonomous driving software.
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
The parallels with Tesla are striking. Both companies began in a single, capital-intensive sector: Tesla with EVs, SpaceX with launch vehicles. Both used early hardware success to fund AI at scale. Tesla’s Dojo supercomputers train neural nets on billions of miles of real-world driving data; SpaceX now trains on telemetry from thousands of orbital assets and re-entries.
Tesla’s FSD chip runs inference on cars; SpaceX’s future satellites will run inference in orbit.
Tesla’s Optimus robot will work in factories; SpaceX envisions lunar factories manufacturing more AI satellites, eventually using electromagnetic mass drivers to fling them into deep space.
Critics once dismissed Musk’s multi-company empire as unfocused. The 2026 moves reveal the opposite: deliberate convergence.
SpaceX is no longer merely a rocket company that sells internet from space. It is an AI company whose competitive moat is literal orbital infrastructure and the only vehicle that can service it at scale. The forthcoming IPO, expected later this year, will almost certainly be pitched not as a space play but as the purest bet on AI infrastructure the public market has ever seen.
Whether the orbital data-center vision survives regulatory scrutiny, astronomical concerns about light pollution, or the sheer engineering challenge remains to be seen.
Yet the strategic direction is unmistakable. Just as Tesla proved that software and AI could redefine the century-old automobile, SpaceX is proving that rockets are merely the delivery mechanism for the next great computing platform—one that floats above the clouds, powered by the sun, and limited only by the physics of orbit.
In that unexpected sense, history is repeating. Tesla stopped being “just a car company” years ago. SpaceX has now stopped being “just a rocket company.” Both are becoming something far larger: AI powerhouses with hardware moats so deep that competitors will need their own reusable megaconstellations to keep up.
The age of terrestrial AI is ending. The age of space-based AI is beginning—and SpaceX is building the launchpad.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla (TSLA) Q1 2026 earnings results: beat on EPS and revenues
