News
Are hydrogen cars competition for Tesla?
Reading the news and making sense of PR pitches is an art and a science. The art is reading through the pitches, determining where the motivation is and what lies behind. The science is re-articulating the message behind pitches. The latest news campaign is that hydrogen fuel cells cars are competition to Tesla and electric vehicles (EV).
Sifting through the news
Are hydrogen fuel cell cars competition to EVs? And if so, how are they competing? Those are basic, relevant questions we need to keep in mind when reading the news. Matthew Levy on Seeking Alpha believes Toyota and Hyundai’s hydrogen fuel cell vehicles compete with the Model S. The truth is, Toyota and Hyundai are not in the same league as Tesla Motors in terms of their respective segments and innovations.
The article tries to make a point that by opening the doors to its charging protocols, Tesla won’t sue those who use these protocols in good faith. The article argues that Tesla’s new competitors are growing, but include the Detroit VIA Motors that converts pickup trucks to plug-in hybrids (PHEV) and Harley-Davidson’s new and loud Project LiveWire, a noisy electric motorcycle I covered on CarNewsCafe. According to Matthew Levy: “While these are not direct competitors to Tesla’s sedans, they do show the shift in attention to electric vehicles. Combined with Chevrolet’s Volt (GM) and the Nissan Leaf, the electric vehicle market is becoming crowded behind Tesla. With the availability of Tesla’s patents to other electric vehicle manufacturers (who have more resources than Tesla), the gap should continue to shrink.”, indeed, it will and it should. No one would argue that, least of all Elon Musk.
The article points to a theoretical advantage Tesla has over the competitors. “With the same driving range on the upgraded models,” we suppose the article refers to the P85, “as well as much longer charging times,” larger tanks take longer to fill as well, “the Model S only holds a slight advantage over its hydrogen competitors, if any.” Really? How so? Try an encyclopedia of advantages. It is a full electric vehicle that comes with the freedom of choice of accepting your very own home 110V outlets, your dedicated 240V plug, your home high-powered Tesla charger, the option for the free Supercharger, depending on your time to recharge and where you are. Now, add to this the fact that you and I can make electricity from solar energy, wind, hydro, and any other alternative and renewable energy, or simply just plug it in anywhere.
These are huge advantages hydrogen does not offer yet. Using hydrogen, we go back to the pump and are not in control of the energy price. To be fair, utilities are slowing down personal alternative energy systems and are trying to inflate energy prices, but almost anyone can choose which energy origin to use for their EVs. If you don’t like the grid, install an alternative energy system at home. The same can’t be said about hydrogen fuel cell. I can build an electric motor or buy one on the cheap, I can’t do the same with a fuel cell. EVs offer energy choice, hydrogen does not yet.
The hidden message and the driving motivation
It is obvious by now that the hydrogen phenomenon hasn’t taken the world by storm. Contrary to the article, Hyundai already has a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle offered to the public and Honda has had its Clarity for lease since 2008. Hydrogen fuel cell has its place in the world of energy, but so far it’s been limited to places where solar panels have limited application without better energy storage. Who is driving the push for hydrogen fuel cells when we already have proven EVs, such as the Model S that uses commodity batteries and achieves close to 300 miles? The question to ask is who has benefited the most from the automobile this past century.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
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
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
