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Electric trucks from large to small vital to Tesla’s Master Plan
It all goes back to Elon Musk’s original secret Master Plan from 2006, when the billionaire entrepreneur issued his famous vision of the future: “[T]he overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.”
Musk made an executive decision right from the beginning to target customers whose opinions influence others by building premium electric cars that would make people sit up and take notice. Until Tesla came along, electric cars were little more than glorified golf carts. But if Tesla is going to make significant progress toward its ultimate goal, it is going to have to make electric trucks as well as passenger cars. Trucks are responsible for about 50% of all emissions created by the transportation sector according to the EPA. It’s no wonder Musk’s follow up plan calls for a zero emissions Tesla targeted at the mid to heavy duty truck segment.
The Tesla Plan
“In addition to consumer vehicles, there are two other types of electric vehicle needed: heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density urban transport. Both are in the early stages of development at Tesla and should be ready for unveiling next year,” outlines Musk in his Master Plan Part Deux.
Aaron Turpen previously gave us an excellent analysis of what characteristics a Tesla pickup would need to have in order to be successful. He set out in detail what Tesla would need to do to build such a truck.
- V8-like performance including roughly 400 hp and 380 lb-ft
- Extended and four-door cab offerings
- Cargo bed size of 5.5 feet with option for 7 feet
- Towing capacity of about 10,000 pounds
- Payload capacity of 1/2 ton to 3,000 pounds
- 4×4 capability
- Driving range, under load, of at least 150 miles
- Conventional styling and appeal
How is Tesla going to make batteries with the energy and power needed to move such heavy vehicles? The Powerwall may offer clues. Just one year after it was introduced, Tesla brought its second generation version to market with roughly double the capacity of the original. Tesla doesn’t reveal very much about its ongoing battery research programs, other than to say that improvements of between 5 and 7 percent a year are anticipated as it ramps up production at the Gigafactory.
One assumption is that batteries for trucks will be significantly different from those used on its passenger cars, with more focus on energy and less focus on power. While a Tesla pickup that breaks the 3 second 0-60 barrier would be very cool, that sort of acceleration would have little relevance to how a truck gets used in daily driving.
When it comes to trucks that haul freight, it’s possible that the company has some sort of battery swapping plan in mind at truck stops along major transportation routes. Another approach would be to simply swap tractors at designated service areas much the way Formula E drivers swap cars during a race. Tesla could own the trucks and lease them to freight companies. The idea is as old as the Pony Express.
What About The Competition?
While Tesla is busy planning its truck strategy, other companies are chasing the same low emissions dream. Most of them rely on some form of range extender engine to build a truck that has low emissions but is cost competitive. The most promising of those ventures may be from Workhorse, which claims it will have a full size plug-in hybrid pickup truck with dual motors on the market by 2018. It uses the two cylinder range extender engine from the BMW i3 REx to provide electricity to the battery when needed. A rendering of the truck by Australia’s Motoring shows a truck that is purposeful rather than svelte in its design.
Delivery and cargo vans are another target market. Four large cities — Mexico City, Paris, Madrid, and Athens — announced their intention to ban all diesel powered vehicles from their streets by 2025. Many of the medium duty trucks used to deliver food and consumer goods to city dwellers are powered by diesel engines, especially in Europe.
Deutsche Post, known globally as DHL, is one of the largest parcel delivery companies in the world. It is working hard to reduce its carbon footprint but could not find an all electric van suitable for its needs. So it built its own. “We designed it as a tool. So the fit and finish does not need to be as good as in a passenger car,” Win Neidlinger, director of business development at Deutsche Post tells Fortune. “It did not cost billions to develop and produce. You will not believe how cheap it is to make.” The company now plans to become a manufacturer and start selling the vans, which it calls StreetScooters, to customers in 2017.
Photo credit: Deutsche Post
UPS is also in the delivery business and is a world leader in testing alternative fuels and alternative powertrains in its trucks. It has invested more than $750 million in alternative fuel and advanced technology vehicles since 2009. UPS now has 7,700 low emission vehicles in its “rolling laboratory” test fleet and is evaluating vehicles that run on natural gas, renewable natural gas, and propane according to Electric Cars Report.
It also is using electric powertrains in some of its vehicles. A version of the Workhorse plug-in hybrid range extender system is being tested in several of its delivery vans. It is also thinking small when it comes to what is known in the industry as the “last mile” conundrum. How do companies like UPS create nimble, zero emissions vehicles that can access congested urban areas? One solution being tried in Hamburg, Germany and Portland, Oregon is a hybrid electric tricycle called the eBike. It has a battery and electric motor and can move using pedal power, electric power, or a combination of both.
Photo credit: UPS
Some of the biggest polluters are garbage and trash hauling trucks. Because the stop and start hundreds of times a day, their diesel engines are constant spewing toxic pollutants into the atmosphere. While their total numbers are small, they discharge a disproportionate amount of emissions to the atmosphere. Taming the emissions from beasts would be an important step forward.
Ian Wright, a Tesla co-founder and former board member, thinks he has a solution. His company, Wrightspeed, builds heavy trucks powered solely by electricity but with a twist. Wright and his engineering staff have invented a small natural gas powered turbine that acts as a range extender engine. He claims his turbine operates so cleanly, it does not require a catalytic converter to meet California’s strict tailpipe emissions laws.
Salt Lake City start-up Nikola Motors recently revealed its idea for a 1000 HP low emissions electric truck called the Nikola One. Sleek and futuristic, it relies on battery power to turn its six electric motors but also has an onboard hydrogen fuel cell that is says will give the tractor a range of 800 to 1000 miles. The company says it has over a billion dollars worth of reservations in hand. While it did present a full size prototype at the reveal, many are taking a wait and see attitude toward Nikola Motors, which has no factory at the present time but claims it will begin production in 2018.
Summary
Trucks will play an important role in reducing global emissions from the transportation sector. A recent report from Navigant Research predicts annual sales of electric trucks — including hybrids and plug-in hybrids — will increase by a factor of ten over the next decade. From 31,000 worldwide today, Navigant says more than 332,000 electric trucks will be sold annually by 2026. That’s a big market for manufacturers to target.
Tesla has refused to consider any sort of range extender device for its cars, but solving the problems of building low emissions trucks for delivering freight and cargo across long distances may make such things a necessity. The need is great and the time is short. If hybrid trucks are what are needed, even as a stop gap measure while battery technology catches up with energy and cost constraints, that would be important for a world struggling to limit carbon emissions.
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
