News
Electric Vehicle sales peaked in Q4 2021, Tesla dominates market share with 72%: KBB
A new report from Kelley Blue Book indicates electric vehicle sales peaked in the United States in Q4 2021, accounting for 4.5 percent of all automobile sales in the final three months of the year. Despite widespread parts and chip shortages that plague the industry to this day, 2021 was the United States EV industry’s most successful year, with nearly 148,000 electrified units sold. Tesla led all manufacturers in the EV segment with 72 percent of all EV sales for the year.
The KBB report says nearly 500,000 fully-electric vehicles were purchased last year. However, it seems the entire landscape of the “electrified” category is picking up traction. Whether it would be a fully-electric car, hybrid, or plug-in hybrid, consumer data seems to show more emphasis on buying sustainable vehicle options. While fully-electric models are preferred for environmental reasons, KBB also includes plug-in and standard hybrid sales in its estimate of electrified vehicles sold, which amounts to nearly 1.5 million, it says.
“Electrified vehicle sales accounted for 9.7% of all sales in 2021, and in the fourth quarter, 11.8% of sales were electrified,” KBB said in the report. “Yet sales might have increased even more last year if inventory and supply issues had not been as problematic. For example, battery and production troubles all but eliminated Chevrolet Bolt and Bolt EUV sales in the second half of the year, and hybrid-leader Toyota struggled with inventory throughout much of the fourth quarter.”
It is important to note that electrified vehicles include battery-electric, hybrid, and plug-in hybrid powertrains.
In the fully-electric segment, Tesla stayed atop the leaderboard in terms of market share, owning 72 percent of all EVs sold in 2021. Tesla owned 80 percent of the market share in 2020, but the company increased its overall delivery figures by 71 percent, delivering over 934,000 cars last year. Additionally, the loss of market share should not be considered a negative in Tesla’s eyes, given the company’s mission. Tesla continues to fend off competitors that emerge nearly every day. Q4 was especially potent, as 25 different EV models sold during the quarter, meaning there are plenty of options besides the four in Tesla’s lineup. Despite plenty of attractive options from other manufacturers, Tesla still remains the most purchased full-EV manufacturer in the market by a considerable margin.
According to a more in-depth analysis of the figures from KBB parent company Cox Automotive, the Model 3 was the second most popular EV in the country, being outsold only by the Model Y, which reached a whopping 39.1 percent of the total market share in the United States. The third-most-popular car in the U.S. automotive market for EVs was the Mustang Mach-E from Ford, accumulating 27,140 sales and 5.6 percent of the EV market share.
Tesla Model Y wins Cars.com’s Best Electric Vehicle of 2022 award
2021 presented encouraging figures for the growth of the EV sector in the U.S. It will be interesting to see what 2022 brings as more electrified models are set to hit the market before the year ends. The biggest catalyst to EV sales in the coming years could be the emerging EV pickup market, which will have new additions with the Ford F-150 Lightning in 2022, and Tesla Cybertruck and Chevrolet Silverado EV in 2023.
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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
