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Future Teslas Could Come “Energy Included”
Future Teslas could come “energy included”, no matter how much you drive, for the life of the car. Crazy as it sounds, Tesla can actually make money giving Tesla owners free energy at home not just at Superchargers. Key components are already on the road or under development at Tesla. So, how would this work, when will it happen and what does it mean for Tesla owners and Tesla investors?
How it works
Tesla can provide grid regulation and stabilization services worth as much as the energy used for charging, or more, by centrally controlling the time and rate at which Tesla cars are charged. Embedding a modest up-front cost increment into the price of a special Tesla charging connector, pays energy cost in excess of earnings from grid regulation and stabilization as an “annuity”, and can leave a lot of money in Tesla’s pocket, too. This model is similar to Tesla’s Supercharger business – there is a detailed analysis of Tesla’s Supercharger business I did a while back on Seeking Alpha.
Owners will handle charging differently. Instead of setting charging current, normal or range charging, and (optionally) the charging start time, the owner will instead set a time for charging to be completed and whether a normal or range charge is needed by that time. The Tesla charging control center will then match the charging rate of each Tesla car using over-the-air communication links to earn grid regulation fees and capture the best electric rates while making sure each car is recharged when the owner needs to drive off.
Central Control of Charging Rate Provides Grid Stabilization
Your garage charging connector will be fed from a separate meter and the connector will “identify itself” to the car to enable Tesla controlled charging.
Two things make this scheme economically viable. There is flexibility in exactly when your Tesla charges because most days the charging time is much less than the time your car spends plugged in overnight. This flexibility lets charging be “timed” to help regulate the grid. When wind generation surges due to gusts, or when system load suddenly drops, chargers can be switched on to “swallow” the power surge. The grid system operator, working through the Tesla charging control center can rapidly adjust the charging load to help stabilize the grid.
Rapid adjustment of loads on the grid is valuable because it allows the grid to use more wind power with less fossil generation online as “spinning reserve”. When a large number of car chargers quickly switch on to “swallow” a surge in wind generated power, the value of the “regulation down” can actually be greater than that of the energy used by the chargers. At these times, the system operator will actually pay to have cars charge!
When will free home charging happen?
The answer is, we aren’t there yet. Utilities are only beginning to wrestle with what happens when large amounts of battery storage get connected to the grid. This turns out to be quite complicated. This Sierra Club Energy-Storage Cost-Effectiveness paper offers a summary of the results of several grid storage studies done for the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). At this point we can’t do a specific financial model because technologies, rate structures and even how grid regulation will work with attached storage have not been set.
There are also, at this point, too few Tesla cars on the road to make their charging a significant source of grid regulation. And so far, there is no central control system in place to coordinate the charging of Tesla cars. But times are changing.
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CAISO now operates a unified energy imbalance market (EIM) across all or parts of seven states (CA, ID, NV, OR, UT, WA, WY). Within a few years one can imagine upwards of half a million Teslas registered in these states. When these cars are (mostly) plugged in for charging at night, they together represent several giga-watts of load that can be switched on or off in seconds, using the central charging control scheme. That’s a lot of wind regulation capability that requires almost no additional capital investment. It just might get us “free” energy to charge Tesla cars in their owner’s garages.
Status: Where are we on the path to free energy?
Tesla is doing a lot more with grid connected storage and grid regulation than many Tesla owners, and even many Tesla investors realize. In May of this year, J.B. Straubel, Tesla’s Chief Technology Officer made the keynote presentation at Silicon Valley/ SEEDZ Energy Storage Symposium. He discussed a surprising array of Tesla storage products already being made and installed in grid applications, from small residential storage systems being rolled out by SolarCity to large industrial units delivering hundreds of kilowatts. Video of JB’s presentation is available on YouTube here.
A lot of the hardware needed for central charging control of Tesla cars is already part of every Tesla. Every Model S already has a big battery, of course. And high power 10kW or 20kW chargers that are controlled through the touchscreen and the car’s computer. Every Tesla car has a broadband communication link to Tesla company computers that is used to download software updates. These links are available to control charging on a car-by-car basis. Tesla already makes a high power wall connector (HPWC) that can be installed with connection through a standard utility meter. Buying and installing one of these will probably be a requirement to get “free” charging at home.
The only part of the remote charging scheme that isn’t online today is the central control system for “aggregating” car charging so it can be controlled by the grid system operator. Everything else needed to implement aggregated charge control for Tesla cars is either already in production at Tesla or available off the shelf as commercial products or communication services.
In his talk, JB describes aggregation of many residential storage systems to allow the grid operator to use that distributed resource in much the same way aggregated car charging control might be used to stabilize and regulate the grid. At the end of his talk, there is a Q and A session. Someone asks what Tesla’s plans are for eventually implementing the aggregated control center JB described. His answer, “We are building it now.”
Should Tesla owners / investors care about this?
Probably, but some caution is warranted. Tesla owners already talk to their ICE driving friends about how much less electricity costs compared to gasoline or diesel fuel. If in the future all Tesla charging is free, both at home and from Superchargers when traveling long distances, Tesla owners will be left with literally “nothing” to talk about – something their fossil fueled friends may (or may not) appreciate.
For Tesla investors, the prospect of making all the energy for Tesla cars free has some big implications. If the economics parallel those of the Supercharger business, Tesla could see very large additional profit (billions of dollars at least) for something that would require negligible new capital investment by Tesla.
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There will be indirect benefits for Tesla, too. Already Tesla cars offer the advantage of much lower energy cost compared to ICE cars, and even hybrids. Free charging at home and at Superchargers would make Tesla cars energy cost even lower than other electric cars which get charged on the owner’s electric meter. While the absolute economic advantage of free charging, compared to other electric cars, will be modest, the emotional value of getting energy for free should never be underestimated as a competitive edge in the market place.
And of course there is the plain, simple novelty of offering a car that costs nothing to run. This is a feature no other car is likely to have, and which no other car (with the exception of soap box derby and solar-car competition cars) has had before. It is newsworthy, people will talk and write about it and it will produce a lot of buzz and free advertising for Tesla. Tesla investors need to be careful not to be overcome with hysteria as the shares go up, yet again.
Disclosure: Author is long Tesla.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
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But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?’”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
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“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
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Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
