Tesla is looking for a Chief Designer to oversee its production of China-specific model releases in the country. The company’s efforts to open a Design Studio in China have been well-known, but the search for someone to help design cars that will be geared toward the Chinese market in specific continues.
Tesla has been manufacturing its electric vehicles in China since late 2019, while the first public deliveries began in January 2020. Since then, the automaker has seen overwhelming growth, which has been driven by incredible demand in China. The Tesla Model 3 is coming off of a highly-successful 2020 where it dominated sales figures for the full year. The Model Y also began production in late 2020 in Shanghai at its manufacturing plant, but the two cars are not all the company has in its plans.
Sources familiar with Tesla’s operation in China told Reuters that the company had started a full-fledged search to find the person who will design China-geared designs moving forward. According to the sources, recruiters and human resources representatives have worked diligently for four months to find a “bi-cultural” candidate with at least 20 years of experience. It will require a subjective sense of automotive design and familiarity with Chinese tastes. Even though Tesla has done relatively well in the Chinese market with its cars, the company plans to attack the market with designs that will speak to local citizens, which should drive sales figures through the roof.
A handful of potential candidates have been interviewed by Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s Chief Designer, but it is unknown how many people Tesla has talked to thus far.
In June 2020, Teslarati reported that Tesla was requesting that everyone, regardless of design experience or automotive craftsmanship, design an all-electric car that would appeal to China’s masses. “Even if you are not a car designer, you are welcome to submit. It’s more than just a car designed for you,” Tesla stated. “Please think of China in your Tesla design work.”
This request from the automaker followed a January 2020 Reuters report that revealed Tesla’s plans to design a “Chinese-style” vehicle.
Tesla is coming off its biggest year as a company, successfully delivering 499,650 of its over 509,000 produced cars. Q4 2020 was the company’s biggest quarter yet in terms of production and deliveries, as the company worked diligently to attain the 500,000 vehicle guidance it set for itself well before the COVID-19 pandemic slowed production lines.
Chinese-Style Tesla Vehicles (Source: Tesla China WeChat)
The mission to increase the number of EVs on the road is far from over for Tesla. Now, it seems the automaker will begin adapting body styles to every market, looking to cater to each consumer base individually, instead of planning to release a universally-accepted vehicle that doesn’t require revisions. While Tesla’s cars have been successful in countries other than the U.S., there is still work to be done. With more cars on the road in China than any other country globally, focusing on China could ultimately lead to long-term success for Tesla and may lead to a more prolonged domination of the sector than originally anticipated. CEO Elon Musk has openly stated that other companies will catch up in terms of EV development, but Tesla would be able to remain in their lead due to manufacturing efficiencies.
Once a Chief Designer is hired, Tesla will begin to build a team that will turn renderings into clay models. This will eventually lead to new EV designs being built and a broader range of body styles for consumers to choose from.
It is unclear if the development of new Chinese designs has anything to do with the $25,000 vehicle that Tesla plans to manufacture in China soon. Tesla detailed this vehicle at the company’s Battery Day event in September, where Musk stated that a $25k, fully autonomous car would be available in 3-5 years.
Right now, China is swallowing up demand for small, compact cars, even if they are not electric. The Toyota Corolla and Volkswagen Golf are two of the most popular, and Shanghai-based consultancy group Automotive Foresight says that a compact vehicle could be Tesla’s key to dominating the country and beyond. “A compact Tesla car would do well in China, as well as the rest of Asia and Europe,” Automotive Foresight’s Yale Zhang said. “It could potentially put a serious dent in sales of cars like Toyota’s Corolla and the Volkswagen Golf.”
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
