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Tesla China VP talks Shanghai factory, Model Y and adapting to a COVID-19 world
Tesla China’s Vice President of Foreign Affairs Grace Tao gave an extensive update to Giga Shanghai’s production rate, Phase 2 progress, and how the company has evolved in a pandemic-affected work environment.
In an interview with Chinese media outlet Xinhuanet, Tao described Giga Shanghai’s projected production rate for June, along with the introduction of the Model Y in China.
Tao stated Giga Shanghai operation is going smoothly and may reach a 4,000 vehicle per week production rate as early as June. The figure of 4,000 Model 3s being rolled off production lines in Shanghai will help the company reach its anticipated annual production rate of 200,000 electric cars a year, exceeding its prior expectations of 150,000 units annually or around 3,000 Model 3s a week. In contrast, only the first phase of the Chinese production facility is built.
Giga Shanghai’s Phase 2 is also coming along nicely, Tao said. The company fully anticipates the completion of Phase 2 by the end of the year, which means the Model Y could begin mass production as early as Q1 2021.
The sheer size of Phase 2 and Tesla’s construction speed is impressive. The company completed the first phase of Giga Shanghai in one year, as the company announced public Model 3 deliveries and the Model Y manufacturing project on January 7, 2020. This date in 2019 is the exact day construction started in Shanghai.
The company has also been forced to adapt to a new world that is dealing with the massive COVID-19 pandemic. Considering the virus has origins in the Asian country, Giga Shanghai would have been a prime candidate for an extended shutdown. However, the facility was only closed for around a week and reopened on February 10. An extended playbook that described safety and health procedures for employees at Giga Shanghai has been increasingly effective in keeping workers safe and production rates steady.
The “Chinese Operation Manual” details how people can remain safe amidst the pandemic, and was the basis for Tesla’s “Return to Work Playbook” that was written to describe safe procedures for the Fremont factory’s reopening.
Outside of the factory, Tesla stores have adapted to the new process of showing the company’s products to prospective owners. Tao stated that Tesla’s internet site had become a mainstay in keeping the company’s sales healthy. At the same time, in-store experiences are crucial for introducing new product experiences and showing new features with the company’s cars.
For example, Tesla just released its White Model 3 interior in China. While virtually anyone with an internet connection can see what it looks like, the stores allow interested buyers in seeing the interior color in person, determining whether the option is right for them.
Tao stated that Tesla plans to expand its stores, which she refers to as “experience centers,” into new territories “based on the expansion of customer bases in different cities.”
Despite the overwhelming infection of COVID-19 in China, Tesla has adapted and established itself as an outlier in a failing automotive sector. The company just reduced the price of its base Model 3 to qualify for government incentives, making the vehicle even more affordable in an already strong market.
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
