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Signs that Tesla may soon discontinue the Model X P90D
It would appear that Tesla is anxious to sell down its stock of new Model X P90D cars according to the latest listing of inventory cars for sale by the Silicon Valley automaker. At the time of writing, nearly 85% of the vehicles listed on the company’s New Inventory page are for the Performance version of its 90 kWh Model X SUV which may suggest that production for the P90D may soon come to an end. With such a modest performance gap between the P100D and P90D, it makes sense to only offer one range topping configuration. But there may be more to the story.
Updated November 3, 2016: Tesla says goodbye to P90D Model S, X: P100D is the new king of the hill
Elon Musk has made it clear that people who opt for the P100D option in either the Model S or Model X are helping to fund development of the Model 3 — especially if the Ludicrous Mode upgrade is included. Tesla has a lot of balls in the air at the moment, especially with the proposed merger between it and SolarCity set to happen in less than a month. It needs to bring money in the door to calm nervous investors who fear the company his bitten off more than it can chew in terms of cash flow.
Tesla lists 46 Model X P90D vehicles for sale on New Inventory page [Oct. 26, 2016]
It is racing to expand its Supercharger network in preparation for having more Teslas on the road once the Model 3 goes into production. It needs to open more stores and service locations. And it needs to fund the SolarCity acquisition. The P100D variant likely has the highest profit margin for the company. With the pressure to bring cash in the door paramount at the moment, this is the perfect time to drop the less profitable P90D and maximize income.
Looking beyond the immediate moment, however, Tesla has always preferred to have two basic battery packs for its Model S and Model X. Right now it has four variants — 60 kWh, 75 kWh, 90 kWh and 100 kWh. The current 60 kWh battery is a software limited version of the 75 kWh battery pack. Eliminating the 90 kWh battery entirely would leave it free to offer a software limited version of the 100 kWh to customers who want something more than the 75 kWh unit but don’t want to spend the money for the 100 kWh choice.
A pair of Model S and Model X P90D Ludicrous seen at the Gardnerville, NV Supercharger
The software limited 60 kWh battery costs $6,000 less than the original 60. That means Tesla could offer a software limited 90 kWh option for less money than the 90D costs today, which would give customers the range of options they want while allowing the company to save money by only building and stocking 2 basic batteries for its long range vehicles – a 75 kWh and 100 kWh battery pack. It wouldn’t come as a surprise if Tesla soon drops the P90D for both the Model S and Model X.
Tesla is charting new territory by offering features that can be unlocked later upon payment of a upgrade charge. All Teslas now come with the second generation hardware needed for its Enhanced Autopilot system. Buyers have a choice of activating that option at the time the car is built or upgrading later. The same is true of Full Self-Driving Capability. Because of Tesla’s ability to alter the configuration of its cars wirelessly at any time, a buyer today can elect to add features later if so desired. That capability should help keep the resale value of used Teslas high.
If you have your heart set on a Model X P90D or Model S P90D, both of which no longer have the Ludicrous mode upgrade available, better act fast before they’re all gone. You can save yourself a significant amount of money by not waiting until the higher priced P100D is the only option available.
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
