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Watch Tesla’s FSD tackle water cup challenge, dirt roads in China
How does Tesla’s Full Self-Driving face off against competitors in China when it comes to smoothness and scalability?
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) started going out for testing in China last month, representing the first market outside of North America to get the software. Amidst competition in the automated driving space from a number of other Chinese companies, Tesla’s FSD seems to be impressing in early reviews, with recent reviews highlighting both the software’s smoothness and its ability to adapt and perform well on non-traditional roads.
In a Saturday video originally posted by user 王船船 on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, a driver utilizes the Supervised FSD system while performing what’s called the “water challenge,” in which a cup of water is balanced on the driver’s side window ledge to see if driving is smooth enough to avoid spilling.
The drive spans a little more than four minutes, and the system manages to make it through without the water spilling in any substantial quantities. The driver mostly remains on city streets, but you can see a handful of quick, unexpected stops, turns, and other maneuvers that one might expect to make the cup tip completely.
The video was also reposted on X by Tesla’s main account, with the company highlighting the system’s “maximum smoothness” as demonstrated in the video. Tesla VP of AI Ashok Elluswamy also reposted the video, saying in a separate follow-up post that “FSD’s been prepared for this one.”
Maximum smoothness https://t.co/p4aM3StgRk
— Tesla (@Tesla) March 15, 2025
Although Tesla’s FSD system didn’t have access to real-world driving data from the company’s vehicles at the time of its launch in China, Elon Musk recently explained that the company used publicly available video from the internet to help pre-train FSD for Chinese streets and traffic laws.
In addition to helping with city streets, Tesla has explained in the past that its camera- and video-based FSD neural network training makes the system easily scalable to multiple countries, fringe traffic cases, and even less traditional roads.
As another example of this in China, FSD testers also took to some dirt roads last week, showing just how well the software seems to handle some seemingly-deep and super-narrow back roads. You can see excerpts from this video below, or check out the full 25-minute version from user AE68 on Douyin.
Tesla FSD testers in China do seem to be built different. That’s some REALLY rural roads!
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) March 14, 2025
READ MORE ON TESLA CHINA: Cheaper Tesla Model Y may launch in China
Tesla’s FSD in China amidst local competition
Tesla officially launched a localized data privacy version of FSD Supervised in China last month, The launch came amidst a headstart from multiple competitors in the autonomous driving space, including from Chinese automakers Baidu, Huawei, and still others.
The Avatr 11 electric vehicle (EV), a jointly created project from Changan New Energy, CATL, and Huawei, was recently seen being tested by Out of Spec’s Kyle Conner. The system uses Huawei’s latest automated driving system technology, Qiankun ADS 3.2, which Conner recently said was “the best driver assistance he’s ever experienced” in a recent review on his trip to China.
You can see this video and an additional video from Conner and Out of Spec discussing the emerging autonomous vehicle industry in China below. It’s also worth noting that both of these were released just a few weeks before Tesla’s first version of FSD launched in the country.
The Best FSD System In China! 1 Hour Drive Using Huawei Qiankun ADS 3.2 Installed In Avatr 11 (2/1/25)
The EV Industry Isn’t Ready For China’s FSD Breakthrough (2/2/25)
Elon Musk clarifies the holdup with Tesla Full Self-Driving launch in Europe
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
