News
Tesla will start installing Model 3 production equipment in Gigafactory 3 this May: report
Tesla President of Automotive Jerome Guillen and Shanghai Deputy Mayor Wu Qing held a meeting on Tuesday, where they discussed the progress of Gigafactory 3’s buildout in the Shanghai Lingang Industrial Zone. The Tesla executive and Chinese official shared in-depth updates on the project, including an estimated timeframe for the installation of the facility’s vehicle production lines.
Local news agency Laoyaoba, which covered the meeting, pointed out that the installation of vehicle production equipment could start as early as May, when the initial stages of the facility are expected to be completed. This represents a notable accomplishment for both the electric car maker and its construction partner, considering that Gigafactory 3 is one of the most ambitious foreign-owned projects that have been attempted in China.
Based on this recent update, it appears that Tesla intends to start the installation of production equipment in Gigafactory 3 while other areas of the 864,885-square meter site are still under construction. This is a bold and risky move on Tesla’s part, but if the electric car maker pulls it off, such a strategy will likely help the company meet its goal of starting Model 3 production in Gigafactory 3 by the end of 2019.
Guillen and Wu also discussed the recent milestones of the project. Construction work in Gigafactory 3 started back in January, and since then, the first phase of the buildout has been moving along very well. Pile foundation structures have been completed, and the steel structure construction of the factory has begun. Multiple sets of steel roof grids have also been completed.
Gigafactory 3 is under an incredibly ambitious timeline. During the groundbreaking ceremony of the facility, Elon Musk noted that he expects the factory to be completed around summer. This timeframe was mocked by Tesla’s skeptics, many of whom claimed that such a target was impossible. This was until Shanghai official Chen Mingbo stated that Gigafactory 3 was on track to be completed by May, a date even more ambitious than Musk’s estimate.
Part of the reason behind Gigafactory 3’s rapid progress is the support that Tesla enjoys from the Chinese government. Tesla’s presence in China is beneficial to the country, which is aggressively pushing for the adoption of electric vehicles. In a statement to Xinhua News, Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association, noted that Tesla’s China production will have a “catfish effect” in the country’s auto industry, pushing domestic carmakers to expedite and improve their own electric vehicles to compete with the Silicon Valley-based electric car maker.
China’s support for Tesla was evident during Musk’s visit to the country. When Musk met with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing, the CEO was received at the Tower of Violet Light, a place that is usually reserved for dignitaries. Li also proved receptive to Musk’s ambitious ideas, even offering the CEO a “Chinese Green Card” so that he can pursue his vision in the country freely.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
β TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
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.
π¨ Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread π§΅
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
β 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.
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
