Investor's Corner
Tesla’s last-month Model 3 production blitz for Q3 will likely be its most impressive yet
This Q3 2018 would likely be one for Tesla’s history books, since this could be the time when the company hits a breakthrough point in its journey towards becoming a mainstream carmaker. Amidst the noise last Friday resulting from the departure of two executives and Elon Musk’s actions during a podcast, the company released an update stating that it would likely deliver twice as many cars this third quarter as it did in Q2 2018.
Tesla’s optimistic and bold forecast for the third quarter, which was authored by Elon Musk, was published on the company’s official blog. The post was a letter sent to Tesla employees, and it noted that the company is “about to have the most amazing quarter in (its) history, building and delivering more than twice as many cars as (it) did last quarter.”
Tesla delivered a total of 40,740 vehicles in Q2 2018, of which 18,440 were Model 3, 10,930 were Model S, and 11,370 were Model X. The company was able to manufacture a total of 53,339 vehicles during Q2 as well, comprised of 28,578 Model 3 and 24,761 Model S and X. Considering Musk’s recent letter to Tesla’s employees, it appears that Tesla is attempting to deliver more than 80,000 Model 3, Model S, and Model X this Q3.
It took a lot of pain and effort to get to this point. Tesla’s trials and Elon Musk’s tribulations since the company started manufacturing the Model 3 are well-documented. Since July 2017, Tesla faced bottleneck after bottleneck in its Fremont factory and at Gigafactory 1 in Nevada. The progress of Tesla’s Model 3 push was nothing short of “production hell,” and CEO Elon Musk was not exaggerating when he described the past year as one of the “most painful” 12 months of his career.
The second quarter appears to have been a pivotal point in Tesla’s Model 3 push, as it was the quarter when it was finally able to hit its manufacturing targets for the first time. Tesla was able to produce 5,000 Model 3 during the final week of June, on top of 2,000 Model S and X. This 7,000-vehicle week was considered a milestone by the company, though it was considered unremarkable by Ford Europe CEO Steven Armstrong, who stated that the legacy automaker could produce 7,000 vehicles in 4 hours. Tesla’s critics were also dismissive of the production milestone, stating that the company would probably not be able to maintain its optimum production rate for the Model 3 during the following months of Q3.
Tesla appears to have taken these criticisms as a personal challenge to prove its critics wrong. During the company’s Q2 2018 earnings call, Elon Musk noted that Tesla was able to produce 5,000 Model 3 per week during “multiple weeks” in July. In August, Tesla showed even more signs that the Model 3’s production was still going full throttle. The Model 3’s VIN filings rocketed past the 100,000-mark, and Bloomberg‘s production tracker, which has only gotten more accurate during the past months, estimated that at one point in August, Tesla produced more than 6,000 Model 3 in a week. Evercore ISI analysts who visited the Fremont factory also concluded that Tesla could ramp to 7,000-8,000 Model 3 per week with minimal CapEx. Â
September is the final month of the third quarter, and Tesla is already showing indications that its Model 3 push would only get more aggressive. Reports have emerged that Model 3 VINs in the 100k range are already being assigned to reservation holders. A Tesla employee who works at Fremont’s paint shop has also teased on Twitter (in a post that has since been deleted) that production is going well, and that the company is “smashing records.”
During the past two quarters, Tesla has shown a tendency to adopt radical and unorthodox strategies to push its manufacturing capabilities during the final month of a quarter. In Q1, the last week of March saw Tesla going all-in to produce more than 2,000 Model 3 in a week. In Q2, June saw the company setting up GA4 inside a sprung structure as a means to hit its production target of building 5,000 Model 3 in one week. It remains to be seen if Tesla would adopt something similarly unique for Q3, but one thing seems certain — the company is about to go on a production blitz at a scale unmatched in the company’s history.Â
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.
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 –Â $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues –Â $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow –Â $1.444 billion
- Profit –Â $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
Elon Musk
Tesla Earnings: financial expectations and what we should to hear about
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings calls are usually a great time to get some clarification on the company’s outlook for its current and future projects.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) will report its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 this evening after the market closes, and analysts have already put out their expectations from a financial standpoint for the company’s first three months of the year.
Additionally, there will be plenty of things that will be discussed, including the recent expansion of the Robotaxi program, the Roadster unveiling, and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) approvals across the globe.
Financial Expectations
Wall Street consensus expectations put Tesla’s Earnings Per Share (EPS) at $0.36, while revenues are expected to come in around $22.35 billion.
This would compare to an EPS of $0.27 and $19.34 billion compared to Tesla’s Q1 2025. Last quarter, EPS came in at $0.50 on $29.4 billion of revenue.
Tesla beat analyst expectations last quarter, but the next trading day, the stock fell nearly 3.5 percent. We never quite can gauge how the market will respond to Tesla’s earnings; we’ve seen shares rise on a miss and fall on a beat.
It really goes on the news, and investor consensus, it seems.
What to Expect
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings calls are usually a great time to get some clarification on the company’s outlook for its current and future projects. Right now, the big focus of investors is the Robotaxi program, the Roadster unveiling, and what the outlook for Full Self-Driving’s expansion throughout Europe and the rest of the world looks like.
Robotaxi
Tesla just recently expanded its unsupervised Robotaxi program to Dallas and Houston, joining Austin as the first cities in the U.S. to have access to the company’s ride-hailing suite.
Tesla expands Unsupervised Robotaxi service to two new cities
Some saw this move as a quick effort to turn attention away from a delivery miss and an anticipated miss on earnings. However, we’ve seen Tesla be more than deliberate with its expansion of the Robotaxi suite, so it’s hard to believe the company would make this move if it were not truly ready to do so.
The company is also working to expand its U.S. ride-hailing service outside of Texas and California, and recently filed paperwork to build a Robotaxi-exclusive Supercharger stall.
Expansion is planned for Florida, Nevada, and Arizona at some point this year, with more states to follow.
Roadster Unveiling
The Roadster unveiling was slated for April 1, and then pushed back (once again) to “probably late April,” according to Elon Musk.
It does not appear that the Roadster unveiling will happen within that time frame, at least not to our knowledge. Nobody has received media or press invites for a Roadster unveiling, and given the lofty expectations set for the vehicle by Musk and Co., it seems like something they’d want to show off to the public.
The Roadster has become a truly frustrating project for Tesla and its fans; evidently, there is something that is not up to the expectations Musk and others have. Meanwhile, fans are essentially waiting for something that is six years late.
At this point, also given the company’s focus on autonomy, it almost seems more worth it to just cancel it, remove any and all timelines and expectations, and surprise people with something crazy down the line, maybe in two or three years. There should be no talk of it.
Full Self-Driving Global Expansion
We expect Musk and Co. to shed some details on where it stands with other European government bodies, as it recently was able to roll out FSD (Supervised) to customers in the Netherlands.
Spain is also working with Tesla to assess FSD’s viability as a publicly available option for owners.
With that being said, there should be some additional information for investors as they listen to the call; no talk of it would be a pretty big letdown.
Optimus
There will likely be a date set for the Gen 3 Optimus unveiling, and we’re hopeful Tesla can keep that date set in stone and meet it. Not reaching timelines is a relatively minor issue, but a company can only do this for so long before its fans and investors start to lose trust and disregard any talk about dates.
It seems this is happening already.
Optimus has been pegged as Tesla’s big money maker for the future. The goals and expectations are high, but it is a privilege to have that sort of pressure when investors know the company’s capability.
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
