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China’s NIO expands mobile charging service to all electric cars, including Tesla
China’s NIO announced at the Shanghai Auto Show that any electric vehicle will soon be able to use their “One Click for Power” services. The service allows EV owners to order valet charging and mobile charging vans right from the NIO app.
NIO, founded in 2014, began production of their first vehicle last year and has since delivered over 15,000 vehicles. Up until this point, the NIO Power services have only been available to NIO owners. The services division includes the company’s quickly growing rapid charging network, charging vans, and battery swap stations. Shen Fei, VP of NIO Power, stated that the company has had several owners order power services seeking to charge their other electric vehicles, including several Teslas. While the company had accommodated those owners in the past, they are now opening up the services to all types of electric vehicles.
While nearly all EV owners in the US and Europe charge at home, it can be difficult to install in-home chargers in China. Fei stated that 22% of NIO owners lack home charging stations, creating a need for other power solutions. While public chargers are becoming quite prevalent in most major Chinese cities, NIO’s One Click for Power services allows owners to skip the trip to the charging station.
The China-based electric car maker highlighted that NIO owners have used the service over 93,000 times since the company started vehicle deliveries last year. Approximately 70% of NIO owners have used the One Click for Power service, indicating that there is a real desire for flexible charging solutions.
On the same day that NIO announced the expansion of their power services to other EVs, NIO was charging up a customer’s Tesla (the customer owned both a Tesla and a NIO ES8). Other EV owners, including Tesla owners, will be able to pay just 280 yuan ($42 USD) through NIO’s WeChat mini-app to have their vehicle charged. The company has more than 510 mobile charging vans across 95 cities in China.
NIO CEO William Li told Teslarati that he sees the expansion of their services business as an opportunity to both grow revenue and expose more users to the NIO brand. “Lots of EV owners want to have better [charging] service and we have the capability to serve them,” Li stated. “Even if they don’t want to buy our car, we can introduce our brand and our service to other buyers. I think it’s very good for us,” he said.
In addition to expanding their power services, NIO also unveiled a new DC-fast charging station. The company previously partnered with ABB to deploy 60 kW fast-charging stations across China. NIO’s new DC fast chargers are far more compact than the previous generation chargers and now have a charging capacity of 105 kW.
NIO debuted on the New York Stock Exchange last fall and has since been on a bit of a rollercoaster as investors react to changing market conditions in China. Despite the swings in value, NIO is focused on servicing its growing customer base. The company now has ~9,500 employees globally, including a team of more than a 1,000 NIO Power service workers. NIO expects to start deliveries of their mid-size SUV, the ES6, in June which starts at ¥358,000 ($53,500) and delivers 315 miles of range.
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
