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Tesla Powerwall thieves discover that stealing six home batteries is a bad idea
Last Friday, a warehouse owned by ProSolar Caribbean in the Virgin Islands was subjected to a rather strange theft. While its employees were spending time with family for the Thanksgiving weekend, a couple of men broke into the company’s St. Thomas warehouse and stole six Tesla Powerwall home batteries and a Ford SUV.
Following the theft, ProSolar Carribean proceeded to offer a $10,000 reward to anyone who could provide information that could help retrieve the Powerwalls, which are estimated to cost about $45,000 together. Fortunately for ProSolar, the Powerwall thieves did not seem to be the most competent.
Footage of the men was recorded by the surveillance system in ProSolar’s warehouse. A detective also found fingerprints on the site. Unbeknownst to the thieves, ProSolar promptly reported the theft to Tesla as well, providing the electric car maker with the serial numbers of the batteries that were stolen. With this in mind, ProSolar partner Brad Spernak noted in a social media post that the thieves were pretty much just harboring a “giant paperweight” in their hands.
Explaining further, Spernak noted that Powerwalls are sophisticated batteries that could not be operated in a simple manner. The batteries require additional equipment to run, and they are also monitored by Tesla, which provides over-the-air updates as they are released. Powerwalls are not even that valuable to those who salvage parts, since they do not have a lot of copper and valuable metals. Those that attempt to take apart a Powerwall may be out of luck too, since they are high voltage batteries.
The thieves also stole a 2008 Ford Escape, the oldest vehicle in ProSolar’s fleet and the one that is most prone to breaking down.
In a statement to the Virgin Islands Daily News, ProSolar Director of Operations Brian Walden remarked that he received a call from a detective from the VIPD on Tuesday morning informing him that the stolen Powerwalls and SUV have been retrieved. “They told me they recovered the car and the Powerwalls,” he said.
V.I. Police Commissioner Trevor Velinor, for his part, remarked that while the stolen items have been retrieved, police have not yet made arrests on the case. Velinor noted that an investigation on the matter is still ongoing, though based on what authorities have found so far, it appears that the thieves were familiar with the times when the ProSolar warehouse and a neighboring business would be unoccupied.
Unfortunately, the Powerwalls that were retrieved have been damaged, and thus, the batteries must now be returned to Tesla for recycling. Part of this is due to the thieves removing the Powerwalls from their boxes and sliding each one on the concrete floor. This resulted in the paint on one side of the batteries being scraped off.
As for Walden, he noted that he is just glad that the batteries had been retrieved. “The reward was offered partially to recover the material and also to incentivize someone and say, ‘Look, that behavior’s not appropriate.’ So right now, we’re glad to pay the reward, we’re glad that someone stood up and said that’s not right and we’re glad to get the material back, even if it’s not necessarily usable,” he said.
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
