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Tesla’s self-driving rollout strategy for Boring Co’s Las Vegas Loop gets teased
Steve Hill, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA), has shared some interesting tidbits about The Boring Company’s plans for the rollout of its self-driving Tesla fleet for its Las Vegas tunnels. Hill noted that while the entire system would likely not be self-driving by the end of this year, tests involving some autonomous cars should begin soon.
Initial renders of The Boring Company’s Loop system showed sleek tunnels with futuristic high-capacity vehicles traveling from one station to another autonomously. Yet for now, the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop and the Resorts World station operate using manually-driven Teslas that can hold about three passengers per vehicle. This has caught some mockery from Elon Musk critics.
Yet according to Hill, Tesla is continuing to work on its full self-driving system for the vehicles in the Las Vegas tunnels. In comments to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Hill stated that he believes some of the Teslas being used in the Loop system would use the company’s full self-driving system sometime in the next fiscal year.
“We are certainly headed toward an autonomous system. We said at a (LVCVA) board meeting a month or two ago that our goal was, by the end of this fiscal year, to have some amount of autonomous driving happening in the system,” Hill said.
Elon Musk has mentioned recently that the Las Vegas Loop’s Tesla fleet may use FSD later this year. In this light, Hill noted that one vehicle at a time would be switched to use Tesla’s full self-driving system. And even at this point, they will still be using safety drivers until it can be proven that the vehicles can operate safely and adequately on their own. Only at this point will the drivers be removed.
“I don’t think we’ll be fully autonomous by the end of this calendar year, but we think we’re in a position to start testing autonomy relatively soon,” the LVCVA president said.
High-capacity vehicles for the Loop system will also be coming in the future. As it turned out, the advent of the pandemic during the buildout of the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop helped push officials to hold off on high-capacity vehicles. Teslas that carry three people are safer, after all, than a vehicle that carries 12 passengers during a pandemic.
But once the system expands and as FSD is rolled out to the Loop’s fleet, The Boring Company’s high-capacity vehicles are expected to be released. Hill noted that Elon Musk’s “Robovan” could be a good candidate for the Loop system’s high-capacity vehicles. Musk did note that Tesla’s Robovan will be highly configurable, so designing a version of the vehicle for The Boring Company’s Loop system should be no problem.
“You may have seen Elon tweeted out that he is working on a higher capacity vehicle, and it’s able to be modified for different applications. We think something along those lines, a version of that will be a part of this system,” Hill said.
For now, however, Hill told the Review-Journal that the current Tesla fleet deployed on the Las Vegas Convention Center and Vegas Loop is already useful. “You can use those higher-occupancy vehicles when you have a group of people who want to go from one place to the same place. Often folks don’t. The ability to have an individual car for people who want to go someplace different from where everybody else is going is an important aspect in the system. The higher occupancy vehicles will be helpful, too,” he said.
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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 🧵
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— 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
