Tesla Semi rival Freightliner recently revealed that its test fleet of all-electric commercial trucks has successfully crossed 700,000 miles of real-world travel. In part to several return-to-base type operations, including local and regional pick-up and delivery, Daimler Communications Manager Fred Ligouri detailed the trips and development of its eM2 box truck and eCascadia Class 8 tractor-trailer, the two vehicles responsible for the 700,000-mile travel statistic thus far.
The all-electric vehicle market is raging with competitors, and it goes far beyond the passenger car sector. With Tesla being the dominating force within electric passenger vehicles, fending off competition from several big-name manufacturers, the commercial vehicle sector is definitely wide open. Several companies are testing out all-electric commercial vehicles, and nobody has brought anything to the market that is being mass-produced at the moment. The Tesla Semi has been delayed on several occasions due to battery constraints, and other companies, like Nikola, have disappeared. It’s not to say that there won’t be a dominating company in this sector in the future, but up to this point, it is really anyone’s race.
Daimler Trucks’ line-up of commercial electric vehicles (from left to right): Freightliner eM2, Freightliner eCascadia, Thomas Built Buses Saf-T-Liner C2 Jouley, FUSO eCanter [Credit: Daimler North America]
With that being said, Freightliner believes they have what it takes to derail the hype that coincides with the Tesla Semi. After completing so many miles of real-world testing, Ligouri believes that Freightliner is moving closer to putting its all-electric trucks on the road as testing provides its engineers with valuable feedback from drivers who are giving honest opinions about the vehicles moving forward.
“These are real trucks hauling real freight in the real world and racking up zero-emissions mile after mile — in excess of 700,000 thus far,” Ligouri told Inverse. “Through this process of co-creation with our customers, we are ensuring durability and reliability for series-built trucks, incorporating purposeful innovations, and furnishing the opportunity for more and more fleets to experience eMobility.”
Freightliner is in no rush to put anything out before it’s absolutely ready. There are currently 38 preproduction trucks traveling around Southern California to develop modifications and improvements as the truck moves closer to its production stage. The testing phase is apart of Daimler’s Battery Electric Freightliner Customer Experience Fleet. Drivers are responsible for reporting suggestions, dislikes, and areas of improvement to the manufacturer, who considers each comment.
The trucks aren’t prepared for extremely-long and treacherous routes quite yet. The eM2 box truck packs only 230 miles of range, while the eCascadia can take drivers 250 miles per charge. It’s undoubtedly low compared to regular Semi-trucks, but it’s not to say that it won’t improve. And, after all, it travels with zero-emissions.
While Freightliner has an impressive statistic in its 700,000 miles of travel with its two all-electric trucks, it surely doesn’t have the only Semis on the road that are all-electric. The Tesla Semi has made some runs from Fremont, California, to Sparks, Nevada, and has been tested in real-world conditions as well. Additionally, several new sightings of the Tesla Semi have been reported recently, showing Tesla is undoubtedly working to pinpoint a date for a future production run of its all-electric commercial vehicle. After the recent promotion of Jerome Guillen from Automotive President to President of Heavy Trucking, it is evident Tesla is looking to make major strides in Semi development in 2021.
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
