News
Tesla shuts down battery swap program in favor of Superchargers, for now
Tesla’s battery swap station near the Harris Ranch Supercharger station in Coalinga, CA seems to have been shut down, at least for now. What started out as a company vision to recharge Tesla vehicles in the same amount of time, if not quicker, as refueling a gas vehicle, turned into a pilot program that saw little to no fanfare.
Now, three years after Tesla first demonstrated the ability to quickly swap out the floor-mounted battery on a Model S and replace it with a fully charged battery pack, the company has seemingly closed the pilot program in favor of expanding its global network of Superchargers.
The news comes from a Tesla owner who had been following the development of the battery swap station off Interstate 5 (I-5) since its first debut. TeslaOwner accounts on their blog the experience with using Tesla’s battery swap program.
![Battery Swap station at Harris Ranch [Credit: TeslaOwner]](http://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141222enteringswap.jpg)
Battery Swap station at Harris Ranch [Credit: TeslaOwner]
TeslaOwner described the battery swap process as being a mix of machine and human. Any automation that occurred during the exchange was augmented by humans. Swap time was, on average, seven minutes. There was some trepidation that, upon returning the battery, a driver would receive a different battery with more accumulated mileage on it. Onboard technology did not recognize the swap and assumed that the original trip totals were continuing.
“Presently the Battery Swap Program is not accepting any new requests for appointments.”
Since experiencing the battery swap last July, TeslaOwner tells us that the same station has remained relatively quiet and “looked quite closed” each time they’ve driven by the station which appeared to have no activity.
This prompted them to inquire with Tesla about scheduling an appointment for another battery swap. According to TeslaOwner, they received a response from the Service Manager for the battery swap station, indicating that Tesla is no longer taking requests for appointments. “Presently the Battery Swap Program is not accepting any new requests for appointments.”
The viability of battery swaps moving forward
The Tesla proprietary charging station service was projected to be able to support both battery pack swaps as well as fast recharging of the Tesla Model S and Model X electric vehicle battery packs. By December 2014, 18 months after the original announcement, no battery swapping stations had yet opened to the public. Then a single battery-swap station was opened in California as a pilot project, where only invited Model S owners could do battery swaps by appointment, to assess technical and economic aspects of the service. Demand for the priced service would be used to determine whether the company would fully commercialize battery swapping stations more generally.
Photos captured of the Tesla battery swap station at Harris Ranch from December, 2014
By June 2015, the company had indicated that the battery swapping capability was no longer a significant part of Tesla’s plans for on-road energy replacement for their vehicles. Tesla’s standardization of car and the swapping stations alongside battery and battery fasteners prohibited other EV car owners from utilizing the battery swap station. For battery swapping to grow, the following conditions might need to be considered:
- Find strategic locations for battery swapping;
- Use alternative energy onsite to recharge batteries;
- Draw upon grid electricity when it is off-peak, cheapest, or when the more environmental energy generation is available;
- Assure customers that swapped batteries have comparable life expectancy in relation to the original;
- Incorporate fleet vehicles to reduce battery swapping costs overall.
The Tesla battery swap program doesn’t receive much press these days, given the news about the impending SolarCity merger and glass roof tiles, among the other constant Tesla technological innovations. Work on accelerating the rollout of Supercharger stations ahead of the Model 3 coming to market next year seems most critical. Moreover, regular Tesla owners at this moment in time don’t really seem to find the battery swap option as attractive as the Supercharger.
Of course, speculation continues to swirl. Tesla recently hired Audi’s North America commercial account manager to lead a new B2B push for Tesla in “fleet management, rental, government/public sectors & corporate enterprises.” Large commercial fleets of Tesla vehicles could change many aspects of the way that Tesla provides services, including a revisit to the battery swap with special, private fleet stations.
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
