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Tesla top 5: Week in review, February 4
Tesla Model S real-world safety demonstrated after violent rear-end collision
A Reddit user recently posted photos of a Tesla Model S that had a rear-end collision with a Volvo truck. The post concurred with an Insurance Institute of Highway Safety crash test result for the Tesla Model S in which it earned only an “acceptable” rating on its rear crash test. To look at the Reddit photo, one might think that the Tesla Model S does quite well. With a curb weight of 4,647 pounds, the Model S has mass that helped it stand up to a 10-ton truck. The 1,200-lb. flat battery pack strapped to the frame likely was a positive factor, as it reinforces the structural integrity of the vehicle. The Reddit post’s author reported that the driver of the Model S walked away from the collision safe and believes the Tesla saved his life.
Welcome to Tesla, Inc.: We’re more than just electric cars
Tesla announced a corporate name change this week from “Tesla Motors” to “Tesla.” At the time of the company’s founding, the company was positioned as an alternative automobile company. Now, over a decade later, much has changed. With the revised moniker, Tesla confers a broader range of products and services, so that its market reach is much more extensive. Whether it is solar roof tiles, residential and commercial battery systems, or future endeavors such as semi-trucks, electric buses, ride sharing, and tunnel boring, the name Tesla speaks to the company’s overarching goals of clean energy efforts. Musk has repeated how his company will “create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage, expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments, develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning, [and] enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it.” The name change now represents that social justice sustainability mission.
Tesla will release 4Q and ’16 full year financial result on February 22
Tesla has announced that on February 22, 2017, it will release Q4 2016 and full year 2016 financial results. First, Tesla will issue a brief advisory, which will include a link to the Q4 as well as a full year 2016 update letter. Each will be posted on the Tesla IR website. To accompany those data releases, the Tesla management will hold a live question and answer webcast that day, scheduled at this writing for 2:30 p.m. Pacific Time (5:30pm Eastern Time). Topics will include the company’s 2016 financial and business results and 2017+ outlook.
Tesla Model S crash test result misses top safety rating by IIHS
The Tesla Model S large luxury sedan earned good ratings in all Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) “crashworthiness evaluations” except one: the challenging small overlap front crash test. In that evaluation, it earned just an acceptable rating. Even through Tesla had lengthened the side curtain airbags to improve small Model S overlap protection, it confronted testing issues when the safety belt allowed the dummy’s torso to move too far forward. The results indicated that duplicated real-world injuries would be “possible.” The ratings for the Model S apply to 2016 and 2017 cars built after October 2016. Tesla did make a production change on Jan. 23, 2017 to address the head-contact problem, so IIHS has said they will test the updated vehicle for small overlap protection.
Tesla Gigafactory in Lithuania reimagined within Minecraft game
Tesla’s mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy requires production of lithium ion batteries to power their electric vehicles. The Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada began construction on November 4, 2014 and is expected to begin battery cell production by the end of this year. Even before that target production goal, however, Tesla is surveying European locations for a second Gigafactory. Lithuania would like to be chosen as that illustrious manufacturing site, so, to persuade Tesla it is the right fit, a team of Minecraft designers spent two days building a virtual model of Tesla’s Gigafactory. They envisioned Kruonis, Lithuania as the ideal spot for construction due to its “free economic zone, close to two international airports, within close radius of 1.3 million inhabitants.” Sustainable energy sources such as wind power were noted as a perk. Teams from several other European nations are also pitching their concepts to Tesla in the hopes that the next Gigafactory, with its associated job creation, will be in their neighborhoods.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
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.
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
