News
Tesla welcomes NHTSA’s critical eye on Autopilot, FSD: “We expect and embrace the scrutiny”
Tesla executives highlighted during the recently held Q3 2021 earnings call that the company welcomes scrutiny from agencies such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). This was despite the incoming appointment of a new NHTSA senior safety adviser who previously dubbed Teslas as “killer robot(s)” on social media, and who sits at the board of Swedish LIDAR company Veoneer, a supplier of automakers like Ford and General Motors.
The NHTSA is currently probing Tesla over incidents where its cars ended up crashing into stationary emergency vehicles while Autopilot was engaged. The company has since rolled out some safety improvements for Autopilot, such as the ability to slow down and alert the driver when an emergency vehicle is detected. This, however, was met by a rather negative response from the NHTSA, which asked the EV maker why it did not issue a recall notice when it released Autopilot’s free over-the-air software update.
Considering the current atmosphere surrounding Tesla and the NHTSA, it was no surprise that investors inquired about the tense environment on the Q3 2021 earnings call. When asked how the company plans to deal with what appears to be increasing scrutiny from the safety agency, Tesla Vice President of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy was firm in the notion that the EV maker will be fully cooperative. He also noted that Tesla expects and welcomes scrutiny on its products like Autopilot and FSD.
“As we have been for years, we always engage with NHTSA and other worldwide regulatory bodies to share our knowledge and to work with them on our approaches on both active and passive safety. There are ongoing regulatory inquiries taking place all the time and especially on the subjects like FSD that are at the cutting edge of technology development.
“During these investigations, my team, myself are always cooperative as much as possible. We expect and embrace the scrutiny of these products and know that the truth about their performance and the innovations our products have will ultimately be all that matters. In the end and as I’ve said on previous calls, we take safety as a top priority in all our designs. This is because our primary motivation is from — coming from a team of incredible engineers designing software and hardware that saves lives and prevents injuries,” Moravy confirmed.
Tesla Chief Financial Officer Zachary Kirkhorn added that safety is paramount for the company. He noted that while the scrutiny will indeed be notable, Tesla is still excited to partner and work collaboratively with agencies like the NHTSA. This was because ultimately, making vehicles as safe as possible is the right thing to do.
“Safety is extremely important for Tesla. It’s the right thing to do. And, you know, if you look at various independent testing and regulatory testing of our products, you can see the work of incredibly talented engineers in the results of those tests. And, you know, our goal in developing safety-oriented software around the car is to continue to go beyond what the hardware is able to provide.
“If you can prevent a crash from happening, that’s the safest way to manage this. And I think at a macro level here, what we’re seeing — and this is entirely understandable and expected, is that the automotive industry is going through a transition from the traditional car as we know it to more of a computer, software-oriented, sensor suites around them that can manage things beyond just what the driver manages. And regulatory bodies are — understandably so, are interested in understanding how to regulate in this environment, and NHTSA is no exception to that.
“We’re excited to partner and we’ll work collaboratively with all regulatory bodies who want — to go on the journey to the transition to a software-oriented vehicle,” Kirkhorn concluded.
Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to tips@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.
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
