The United Auto Workers (UAW) union recently came to tentative contract agreements with the Big Three automakers of Michigan, and General Motors’s (GM’s) investment plans in the agreement reportedly include around $2 billion dedicated to electric vehicle (EV) parts and production.
According to a summary of GM’s agreement with the UAW, GM is set to invest nearly $2 billion into EV production plans at facilities in Michigan, Kansas and New York (via Automotive News). The investments include $1.25 billion set for the Lansing, Michigan Grand River assembly plant and $391 million for its Fairfax, Kansas assembly facility, both of which will produce EVs. The automaker will also invest $300 million into its Tonawanda, New York site for electric drive production.
The financials come as part of more than $11 billion planned for manufacturing investments, many of which are also expected to be related to EV production. The UAW has also said that around $40 billion will be invested by the three automakers during the contract’s term, which ends in April 2028.
“We were able to wrench back so much of what these companies have stolen from us over the past few decades,” UAW President Shawn Fain said during a Facebook livestream on Saturday. “We won back our dignity as auto workers.”
The UAW GM Bargaining 2023 page is your hub to find the information you'll need to make an informed vote on the current tentative agreement. Check it out at the link below.https://t.co/5hBoPl8YrH#StandUpUAW pic.twitter.com/lj4lXuoIrP
— UAW (@UAW) November 4, 2023
Over the next few weeks, the UAW will hold votes for workers to ratify the tentative contracts, and all three of the automakers are including $5,000 ratification bonuses and wage increases of 25 percent over the four-and-a-half-year period.
Other parts of the contract include the restoration of cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) that bring the wage increases to around 33 percent, or over $42 per hour, according to the union. It will also increase the pay of temporary workers with over 90 days on the job by between 51 percent and 115 percent upon being ratified. Temporary workers will be able to become full-time and gain seniority status after working at covered locations for nine months.
Additionally, the agreement brings GM’s Ultium Cells joint venture plants under the contract’s coverage, and employees of the battery arm are expected to get hourly pay raises of at least $6 to $8 when the contract is ratified, according to the UAW.
Although GM refused to comment on the matter, CEO Mary Barra said that the automaker is “pleased to have reached a tentative agreement with the UAW that reflects the contributions of the team while enabling us to continue to invest in our future and provide good jobs in the U.S.”
Over the course of the strikes, Fain implied UAW hopes to reach other automakers not covered by the contracts in the coming years, including Tesla, Toyota, Honda and others. Last month, Fain called workers at the other automakers “UAW members of the future,” highlighting hopes to expand the union’s reach.
Following the union reaching tentative agreements with Ford, GM and Stellantis, Fain also said that the union was looking to bargain with the “Big Five or Six” in 2028 when contracts ended, suggesting that Tesla would likely be amongst the organization’s next targets.
The unionization of Tesla has seen workers divided, and past labor efforts at the automaker’s Fremont, California factory have failed. Tesla CEO Elon Musk also invited the UAW to hold a union vote at its Fremont factory last March, though the union never followed up.
What are your thoughts? Let me know at zach@teslarati.com, find me on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send your tips to us at tips@teslarati.com.
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
