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Young Tesla enthusiasts write 200-page kids’ book on the automaker

Credit: Courtesy of Lightning Strikes Twice (written by Aiden Miao and Eliana Miao)

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Young Tesla enthusiasts have penned a 200-page kids’ book on the automaker, offering information about the science behind the company’s vehicles, as well as its foray into energy, artificial intelligence (AI), and more.

Twins Aiden and Eliana Miao launched their book “Everything Tesla” this week, featuring a comprehensive breakdown of the company’s products written “by kids for kids of all ages.” The siblings, who are now in their freshman year of high school, started working on the book after their parents bought their first Model 3 in 2018, named “Blueberry,” and it’s a pretty impressive product for parents who want to teach their kids about science, Tesla, and more.

Credit: Courtesy of Lightning Strikes Twice (written by Aiden Miao and Eliana Miao)

The siblings wrote the book to help educate other kids about Tesla’s technology, as part of a larger effort to be a part of the fight against climate change. They shared a digital copy of the book with us, and it’s honestly pretty detailed.

“The California wildfires, the Netflix show Our Planet, and my parents getting a Model 3 all brought climate change closer to home,” says Aiden on why the two started the book. “I always knew and cared about climate change, but it started to feel more like something I needed to help make a change about.”

The two began working on the book in 2019, when they were in just fifth grade. While they originally envisioned writing a 20-page book on Tesla and its vehicles, the project turned into something much bigger, as supported by designer Sadie Thomas and editor Alex Cox after others rejected the idea.

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Eliana says that the two weren’t taken seriously by many adults in the writing process, due to them being such young authors. To be sure, the two met with several experts in multiple fields to fact-check details, and ultimately, the fact that it was written by children just plays to its strengths—offering such a unique, kid-friendly voice in the Tesla world.

“Many people don’t take you seriously,” Eliana said of the more challenging aspects of writing the book. “It was hard for people to understand and respect our vision of the book because we were kids, which meant that we would often be rejected.

“But there were many perks to this too—being able to be more creative and break some rules, finding awesome people who did believe in our book (shoutout to Sadie Thomas and Alex Cox!), and having motivation to prove the nay-sayers wrong.”

Credit: Courtesy of Lightning Strikes Twice (written by Aiden Miao and Eliana Miao)

The siblings say they also plan to send twin Traveling Book copies for families to pass around at Supercharger stations, adding that they hope the book makes it from their home in California, near where Tesla’s engineering headquarters is located, to the other side of the country.

The book has gone live on Amazon for $19.99 (or $6.99 on Kindle), and you can find the listing here.

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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.`

Zach is a renewable energy reporter who has been covering electric vehicles since 2020. He grew up in Fremont, California, and he currently lives in Colorado. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, KRON4 San Francisco, FOX31 Denver, InsideEVs, CleanTechnica, and many other publications. When he isn't covering Tesla or other EV companies, you can find him writing and performing music, drinking a good cup of coffee, or hanging out with his cats, Banks and Freddie. Reach out at zach@teslarati.com, find him on X at @zacharyvisconti, or send us tips at tips@teslarati.com.

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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.

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tesla autopilot

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla (TSLA) Q1 2026 earnings results: beat on EPS and revenues

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Credit: Tesla

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.

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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.

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