So too for the great groundbreaking and opening. So let's see with that we can move to I guess Q and A. We've obviously got significant bench strength here should probably hit like a bench and anyway, which we maybe have too many people on stage, but we'll try to answer questions within reason, you know, which this is meant to be kind of more of a long term sort of discussion as opposed to, uh, you know, what will be the production for the rest of the quarter type
of thing. So let's try to orient our questions towards long term value creation and with that far away.
Rob.
All, it's a road lash for the Wolf research. Very exciting plans about the the next generation vehicle and power trains and batteries. I was hoping you can maybe talk to us a little bit about the timeline for deploying this. And it sounds like it's more than just a vehicle. This is a kind of a paradigm change on how vehicles are assembled, how batteries are put together and everything, and does that also just get reconfigured into everything that you do. So the model wise that are being built
here will be built very differently in the future. Maybe just give us some feel for what happens from here and what's the timeline for implementation.
Well, talk a little bit about that, but.
Broadly speaking, the most profound architectural changes will be in future vehicles. Retooling a factory means bringing the factory down for an extended period of time, and that's I would preferred not to do that, I think. But but there are variants in how Model Y is produced. So we've got variants where there's rear casting, where there's a front and rear casting, and.
We have the.
Structural battery pack, and then there are a number of smaller improvements that occur. But I think for really really big changes those would be future vehicles.
Yeah. I know, you guys want to add.
Lars maybe, I mean yeah, so, I mean, as far as I agree with you one hundred percent, Elan, it's it's it's really easy to put innovations in new vehicles, but long term we'll obviously bring them back. We've always talked about that, but we don't want to take our factories down. As far as the timeline goes, you know, we're gonna go as fast as we can left or right.
As always, you know, Elon alluded to the fact that Mexico will build our next end vehicle, but we will also be doing that in other plants, and so it's really about getting them all up and running. We expect that to be a huge volume product and yeah, we're going to move that quickly over the next couple of years.
Let's go through all them.
Thanks first in not Buena Mexico, Marmos, that's great, congratulations. Uh elon a question on applying first principles thinking and innovation to an area that up to now has seemingly been outside of your control, and that is on mining and extraction of some of the key materials.
I believe a couple of.
Years ago you you had a patent on sodium chloride to extract lithium from some from some clays and spodyming clay and things of that nature. Any How, how does that fit into the plan of maybe bringing real innovation into a mining sector that could use a little you know, maybe waking up and getting those costs down, because that could be a relegating factor.
It seems well, we're gonna address whatever we think the limiting factor is at any point in time, so we would like to do the least amount possible, So we don't want to get into the mining or refining sector.
We will do that if we have to.
I do think the focus really should be on refining capacity. You know, we need to make just a very giant amount of anode cathode lithium, latinatruxide, liatin combinates. It's really the refining capacity that is the biggest choke point. Yeah, so that's that's why we're building a lithium refinery in Corpus Christy.
In terms of the mining companies that are out there, uh and looking at that part of the value chain. And so we do have large suppliers of lithium right now and they are aware of you know, how we're approaching the Corpus refinery and the technologies we're trying there. And the reason we're making them aware of it is because we think they're fundamentally more scalable. And as we prove them out, we plan to share that with them because, as Elon says, like, it's not really like we want
to do these things. We're doing them because it's not happening fast enough. So if we can prove that it can be done faster, the intention is to transfer that knowledge to our large our current suppliers, and the same is actually true. It was actually a clay process that we were playing with and we continue to work on the same is true on that. So we've worked with our suppliers as well on trials and we're sharing knowledge there and the intention is just to help the whole
world do this better. And ultimately this here is getting the lithium or whatever it is out of the order.
And we're obviously building a cathode processing facility just adjacent to this building. So a little further down the road you'll see another large construction that's for cathode refining. But like I said, we'd really prefer if others did that. We're doing it because we have to, because we want to.
Yeah, And in that case, there just isn't really any large scale cathode production in the United States and it needed to be done. And again, if we're going to do it, we're going to try to do it from a first principles perspective. So we have tried a bunch of new things there. We're confident that they will work, and as they prove out again, we want to bring them back to our supplier so they can build new facilities more quickly with less investment.
Right, let's go to ben Hi ben Cala for bair.
So similar On the renewable side, Is there more that you can do in Tesla to nudge the rest of the renewable industry to speed up since it's such a big a pillar of the master plan Three?
Well, I mean, I don't know more we can do, but I can say that if there's like entrepreneurs out there that wanted to have like a guaranteed chance of success, it would be refining lithium or anode and cathodes or any any materials whatsoever for uh leathium on cells as no brainer.
Yep.
I think we're doing everything we can. So yeah.
On the on the reneable energy thing, the thing that we can do Tesla is the more we reduce the cost of storage, the more we reduce the cost of stationary storage, and the more we bring like flexible load to the grid in the form of like cars charging at the right times, the more valuable renewables are. Because in like Texas right now, I wasn't joking like that's off or whatever. So so bringing really low cost storage onto the grid makes renewables more valuable. Which ultimately will
accelerate their deployment. So that's how we focus on it.
I guess.
Felippe, thank you. It's Sidi Bouscher Jeffries. I've got two questions. The first one, when I think about in this industry, everybody wants to be Tesla. Every comic er is trying to emulate what you're doing well done. The one thing they don't do is focus on having as much growth
as possible with as hew models as possible. So I'm just trying to understand, as you aim for twenty million units in twenty thirty, how many models do you think you need to get there, and how does it fit into your drive to hyper scale?
How do you manage this?
And also the fact that probably consumers at some point I don't want to see your tests out the same test at every street corner, So I'm just trying to get your your sense of that.
And my other question is on.
Bidirectional I mean, you talked a lot about making you know a world more renewables and better use it of cars. I think bidirectional charging is one way of better using cars, but you seem to have been reluctant about doing that in the past, so I'm just wondering what your latest views are on the topic.
Sure, on bi directional it it wasn't like a conscious decision to not do it. It just wasn't a priority at the time. I think is maybe the way to think about it. As we looked, as we continue to improve the para electronics in our vehicle, we've found ways to bring brighter actionality while actually reducing costs of para electronics in the vehicle. And at allten Tesla, the goal is usually to get more for less, and so we are in the middle of kind of like a power
electronics retool. I would say that we'll bring that functionality to all of our vehicles over the next you know, two years, let's say.
But but it's.
Yeah, I guess that's how I'll say there.
I don't think very many people are going to use my directional charging unless you have a power wall, because if you unplug your car, your house goes dark and this is extremely inconvenient.
Yeah, most of the value it comes in charging the car at the right time. It's not really about sending energy the other way.
Yeah.
I mean, if if you have a power wall that can take the house load then you can use your car as supple as a supplementary energy source to the power wall, and then you know you're not gonna drive one crazy by unplugging your car and having the house goal.
So I think there's some value there as.
A supplemental energy source down the road where if you have a power wall.
You've not diminished the convenience of the people in the house.
And the question of number of models, how many models?
But if not that many, I'm really ten, I don't know, not that many. There's I mean what's happened with the conventional cars is people have run out of things to do. So if you run out of things to do, they just end up reshuffling the deck and you have pretty much the same. I mean, how many variants of a car are there on the road. There's like hundreds. But there are they good variants? No, mostly not. They're just variants for the sake of variance. But look at how
have things converged with the phone. I mean, there used to be hundreds of flip phones.
Now what do we have? It'll be like that.
George George Genericas from Cannon Coordenuity just had a question about your plans to grow market share in China, and also whether or not the political tensions between the United States and China impact your long term ambitions there.
Thank you. I don't know, Hey, Tom Nott, do don't don't swear too hard.
Yeah, well, we're still growing up our markets here in China quite strongly, actually, especially you know early this year we had this price adjustment. After that we actually generated a huge demand more then we can produce. Really, and as Elon said, as long as you're offer a product with value at affordable price, you know, you don't have to worry about demand. That's basically the philosophy that we
we follow. We try everything to cut cost from supply chain, from improve the efficiency in the factory, and to pass down that value to our customers. I think you as long as we'll continue to do that, I'm not too concerned about the market share in China. In the second part, Geopolic, no one else.
We do our best.
We we we actually create a lot of jobs to look low community, and we tender also.
With at our suppliers.
Factories will create a lot of jobs as well, and we'll contribute with a lot of to the local economy. I think you know, as long as we're needed in this country. I don't see there much.
Of the risk of that, Colin, Colin Rush from Oppenheimer. You know, one of the things I was struck by in the presentation was the operational efficiency metrics that you guys are talking about. Could you talk a little bit about the velocity of learning cycles and how you guys track that and think about that as an organization as you work into a variety of other areas from a innovation perspective, if anyone wanted to try that, I.
Mean, I'll say one very high level thing, which is you can't improve something you don't measure. And we're like ruthless measurers at Tesla, and once you start measuring things that contribute to operational efficiency, you actually have a path to doing something about it. So I guess the key is a good measuring stick.
Okay, it's something I should say with respect to demand, which I've said a few times over the years, but it sometimes it needs to be set again, which is.
The overwhelmingly the uh.
There's the desire for people to own a Tesla is extremely high. The limiting factor is their ability to pay for a tesla, not do they want to eat Tesla. It's easy for people in this room to lose sight of that. If your income is far in excess of what a car costs, then you look at value for money, but you do not consider affordability. But for the vast majority of people it is affordability driven. This is why
we cannot simply double the price of the car. Or you could say and think about things in the limit where if you hadn't you know, an infinitely desirable car, but it costs ten million dollars, it wouldn't matter because people can Most people do not have that, So demand is very much a function of affordability, not desire. Very important. One of the things we weren't sure about was the price elasticity of demand for Tesla's, so like, as we
lower the price, how much does demand increase? And we found that even small changes in the price have a big effect on demand, very big. So that was a good thing to learn. Yeah, and then this autonomy question.
Is very very big.
Because it could potentially have I don't know, five times the utility of the asset that you currently have.
So passenger car.
Is ten or twelve hours a week of usage plus a lot of parking expenses, an autonomous car could be fifty sixty hours a week or something like that, and you could get rid of a lot of parking expenses. So you know, if this, if this is true, then as autonomy is effectively turned on for the fleet, it may be that it probably will be the biggest asset value increase in history overnight, Emmanuel, Thank you so much.
Emanuel Raznov from Deutsche Bank. So, as you start launching this next generation vehicle and ramping up volume, what will be your nearest term priority in terms of segment or vehicles focus. The slide that you showed with two vehicles under wrap seemed based on form factor one of them maybe he looks like a van, another one looks like
maybe like a smaller vehicle, like potentially a model. To what is the nearest focus for you in terms of ramping up the next gen vehicle and how do you make sure that by lowering the price point so much, because the costs is going down fifty percent, you're not cannibalizing demand, you know for your existing vehicles, I mean demand for our vehicles in terms of desire to own them may as well be infinite. It's indistinguishable from infinite at this point, affordability is what matters. So as you
make the car more affordable, we will have demand go crazy. Basically, the issue is how do we build the cars. The hard part is building the cars. I can't emphasize that enough. The hard part is building the cars and the entire supply chain that goes with the cars.
This is a.
Logistics challenge of extraordinary difficulty. All the things that have to go into the car have to scale with the car while everything is doing an exponential ramp. And if you miss even one of those things doesn't matter. Why earthquake, flood fire, revolution, I thought I've heard them all.
I mean, it's.
Any part of that supply chain gets interrupted, you're now then you have a seizure. The hard part is building the cars, by far, and the supply chain that goes with it. You guys want to talk about the supply chains though, yeah they might, I think, you know.
And the presentation I'd mentioned perfection is a passing great. We really need everything to happen perfectly, and the strategy for mitigating the different risks, some of which were anticipated and some weren't, is really bespoke to the situation. And then really the unique subject matter expertise and a deep knowledge of the particular supply chain you're managing to come
up with those strategies. So we've seen everything from as Elon mentioned, you know, first the tariffs that flew back and forth, then the ocean logistics issue, a chip shortage, COVID floods, there was a fire and a fab in Japan that knocked down. There was a massive COVID spike in Malaysia where a lot of the chips to the back end of a lot of chips was down there. In more, this was one that Elon was involved with as well. And yeah, that's it's nerve wracking, but somehow it works.
Yeah, and although it is difficult, I think we have been laying the foundation to be as intimate to all the tiers of the supply chain, building that control and you know, directing the different tiers of supply chain. That's the way we are trying to make it. The risks that come with it, you know, again, dual sourcing, triple sourcing, having redundancy is the way we've been trying to mitigate for it.
Yeah.
On that point, when we think about vehicles, when you think about three y as an architecture SX as an architecture, our next generation platform is more than one segment, and really we're thinking about all the segments that are available that we haven't captured and where the market would be and designing it with our supply chain partners so that we can go quickly through those segments for where we need.
But to Elon's point, if you make a car desirable and affordable, you know, oftentimes it doesn't necessarily matter what segment it's in because it's one that you want. And we've seen that with Model three when a lot of people thought that sedan was not going to be a
great hit, but we sell tons of them. So the next generation platform is not one vehicle, it is multiple, and it's on the segment that we will, you know, really try and focus on that affordability and desira ability point more over than where we start it.
Yeah, I mean there's like, I think it's an old saying, like battles the one with tactics or is the one with logistics. The logistics challenges here are enormous, and when you start like being a very significant percentage of an industry, you can't overcapacitize. It's not realistic, and some of these things like you say, like well you dual source or
triple source. You can do that maybe for small things, but you can't do it for big things because if you're if you're triple sourced and one of it's like having a plane with three engines, where if any of the three engines fails, you crash.
It's like, you know, so.
You have to eat the overcapacitizes, which drives your cafex up and it has idle suppliers somewhere and big warehouses, or you're designed to some overage that's you know, reasonable, and then you have expedite costs because inevitably there's something goes wrong somewhere and you've got to fly things around. So it's really just the rate of progress is the rate of which we are able to scale a ten thousand logistics problems.
The most significant of those is the.
Cell production, and so we actually liberately try to overdo cell production or self supply.
To have that exceed what is needed in vehicles.
Because if it goes below what's needed in vehicles, then with the factories stall. But then what do you do with all these extra cells? It's like, well, okay, so the much easier thing to scale up and down is is powerwall and megapac output stationary storage. So we can then overcapacities and sells and packs and scale production of stationary storage, which is much easier to scale than vehicle production.
So that's strategically, I think, a good thing.
Yeah, I mean the capex for megapac is tiny compared to capex for vehicles.
And also megapac demand is quasi infinite.
It basically as long as we are competitive with utilities, we can sell as many like it's yeah, quasi infinite demand for that really for multi tier many Taro White hours, and we got a long way to go to get to many Taro White hours per year.
Then let's go to down.
Thank you, Dan Leevy Barclays. I think we know competitive dynamics differ significantly by region. Cost dynamics different by region. We saw that with your China Giga factory, far superior cost to what you had for a month I realized it was a new factory. But uh, they're clearly different dynamics. So to what extent are the cost strategies that you've laid out today, Do they differ by region or or is there more of a global, one size fits all approach on reducing costs?
Yeah, I think we're pretty consistent under the strategy here. We'll try it as as much localized as possible. Like in China, ninety five percent over ninety five percent of our supplying are localized all the way from a first tier to secondarium that the third tier, and that gives
us general detrimentous savings on cocks. And we also have a very localized labor force, and we have access to scale the labor force in the region and Young's adulta region in Shanghai, and particularly referring to and among over thirty thousands of employees in China, we have probably less than twenty expats. So it's uh very deep localization we have done there to be able to have such cost structure, and we try to replicate this approach elsewhere and in
different give factories. Of course, you know the supplier base that are different, the you know, labor market are different region by region, the country back country, but which are our.
Best to to localize.
Yeah, and and.
I think that's that's absolutely.
Give us advantage to compete with the all the ms around the globe. Another thing is you know, we have this direct selling mode like Zach's that you know will save with tremendous money on op acces as well. We have food controller all expenditures across the the company, and you know we don't spend money on marketing or advertising. Everything we saved and will become you know, the value
we can offer to the consumers. So that part, on that part, we also followed pretty consistent strategy over the years.
I mean, certainly the manufacturing stuff that Colin Pete and myself talked about, whether you make it here, you make it in Europe, or you make it in Asia, it applies everywhere. We think about that from the ground up, not not specific to any region.
Yeah, just one thing I would add to Tom's point about localization and to Lars's point here, I would actually say that we're moving in a direction of more standardization in terms of our factories and our processes and our cost reduction approaches. So as we've been thinking about the next generation platform, we've been thinking about the volume that we aspire to build against that. How many individual factories do we need to build and what is the fastest
possible way to expand that footprint around the world. What we've done with Model why is each factory is an incremental improvement of the previous factory, which requires engineering hours engineering spend for each factory design, and then you end up with factories that are slightly different from each other.
And as we move towards the next generation platform, I think the term you use, Lars is copy paste, so to get it right from the first time, you know, certainly there will be things that we learn and we replicate and we make adjustments to but try to have as much standardization and commonization as possible which allows us to go as quickly as possible with expansion.
O raka.
On the sides, thanks Two questions, once for Zak one
flush self for Zach. How do you think about the long term growth and operating margins for the business And when we look at one hundred and fifty one hundred and seventy five billion in capex as the remaining balance of that is that essentially the capex guidance through twenty thirty for a shock the multi trip reconstruction that you highlighted, how is that different from what mobil eyed does with the IRAM map that they have And can you give us any color on the AP four hardware.
So with respect to operating margins, you know, we intend to continue to improve operating expenses as a percentage of revenue over time, and we're continuing to take cost out of our products and try to keep gross margins in a place that's healthy as well. And so you know, from the hardware perspective of the business, you know, it's our expectation that will continue to stay in a healthy place over time. And then there's a software portion that's
added on top of that. And so Elan has commented on this many times about the impact that full self driving software can have on the economics of the business, and in that space, you know, profitability operating margins would
be impacted dramatically. Specifically to your point about CAPEX guidance, you know, the intent of that slide was not to provide specific guidance, but to just be transparent about internally what our rough estimates are and to provide context that we think getting to twenty million vehicles per year in one taara what hour of energy storage is very feasible relative to our expected cash generation for the business. That's
a number that we'll move as we learn. We may choose to vertically integrate more into things, we may find efficiencies elsewhere. To the whole conversation we were having earlier about do we do mining, do we not do mining, But the entire point is to say that this is something that's entirely possible based upon our.
Forecast regarding the monkey to preconstruction. My point I was trying to make was that we want to auto label most of the data, and we can collect data from the fleet and then reconstruct local areas that can act ass supervision for those clips. Since we want to build a scalable self driving system, we don't want to really relay on stamps or anything, even though we could really
build something using the same technology. But this is mostly for auto labeling, and this provides like precise three D labels for all the video sequences involved in the reconstruction.
It's something that's I don't know if we touched on this much. But in terms of training, we have one of the biggest neural net training systems in the world, and that we expect to increase that capablely by an order of magnitude by the end of this year and probably another order of magnitude by the end of next year with some combination of Invidia and Dojo. So like much of the scale of that is quite going down people, and it's enormous.
Maybe the final two questions one from Alex and one from Chris.
Okay, Alex Potter with Piper, So I definitely want to ask Drew or anybody else up there for an update on dry battery electrode. Right, So, if you're gonna try to overcapacitize towards cells scale a lot of this Clearly, there's a lot of moving pieces and it's a complex sort of orchestra with the supply chain, but a lot of it comes down to dry battery electrode, at least to me.
So how are you trending?
That was the most fascinating part of the factory tour for me, and looking through that window and seeing that this is clearly not a science project, but anything that you're willing to disclose yields progress where you are today versus where you thought you were going to be. Yeah, thanks, right.
Uh yeah, I mean as you saw right, Like it's this is this is a real factory making a lot of dry electrode in an automated fashion. We've made a lot of progress. Uh, it's it's a it's a spectrum. Like we we're perfectionists, and we we have clear end goals and we are every week that goes by making progress towards those end goals, whether it's speed of the tool, yield of the of that process, or the downstream process.
We we haven't stalled out yet on the rate of progress either, and that's both on the eNode and the cathode side. And I think the great thing about where we are with the overcapacity that Elon mentioned is it's giving us the opportunity to experiment as we go rather than just being like stuck to something that we happen to kick off a year and a half ago. And it is here something that Elon has said to the team many times is so okay to scrap equipment or money,
it's not okay to scrap time. So the way we've been approaching it is probabilistically, what do we think is
the most likely thing to succeed. And even actually in the factory here you saw more than one anode line that they are actually operating two slightly different versions of the final process step of the powder entering the tool, and it's a competition, you know, which is going to be more higher yield, which is going to perform better, And we have the luxury to be able to do that, and we're taking full advantage of it to advance the technology as quickly as possible.
The dir electrode problem is really quite a hard problem.
I mean, we acquired Maxwell really just for the dry electrode technology, but just illustrates what a gigantic gap there is between something working at small scale and at large scale.
And we've had a an.
Extremely talented team of engineers working on scaling the dry electrode process and having to be reliable, consistent, and we've been grinding hard, literally and figuratively on this for quite a while. It seems likely that we will be able to scale it to volume this year.
Yeah, I mean we're we're basically increasing the output week over week, like roughly one k week per quarters our internal target, and we're you know, we're tracking to that. I think the what you saw is effectively like a ton of material per hour per tool. It's kind of like hard to like rationalize like what that really means, but it's it's it is. It's different than like, oh, something works in a lab, it's like, well, when it's tons of material per hour, there's just different kinds of problem.
Like even if you have zero point one percent escape of like finds into the enclosure that your equipment is in, now you have a dust problem and like that could short out some electronics. It's like just things like this where when you're on a lab scale you don't even notice it, but when you're doing thousands of tons over the course of months, it's like, oh, a new failure
mode we found, and that's where we're at. But we're we're knocking those out though, and the team is grinding through it, but progress every week.
And the last question from Chris, Thanks for taking a question. I have a few follow ups on the next gen vehicle. First, when do you think we'll get a look at it? Maybe a prototype? Second, are there any details that you think you can share in terms of the size, the content, the performance. And Then third, I think you mentioned that you would produce it in other plants in addition to Mexico.
Should we take that to mean that you can launch it at an existing plant before you're finished constructing the new plant in Mexico.
I think we'll actually have to probably decline that answer. We will have a proper sort of product event, but we would be jumping the gun if we were to answer your questions. Maybe another question if this yeah, yeah, I don't know anyone.
Will willed enough.
I have two questions.
This has really been a very impressive afternoon.
Thank you so much.
Elon.
I'm curious, as you've doubled and you'll double again, how what you've learned about sort of managing a larger enterprise and what you might have to you know, do to manage a bigger enterprise. And then secondly, I'm curious on your thoughts on how you know generative AI and you know these rapid breakthroughs in AI in the last months could help you make cars sort of you know, less hard to make.
Thank you.
I don't see AI helping us make cars anytime soon at that point, I mean, at no point in any of us working anything big problems, So we'll just chill out. I mean, I'm a little worried about the AI stuff. I think it's uh something I don't know which we should be concerned about.
Uh, I don't know.
I think we should need some kind of like regulatory authority or something that's overseeing AI development and just making sure that it's operating within the public interests. And you know, it's quite a dangerous, quite a dangerous technology, and I I fear I may have done some things to accelerate it, which is I don't know. So, I mean, some of the AI stuff I think is just obviously useful, like what we're doing with self driving, which is you know,
some people think is an AGI type problem. I don't think it's quite an a GI problem, but it's certainly requires very sophisticated neural nets because the road system is designed for eyes and biological neural nets, so naturally the analog to that is.
Cameras with digital neural nets.
And yeah, the thing we've we found is just there's a sick if you actually look at our neural net architecture in the carts, kind of insane, frankly, nets upon nets upon nets upon.
That's the visualization toold crashes open. Yeah, it's like so complicated that no one can misulace this right now.
Yeah, it's hard to visual just like literally it looks insane. So I guess something like that's happening in our brains while we drive around, which is pretty wild, So.
You know, I don't know. I think Tesla's doing good things in AI. I don't know. This one stresses me out, so I don't know what to think you should say about it, you know.
Okay, given it's seven o'clock, I think that's all the time we have. Thank you very much for coming and se