Q3 2024 Tesla Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Travis Axelrod; Head, Investor Relations; Tesla Inc

Elon Musk; Chief Executive Officer, Director, Technoking of Tesla; Tesla Inc

Ashok Elluswamy; Vice President, AI Software; Tesla Inc

David Lau; Vice President, Software Engineering; Tesla Inc

Vaibhav Taneja; Chief Financial Officer; Tesla Inc

Lars Moravy; Vice President, Vehicle Engineering; Tesla Inc

Pierre Ferragu; Analyst; New Street Research LLP

Adam Jonas; Analyst; Morgan Stanley

Presentation

Travis Axelrod

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Tesla's Third Quarter 2024 Q&A Webcast. My name is Travis Axelrod, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm joined today by Elon Musk, Vaibhav Taneja, and a number of other executives. Our Q3 results were announced at about 3:00 p.m. Central Time in the update deck we published at the same link as webcast.
During this call, we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. These comments are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our most recent filings with the SEC. (Operator Instructions) Before we jump into Q&A, Elon has some opening remarks. Elon?

Elon Musk

Thank you. So to recap, as someone was saying, something that what the industry was seeing year-over-year declines in order volumes in Q3. Tesla at the same time has achieved record deliveries. In fact, I think if you look at EV companies worldwide, to the best of my knowledge, no EV company is even profitable. And I'm not -- to the best of my knowledge, there was no EV division of any company, of any existing car company that is profitable.
So it is notable that Tesla is profitable despite a very challenging automotive environment, and this quarter actually is a record Q3 for us. So we produced our seventh million vehicle actually just yesterday, so congratulations to the teams that made it happen in Tesla. That's staggering the immense amount of work to make 7 million cars. So you see, we all have -- the energy storage business is growing like wildfire with strong demand for both Megapack and Powerwall.
And as you all know, on October 10, we laid out a vision for an autonomous and future that I think is very compelling that the Tesla team did a phenomenal job there with actually giving people an option to experience the future, where you have humanoid robots working among the craft, not with a canned video and a presentation or anything but walking among crowd, so he drinks and whatnot. And we had 50 autonomous vehicles. There were 20 Cybercabs, but there were an additional 30 Model Ys, operating fully autonomously the entire night, carrying thousands of people with no incidents the entire night.
And all those who went there that worth emphasizing that the Cybercab had no steering wheel or brake or accelerator panels, meaning there was no way for anyone to intervene manually a unit if they wanted to and the whole night went very smoothly.
So regarding the vehicle business, we are still on track to deliver our affordable models starting in the first half of 2025. This is -- I think probably people want should they assume for vehicle sales growth next year. And at the risk of -- to take a bit of risk here, I do want to give some rough estimate, which I think it's 20% to 30% vehicle growth next year. Notwithstanding negative external events, like if there's some force majeure events, like some big war breaks out or interest rates go sky high or something like that, we can't overcome massive force majeure events. But I think with our lower-cost vehicles with the advent of autonomy, something like a 20% to 30% growth next year is my best guess.
And then Cybercab reaching volume production in '26. I do feel confident of Cybercab reaching volume production in '26, just starting production, reaching volume production in '26. And that should be substantial. But we're aiming for at least 2 million units a year of Cybercab. That will be in more than one factory but I think it's at least 2 million units a year, maybe 4 million ultimately.
So yeah, these are just my best guesses but if you ask me my best guesses, those are my best guesses. The cell 4680 lines, the team is actually doing great work there. The 4680 is rapidly approaching the point where it is the most competitive cell. So when you consider the fully landed -- the cost of a battery pack fully landed in the US, net of incentives and duties, 4680 is tracking to be the most competitive, maybe lower cost per kilowatt hour fully considered than any other alternative. We're not quite there yet but we're close to being there, which I think is extremely exciting. And we've got several -- a lot of ideas to go well beyond that.
So I think there's -- if we execute well, the 4680 -- we'll have the -- the Tesla internally produced cell will be the most cost competitive cell in North America, a testament to the tremendous amount of hard work there done by the team. So that's to say we'll continue to buy a lot of cells from our competitors. I tend not to -- to provide -- to make cells just internally. So I don't want to sort of here.
We're obviously increasing substantially our vehicle output and our stationary storage output, so we need a lot of cells. And most of them will still come from suppliers. But I think it is some good news that the Tesla internal cell is likely to be the most competitive in the US.
So with respect to autonomy, as people are experiencing in the cars really from week to week, there are significant improvements and the miles between interventions. So with the new version 12.5 release of (inaudible) and Cybertruck, combining the code into a single stack so that the city driving and the engine and highway driving are one stack, which is a big improvement for the highway driving. So it's just all neural nets. And the release of actually Smart -- we try to have a sense of humor here.
And we're also -- so that's 12.5. Version 13 of FSD is going out soon. will elaborate more on that later in the call. We expect to see roughly a five or six-fold improvement in miles between interventions compared to 12.5. And actually, looking at the year as whole, the improvement in miles interventions, we think will be at least (inaudible) So that's a very dramatic improvement in the course of the year, and we expect that trend to continue next year.
So the current total expectation, internal expectation for the Tesla FSD having longer miles [intervention] human is the second quarter of next year, which means it may end up being in the third quarter but it's next -- it seems extremely likely to be next year. Ashok, do you want to?