I haven’t covered a Tesla earnings release and call in a while, but I thought I’d give a quick summary since this quarter was pretty interesting. Last quarter I wrote this after the delivery release, but I didn’t write up the earnings call.

There are a lot of small pieces of good news. Tesla keeps promising vehicle growth, but every quarter they produce about the same number of cars. This seemed to be the first call where they are quickly scaling Robotaxi instead of promising to do that in the future. It seemed to coincide with the Cybercab launch last month. Since the Model Y has the same computer and cameras, many people (including me) thought they would scale the Model Y Robotaxi service first, then bring in the Cybercabs. It appears the software got good at about the same time as Cybercab production got going. I guess a happy coincidence.

On traditional car sales, they clearly have huge demand (which is very different than other automakers of battery electric vehicles in the US), which is because of both FSD and high oil prices causes by both the Iran and Ukraine war. They claim to be increasing production in Austin and Berlin, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to reduce the backlog. Tesla could sell a lot more cars if they had some inventory. Many people can’t wait a long time to get a new car, since they are typically buying because of the end of lease, an accident, or a breakdown of an existing car.

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