□ Dahe Daily Yu video reporter Geng Ziteng
On April 24, Beijing time, Tesla released its financial report for the first quarter of 2024, Tesla CEO Elon Musk released good news on the earnings call, Tesla will continue to update the vehicle lineup and accelerate the launch of new models, some of the production plans originally scheduled for the second half of 2025 may be advanced to the beginning of 2025 or even the end of 2024, including cheaper models, which will form a strong combination with existing models. The new model will utilize the next-generation platform and current platform technology, and will be able to use the production line of the current model. He also said that the delivery of electric vehicles in 2024 will be higher than last year, and the growth rate of the energy storage business will be higher than that of the electric vehicle business. During the quarter, Tesla's AI training calculations related to self-driving increased by 130%.
In this quarter, Tesla's revenue reached 21.3 billion US dollars (about 154.3 billion yuan), and the quarterly non-GAAP net profit was 1.5 billion US dollars (about 10.9 billion yuan); Tesla Model Y is still the world's best-selling model, and the on-board computer of all S3XY models has evolved to the HW4.0 era of automatic assisted driving hardware with stronger information processing and photography capabilities, and the installed capacity of energy storage has reached a record 4.1 GWh, and the production of 4680 batteries has also continued to grow in the first quarter.
Tesla said that the next wave of growth will be brought by autonomous driving and new products, including electric vehicles produced on next-generation electric vehicle platforms. At the same time, the Shanghai Gigafactory will provide some capacity for new markets such as Chile. Despite the fact that some companies will shrink their investments, Tesla continues to invest in future growth areas – including AI infrastructure, production capacity, superchargers, service networks and new product infrastructure – with capital expenditures of $2.8 billion in the first quarter. Tesla is and will continue to expand the scale of vehicles and data: the future will not only be the era of electric vehicles, but also the era of autonomous driving. Large-scale unmanned driving can only be achieved with millions of vehicles and massive AI training clusters.
Tesla's business ecosystem includes autonomous driving, robots, battery cells, and sustainable energy
During the earnings call, Musk confirmed that Tesla will release a robotaxis on August 8, 2024, and management announced an update on the progress of robotaxis, which will be manufactured in an "unboxed" way. Earlier this month, Musk announced plans to release a driverless taxi on social platforms, a move that was seen by the industry as a strategic move by Tesla's All-in self-driving and Roboride. In terms of Optimus, a humanoid robot with the same origin as car technology, Musk said that Tesla will be the most capable company among all humanoid machine manufacturers, and humanoid robots may be able to start doing simple work in factories by the end of 2024.
Tesla's artificial intelligence inference efficiency far exceeds that of other companies, and driverless taxis are an important cornerstone of Tesla's next phase of high growth, which may lead to the next industrial revolution. Two definite trends are taking place in the world: first, the energy mix will shift to sustainable energy sources dominated by solar energy, and second, the development of artificial intelligence technology will accelerate to reshape productivity and production relations on a global scale. Sustainable energy and artificial intelligence technology are strategic business segments that Tesla is fully focused on. In the field of artificial intelligence and autonomous driving, Tesla is the only company that has all the trump cards of fleet mileage, computing power, and data platform, leading the industry for at least 3-5 years.
Tesla will launch a driverless taxi on August 8, 2024
With electric vehicles as the basic carrier, Tesla's "sea of stars" is artificial intelligence
During the quarter, Tesla focused on investing in the hardware and software ecosystem that enables autonomous vehicle driving and ride-hailing services. Tesla believes that only through a pure vision architecture and end-to-end neural networks, and training with large-scale real-world data, can it achieve large-scale growth and profitable autonomous driving. The V12 version of FSD's Full Self-Driving Capability (Supervised Edition), which will be launched in early 2024, is further proof that Tesla has made the right choice. To further improve its end-to-end training capabilities, Tesla will continue to enhance its core AI infrastructure capabilities in the coming months.
Tesla's goal in developing self-driving technology is to liberate human labor and significantly improve traffic safety. Autonomous vehicles are much safer than human drivers. On the earnings call, Musk pointed out that if you have a certain scale of statistically significant data, it can be clearly seen that the accident rate of self-driving vehicles is only half of the accident rate of human-driven vehicles.
Tesla's FSD Full Self-Driving (Beta) drive has increased its cumulative mileage
Tesla is also currently developing ride-hailing features that will be available in the future, with plans to seamlessly integrate ride-hailing features into Tesla's apps.
In early 2024, Musk confirmed on social media that Tesla will invest $500 million in the New York Gigafactory to build a Dojo supercomputer cluster. He also noted that the amount of investment to remain competitive in the field of AI will be billions of dollars per year. In early April, Musk further pointed out that Tesla's cumulative investment in the field of autonomous driving (computing power training, large-scale data pipelines and video storage) in 2024 will exceed $10 billion.
In other words, Tesla is comprehensively increasing its investment in the field of artificial intelligence, all-in artificial intelligence and autonomous driving.
The launch of Robotaxi is inseparable from the core competitiveness and moat built by Tesla's FSD full self-driving technology. Based on the in-depth layout of large-scale mileage, self-developed computing platform, and huge computing power, Tesla's FSD fully autonomous driving continues to be upgraded and iterated and has entered the V12.3 stage, which can respond flexibly and accurately to quite complex road conditions. Fully autonomous driving is only "one step away" from reality, and once its large-scale commercial use is implemented, it will become a lucrative "cash cow" for Tesla.
Musk has said that 6 billion miles of driving is an important node for a qualitative change in a fully autonomous driving system. In the first quarter of 2024, Tesla's FSD fully self-driving total mileage has reached 1.25 billion miles (about 2 billion kilometers) in real road conditions, which is far more than the sum of other companies.
Tesla's FSD has a total mileage of fully self-driving that far exceeds that of other companies combined
In the U.S. market, the subscription price of Tesla's FSD full self-driving capability has dropped from $199/month to $99/month, and the price has dropped to $8,000, and the number of subscriptions has also grown rapidly. On April 20, Tesla began pushing FSD V12.3.5 to employees, just 10 days after V12.3.4 was pushed. As Musk said on social platforms at the end of March, Tesla is no longer limited by artificial intelligence training calculations, and the progress of fully autonomous driving will be greatly accelerated. In the FSDV12.3.1 version pushed by Tesla to North American car owners in March, "end-to-end neural network" technology has been introduced, through deep learning of more than one million driving data, using artificial intelligence technology to affect vehicle control, such as operating steering wheel pedals, turn signals, etc., instead of hard-coding every driving behavior, this change has been hailed as "game-changing technology".
At the current cumulative mileage of Tesla's FSD fully self-driving, its cumulative mileage is expected to reach 2 billion miles by the end of May and reach a total of 6 billion miles within a year. In early April, Musk also said that Tesla's cumulative mileage of fully self-driving exceeded 10 billion miles just around the corner.
Tesla's cumulative mileage of fully self-driving will soon exceed 10 billion miles
The market has seen the tremendous value of Tesla's all-in AI and autonomous driving. Morgan Stanley said in its April 2024 research report that the launch of Robotaxi symbolizes a greater shift in Tesla's business model towards real-world/hardcore AI and robotics. "Tesla will solve some of the world's most challenging problems (autonomous driving), providing an entry point to huge untapped commercial potential...... Over time, investors will witness a shift in the company's business model towards a more asset-light, software-based, recurring revenue model. ”
Casey Wood, the founder, CEO and chief investment officer of Ark Investment, which has $30 billion in assets under management, said in a recent interview that Tesla is working on the world's largest artificial intelligence project through self-driving, and Wood believes that the gross profit margin of the robotaxi business is 80% to 85% By 2030, the entire ecosystem of robotaxis will generate between $8 trillion and $10 trillion, half of which will be generated by platform providers such as Tesla.
Data, chips, supercomputing platform, Tesla has a complete and leading artificial intelligence software and hardware
From electric vehicles, to energy storage equipment, to artificial intelligence and robots, Tesla's business territory has far exceeded the ordinary sense of electric vehicle companies, for this innovative technology giant, electric vehicles are the basic carrier to achieve applications, its purpose is to integrate electric vehicles, energy storage products, artificial intelligence and robotics in the field of key technologies to form a closed loop of software and hardware integration, with disruptive technology to solve the fundamental problems in the field of travel and energy. The core competitiveness of the future is reflected in disruptive innovation and the industry change and imagination brought about by it.
At the same time, Tesla is also one of the few AI leaders that has integrated multiple trump cards such as computing power, fully autonomous driving software and hardware, and manufacturing, and its AI efficiency is significantly ahead of other companies. In the past two years, NVIDIA, which has been popular in the capital market, is a supplier and only provides AI computing tools, while other driverless technology companies have no large-scale hardware to verify data, and car companies do not have AI technology and computing platform support.
At a time when the global economy has entered a period of moderate growth, Tesla insists on being a long-term advocate with long-term strategic vision and tactical execution capabilities. To truly achieve FSD full autonomous driving, it is necessary to accumulate large-scale mileage and huge computing power, which is made possible by Tesla's more than 6 million electric vehicles worldwide and its self-developed Dojo supercomputer.
The high number of Tesla vehicles has created a cluster of "detectors" that collect visual data in real time for neural network training. On March 30, Tesla became the first company in the world to break the 6 million pure electric vehicle production mark, and in 2023, Tesla will deliver about 1.81 million electric vehicles worldwide, with a huge fleet and data volume. According to Morgan Stanley's forecast, the number of Tesla electric vehicles on the road will reach 27 million by 2030, 58 million in 2035, and 100 million in 2040.
The Tesla Model Y is the best-selling model in the world in 2023
In the Chinese market, Tesla has always been a winning general in terms of sales. On April 21, Tesla reduced the price of all models in Chinese mainland by 14,000 yuan, after the price reduction, the starting price of Model 3 is 231,900 yuan, and the starting price of Model Y is 249,900 yuan, and Model Y can also enjoy the financial policy of up to 5 years of zero interest on car purchases, and the annual rate of Model 3 is as low as 2.5%. On April 22, Tesla celebrated the 10th anniversary of the delivery of the first Model S in Chinese mainland. Since 2014, the number of Tesla owners in China has increased from 15 to more than 1.7 million, and the number of new energy vehicles in China has jumped from 216,400 to more than 20 million in the same period.
What's more, only Tesla's cars have the possibility of upgrading to state-of-the-art AI technology in the near future. In the current electric vehicle market, the intelligent driving technology of many car manufacturers is not a real fully autonomous driving operating system, but a primary integration of various small applications.
At the same time, Tesla has built a strong infrastructure, including the Dojo supercomputer, which provides super underlying technical support for Tesla's autonomous driving and robotics business. In terms of performance, at the same cost, the Dojo supercomputer can achieve 4 times the performance and 1.3 times the energy consumption ratio compared with the NVIDIA A100. According to previous Morgan Stanley data, Dojo has saved Tesla up to $6.5 billion in costs, and will bring up to $500 billion in market value growth for Tesla in the future because of its huge potential to empower the development of artificial intelligence technology.
Tesla will also become a leader in the field of humanoid robots with Optimus, when the humanoid robot reaches its technological "singularity", it will be able to greatly improve the production efficiency of the car factory and help it expand its scale. At the end of 2023, Tesla showed the world the second generation of Optimus, a humanoid robot that is more delicate and flexible. Optimus uses the same visual perception scheme and neural network technology as FSD's fully autonomous driving technology to complete core functions such as path planning and object recognition. In the future, humanoid robots will meet the needs of the global labor market of $30 trillion.
In December 2023, Tesla unveiled the more flexible Optimus II
With Tesla's layout and integration and innovation in "electric vehicles, energy storage, and AI", the company has shown imagination that is enough to subvert the growth potential of the industry and change the way of life of human beings. Tesla's Shanghai energy storage gigafactory is scheduled to start construction in May 2024 and complete mass production in the first quarter of 2025, which is also Tesla's first energy storage gigafactory project outside the United States. Energy storage is no less important to Tesla than the well-known electric car. Musk previously said on the fourth quarter 2023 earnings call that Tesla's energy storage business will grow much faster than the electric vehicle business. Bloomberg predicts that the global market demand for energy storage batteries will reach 1,000GWh by 2030, with a market size of $1.2 trillion.
Tesla's ultra-large commercial energy storage system Megapack has been put into use in many countries