Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) held its Q2 earnings call after market closed Wednesday. According to the release, the electric vehicle maker’s profits grew 20% in the quarter to $0.91 per share, coming in ahead of the street’s estimate of $0.79. Revenue for the quarter increased 47% to $24.93 billion, versus the consensus estimate of $24.29B.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk joined the call to announce the company’s record vehicle production and deliveries and record revenue during Q2. These results come after the company’s Model Y became the best-selling vehicle of any kind globally in Q1, surpassing the likes of Corolla and Golf. The record results also come despite high interest rates and a lot of macro uncertainty.
“We continue to target 1.8 million vehicle deliveries this year, although we expect that Q3 production will be a little bit down because we've got some shutdowns for factory upgrades,” added Musk during the call. “So, just probably a slight decrease in production in Q3 for sort of global factory upgrades.”
However, in the long term, Musk assured listeners that autonomy “is going to just drive volume through the ceiling” and that he believes that the company’s future robotaxi products will “have like quasi-infinite demand.”
“The way we're going to manufacture the robotaxi is also itself a revolution. So, it's a revolutionary design made in a revolutionary way. It'll be, by far, the highest units per hour of any vehicle production ever,” said Musk.
Tesla’s global supercharging network now stands at “roughly” 50,000 connectors at over 5,000 locations. The company has made their North American Charging Standard (NACS) open-sourced and available for OEMs to use in their vehicles. Some, such as Ford (NYSE:F), General Motors (NYSE:GM), and Rivian (NASDAQ:RIVN) have already chosen to adopt the connectors and will make them available in the coming years.
“We're deeply honored that Ford, GM, Mercedes, and many other OEMs have signed up to use our connector and gain access to our charging network. We strongly believe in helping other car companies to accelerate the EV revolution and just trying to do the right thing in general,” said Musk
Entering the question-and-answer phase of the call, investors inquired about the company’s progress on Tesla’s Optimus robot and voiced concerns over giga-casting and future repair costs among other things.
One investor asked how the company decides when to reduce prices or add sales incentives to increase demand.
“Yeah. I guess demand has roughly tracked production,” answered Musk. “Something that we have that really I think no other carmaker has is that we have real-time demand and real-time production.”
“So, it's like a real-time finger on the pulse of Earth, basically. And we, you know -- we just -- we just course according to what the mood of the public is, you know?”
“And then, obviously, another challenge is the interest rate environment,” added Musk. “As interest rates rise, the affordability of anything bought with that decreases, so effectively increasing the price of the car. So, when interest rates rise dramatically, we actually have to reduce the price of the car.”
VP of investor relations, Martin Viecha followed investor questions by opening the floor to questions from analysts, several of which were interested in the company’s use of AI and how they use the Dojo supercomputer to analyze video data to train Tesla’s Full Self-Driving program.
“We want to get to 10 times better than humans, maybe 100 times better than human,” Musk said of the company’s FSD program.
“The fundamental rate limiter on the progress of full self-driving is training. But that's -- if we had more training compute, we would get it done faster,” added the CEO.
“I think the Tesla fleet value increase to the point at which we can upload full self-driving and it's approved by regulators, will be the single biggest step change in asset value maybe in history.”
Shares of TSLA are down 3.76% in morning trading on Thursday.