This week, Tesla held their latest big event, known as Investor Day. This is the latest in a growing list of dedicated events for the company, starting with Autonomy Day back in 2019, Battery Day in 2020, AI Day 2021, AI Day 2022.
Leading into Investor Day, expectations reached a fever pitch, as Elon Musk teased the event as the unveiling of Master Plan Part 3, the roadmap for the next decade of the company.
You can read my predictions here.
If you missed the event, you can watch it below, just grab yourself a strong drink and settle it, as it went on for more than 3 hours. As expected the day focused on what lies ahead for the company and more broadly, the planet as Tesla attempts to lead the world in transitioning to sustainable energy.
This feels like a step change in Tesla’s mission, previously they aimed to accelerate the transition, but now it seems Tesla is quite happy to lead the world.
After watching Tesla lay out the massive challenge of transitioning the world, I couldn’t help but wonder, what was the point of calling this investor day, given the company seems extremely confident that they can fund the investment needed to achieve their goals.
This was almost as if Tesla assembled a room of 200+ analysts and institutional investors to brag about the company, rather than pitch them on getting their firms or clients to invest in Tesla.
Most people in that room manage share portfolios that are interested in short-term returns which sits in stark contrast to the whole theme of the day, which was Tesla will relentlessly work towards this sustainable future over the next decade and beyond.
The event featured presentations from many parts of the business, and through these presentations, we got to meet many of the amazing people that work at and lead teams at Tesla.
Each speaker was given an allotted time and it seems was given a scope to talk about what your team has done, rather than what the team is currently working on, or will do in the future. Many, so many of the talks contained rehashed of old information we already knew, which resulted in some big disappointment from those whole followed the company closely.
Hitting the right information among a completely mixed audience was always going to be a tall order, however, the decision to bury any new information in the middle of background and history, resulted in many people missing the important announcements.
An alternative approach would have been to quickly speed through the back story, then talk about where they are now and then expressly call out new announcements or ‘breaking news’.
What was new at Investor Day?
Gigafactory
Possibly the biggest announcement (or really confirmation as this leaked to Twitter a couple days prior), is that Tesla will build a brand new Gigafactory in Mexico.
This is set to be the largest building on the planet.
New solar products coming in 2023 (Powerwall 3?)
Tesla’s energy business is really starting to fire, particularly in the grid-level storage of Megapack. During the event, we saw a slide that outlined Tesla Energy products since 2015 and the latest item on that chart included two covered (unreleased) Tesla products with the title ‘upcoming products in 2023’.
At least one of these is likely to be the Powerwall 3, which is almost certainly going to use an LFP chemistry to bring the price down and make energy storage much more affordable for homes and businesses.
There will likely be a dedicated event for the launch of these products later this year.
TeslaBot
It’s been 5 months of silence since we saw Teslabot back in October 2022 and at that point the 2nd generation Teslabot couldn’t even walk on its own. Fast forward to March 2023 and Tesla has multiple prototypes and they can work together on tasks.
The robot is now looking much more capable as they walk around without assistance, can pick up screws and power tools typically used by humans, as well as interacting with soft fabrics as they removed a cloth from a picture.
Vertical integration
Tesla may buy some components like headlights form 3rd party suppliers, but anywhere they believe they can make a better product, cheaper, it seems they’re happy to vertically integrate that into the company’s portfolio. Tesla announced they’re moving to 100% Tesla-built controllers in the car with the next-gen vehicle.
The Model S, was around 20%, the Model X doubled this to 40%, the Model 3 improved again to 56% and the Model Y incremented to 61%. The upcoming Cybertruck is expected to use 85% of Tesla-designed controllers and the next-gen vehicle moves that all the way to 100%.
This will give them an unprecedented level of control over the hardware/software combination.
Dr Know-it-all has a great breakdown of the Teslabot video here.
Batteries
Tesla around going to make an incredible amount of batteries. These batteries will go in cars, stationary storage and even some new vehicles. They have the dry battery electrode process running at scale now, as part of their 4680-cell production. While this has taken longer than anticipated, it seems the technology they first acquired as part of the Maxwell Technology acquisition back in 2019, is now paying off.
New vehicles
Tesla didn’t show off a robotaxi design, but then again, I didn’t expect they would. Vehicles regularly get their own launch events and the robotaxi is key to their master plan part 3, so it’ll certainly get it’s time to shine.
What Tesla did talk about is how they’re aiming to drop the price, by as much as 50% from the cost of the Model 3 platform. To achieve that ambitious goal, they can’t simply replace leather seats with cloth seats and call it a day, they need to take what they learned in the Model Y innovations with structural pack and keep pushing hard on those kinds of innovations.
The next-generation car sounds more like a vehicle platform that they can build many vehicles on top of (i.e. bus/shuttle). What isn’t yet know is if they’ll go all in on robotaxi and build it without a wheel and pedals. This would be insanely risky to do, given the exact timeline for FSD to reach level 4/5 is unknown.
48 volt architecture
Tesla is moving past the decades-old 12v architecture and moving to a 48v system that would allow them to further reduce the diameter of wiring and therefore cost and weight of the vehicle. The last transition from 6V to 12V occurred way back in 1960.
What is not clear is what happens to your 12v accessories, but that’s a problem for another day.
Interestingly this change is coming soon, this year, starting with Cybertruck, but also in Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot which I expect will lead to increase battery life. Tesla says it will go 48V for all future vehicles, but like single-piece casting, it’s challenging to retrofit this into existing production lines as you’d need to shut them down to achieve it.
Charging
Tesla Supercharging has been critical in providing confidence to potential EV buyers that they will be able to travel to their desired destination in an EV. Recently Tesla started opening up supercharging to other brands, but charge a premium for them to charge at a Tesla Supercharger. This revenue will be re-invested in rolling out more charging options.
What Tesla revealed about their cost to provide the energy for Supercharging. They claim their cost to deploy charging hardware and installation is between 35% and 75% as the competition. In Australia for example, they list the cost (presumably per stall), as around $50k, while the competition is around $70k. When sites often have between 2 and 12 stalls, this compounds to Tesla having a massive cost advantage when it comes to infrastructure.
Tesla also spoke about a move to encourage more daytime charging sessions. This would be achieved by more vehicles charging during sunlight hours and that would mean your boss needs to be involved. If you buy an EV it sits at work all day from 8am to 5pm, then your greatest opportunity to charge would be at the office.
Tesla didn’t go into detail but expect Tesla to get serious about accounting for charging sessions using their High-Performance Wall Charger (HPWC). Generation 3 of the charger already includes wifi connectivity and could enable per-use charging with a software update. Another option for employers would be to offer it as part of a salary package and if they invest in a solar array or carpark, their cost to provide that power to employees could also become a profit center for them.
Tesla has 1.9 Million sharing sessions, every, single, day.
Heat Pumps
Tesla didn’t absolutely confirm they will make a heat pump for the home but waxed poetically about how amazing they were and what an opportunity they were to move people away from fossil fuels.
Tesla now includes heat pumps inside all cars to thermally control the inside of vehicles and Elon said ‘at some point they might make a heat pump for the home’, to which Drew Baglino replied ‘maybe, maybe’ which was met with a smirk from both. You don’t have to read between the lines here, it’s pretty clear they are going to enter this market, but are just not ready to launch it yet.
Can’t Forget To Do Cool S***
Tesla didn’t talk about it, but one of their slides during the event had the title ‘Can’t Forget To Do Cool S***’ and showed the fancy retro modern Tesla diner has mentioned before.
What has never been discussed is a Tesla wireless charger and don’t the right of that slide, we see a brand new, never before seen Tesla wall charger that’s long and silver on the face, with a cable that runs to the ground. Underneath the back of the red Model S, is a wireless charging pad.
Do not expect this anytime soon, but it is great to know Tesla are thinking about wireless charging to increase the convenience of owning an EV.
What was missing at Investor Day?
There’s something very strange happening with FSD right now. In January we were supposed to tick off a couple of big milestones. The first was to finally, after more than a year of waiting, ship the single-stack build of FSD Beta, known as V11.3. Ahead of the event, we see the first builds reach employee cars and expected it’d follow the standard schedule of then progressing to customer cars a few days later. That still has happened.
Tesla received notification from the National Highway Trafic Saftey Administration on February 16th, 2023 that they had an issue with FSD Beta. Tesla agree to issue a voluntary recall, which was to be addressed with a OTA software update.
As they do with all recall notices, Tesla posted on their website about the issue. In the post, they also highlight that a software update will be released OTA when the software is available. It’s now almost 2 and a half weeks after the NHTSA notice and almost a month since Tesla first learned about the issue.
While the success of FSD Beta was covered in the presentation, it was a very loud silence when it came to this issue.
Tesla paused the rollout of FSD Beta to anyone new purchasing or subscribing to the FSD package, which creates further questions about when countries outside the US and Canada may get FSD Beta.
In certain rare circumstances and within the FSD Beta operating limitations, when the feature is engaged, it could potentially infringe upon local traffic laws or customs while executing these driving maneuvers in specific conditions before the driver may intervene:
- Traveling or turning through certain intersections during a stale yellow traffic light
- The perceived duration of the vehicle’s static position at certain intersections with a stop sign, particularly when the intersection is clear of any other road users
- Adjusting vehicle speed while travelling through certain variable speed zones, based on detected speed limit signage and/or the vehicle’s speed offset setting that is adjusted by the driver
- Negotiating a lane change out of certain turn-only lanes to continue travelling straight
The problem here is that fixing this isn’t like fixing a bug in the Spotify app, fixing these issues so they work every single time, is likely going to take a lot more data, many more turns of that data engine and lots of testing before rolling out to customer cars. I suspect the reason we haven’t heard of an ETA from Tesla and why Elon Musk has stopped responding to Tweets regarding V11 is that they simply don’t know how long this will take.
While rare and while the driver is still absolutely responsible for taking over when the software does something wrong, Tesla would be in a much better state if they can understand when and why this happens and work through a solution to reliably solve for it.
Tesla’s solution is complex, firstly the cameras capture the world around the car. It’s likely this layer is ok, as the perception of signs, traffic lights, and lane markings are all generally perceived well, but not perfectly. We can’t, unfortunately, take examples from Australia that don’t have FSD Beta and compare, as we don’t have access to the latest code, so the fact our cars may no recognise a variable speed sign, isn’t confirmation they can’t perceive the world with enough detail.
Assuming the environment around the car is understood, it is then the planner’s responsibility to navigate the car through drivable space and obey any local road rules. I believe this is the source of the issue regarding a number of the items on the list above.
Tesla’s 2023 Investor Day
0:00:00 – Preshow
0:29:09 – Intro Part 1 | Master Plan 3
0:31:24 – Master Plan 3 Part 2 | Executing Master Plan 3
0:58:21 – Vehicle Design with Franz Von Holzhausen & Lars Moravy
1:10:43 – Powertrain with Colin Campbell
1:19:17 – Electronic Architecture with Pete Bannon
1:27:53 – Software with David Lau
1:38:20 – Full Self-Driving with Ashok Elluswamy
1:48:12 – Bot Update with Elon Musk and Ashok Elluswamy
1:53:41 – Charging with Rebecca Tinucci
2:02:04 – Supply Chain with Karn Budhiraj & Roshan Thomas
2:23:07 – Manufacturing with Tom Zhu & Drew Baglino
2:36:15 – Energy with Drew Baglino & Mike Snyder Part 3 | Impact at Tesla
2:49:06 – Impact with Laurie Shelby and Brandon Ehrheart
2:55:42 – Financials with Zach Kirkhorn Q&A
3:21:24 – New Gigafactory Location Announcement
3:23:20 – Q&A
If you’ve got thoughts about what was and wasn’t announced during the 2023 Investor Day, please leave a comment below.
