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And four more things we learned from Tesla’s Q1 earnings call.
Tesla doesn’t want to talk about its cars — or at least, not about the cars that have steering wheels and human drivers.
Despite weeks of reports about Tesla’s manufacturing and sales woes — price cuts, recalls, and whether a new, cheaper model would ever come to fruition — CEO Elon Musk and other Tesla executives devoted their quarterly earnings call largely to the company's autonomous driving software. Musk promised that the long-awaited program would revolutionize the auto industry (“We’re putting the actual ‘auto’ in automobile,” as he put it) and lead to the “biggest asset appreciation in history” as existing Tesla vehicles got progressively better self-driving capabilities.
In other Tesla news, car sales are falling, and a new, cheaper vehicle will not be constructed on an all-new platform and manufacturing line, which would instead by reserved for a from-the-ground-up autonomous vehicle.
Here are five big takeaways from the company's earnings and conference call.
The company reported that its “total automotive revenues” came in at $17.4 billion in the first quarter, down 13% from a year ago. Its overall revenues of $21.3 billion, meanwhile, were down 9% from a year ago. The earnings announcement included a number of explanations for the slowdown, which was even worse than Wall Street analysts had expected.
Among the reasons Tesla cited for the disappointing results were arson at its Berlin factory, the obstruction to Red Sea shipping due to Houthi attacks from Yemen, plus a global slowdown in electric vehicle sales “as many carmakers prioritize hybrids over EVs.” The combined effects of these unfortunate events led the company to undertake a well-publicized series of price cuts and other sweeteners for buyers, which dug further into Tesla’s bottom line. Tesla’s chief financial officer, Vaibhav Taneja, said that the company’s free cash flow was negative more than $2 billion, largely due to a “mismatch” between its manufacturing and actual sales, which led to a buildup of car inventory.
The bad news was largely expected — the company’s shares had fallen 40% so far this year leading up to the first quarter earnings, and the past few weeks have featured a steady drumbeat of bad news from the automaker, including layoffs and a major recall. The company’s profits of $1.1 billion were down by more than 50%, short of Wall Street’s expectations — and yet still, Tesla shares were up more than 10% in after-hours trading following the shareholder update and earnings call.
The strange thing about Tesla is that it makes the overwhelming majority of its money from selling cars, but has become the world’s most valuable car company thanks to investors thinking that it’s more of an artificial intelligence company. It’s not uncommon for Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his executives to start talking about their Full Self-Driving technology and autonomous driving goals when the company’s existing business has hit a rough patch, and today was no exception.
Tesla’s value per share was about 33 times its earnings per share by the end of trading on Monday, comparable to how investors evaluate software companies that they expect to grow quickly and expand profitability in the future. Car companies, on the other hand, tend to have much lower valuations compared to their earnings — Ford’s multiple is 12, for instance, and GM’s is 6.
Musk addressed this gap directly on the company’s earnings call. He said that Tesla “should be thought of as an AI/robotics company,” and that “if you value Tesla as an auto company, that’s the wrong framework.” To emphasize just how much the company is pivoting around its self-driving technology, Musk said that “if somebody believes Tesla is not going to solve autonomy they should not be an investor in the company.”
One reason investors value Tesla so differently relative to its peers is that they do, actually, expect the company will make a lot of money using artificial intelligence. No doubt with that in mind, executives made sure to let everyone know that its artificial intelligence spending was immense: The company’s free cash flow may have been negative more than $2 billion, but $1 billion of that was in spending on AI infrastructure. The company also said that it had “increased AI training compute by more than 130%” in the first quarter.
“The future is not only electric, but also autonomous,” the company’s investor update said. “We believe scaled autonomy is only possible with data from millions of vehicles and an immense AI training cluster. We have, and continue to expand, both.”
Musk described the company’s FSD 12 self-driving software as “profound” and said that “it’s only a matter of time before we exceed the reliability of humans, and not much time at that.”
The biggest open question about Tesla is what would happen with its long-promised Model 2, a sub-$30,000 EV that would, in theory, have mass appeal. Reuters reported that the project had been cancelled and that Tesla was instead devoting its resources to another long-promised project, a self-driving ride-hailing vehicle called the “robotaxi.”
Musk tweeted that Reuters was “lying” but never directly denied the report or identified what was wrong with it, instead saying that the robotaxi would be unveiled in August. He later followed up to say that “going balls to the wall for autonomy is a blindingly obvious move. Everything else is like variations on a horse carriage.”
Before the call, Wall Street analysts were begging for a confirmation that newer, cheaper models besides a robotaxi were coming.
“If Tesla does not come out with a Model 2 the next 12 to 18 months, the second growth wave will not come,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note last week. “Musk needs to recommit to the Model 2 strategy ALONG with robotaxis but it CANNOT be solely replaced by autonomy.”
Anyone who expected to get their answers on today’s call, though, was likely kidding themselves.
Tesla announced today it had updated its planned vehicle line-up to “accelerate the launch of new models ahead of our previously communicated start of production in the second half of 2025,” and that “these new vehicles, including more affordable models, will utilize aspects of the next generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms.” Musk added on the company’s earnings call that a new model would not be “contingent on any new factory or massive new production line.”
Some analysts attributed the share pricing popping after hours to this line, although it’s unclear just how new this new car would be.
Tesla’s shareholder update indicated that any new, cheaper vehicle would not necessarily be entirely new nor unlock massive new savings through an all-new production process. “This update may result in achieving less cost reduction than previously expected but enables us to prudently grow our vehicle volumes in a more capex efficient manner during uncertain times,” the update said.
Of the robotaxi, meanwhile, the company said it will “continue to pursue a revolutionary ‘unboxed’ manufacturing strategy,” indicating that just the ride-hailing vehicle would be built entirely on a new platform.
Musk also discussed how a robotaxi network could work, saying that it would be a combination of Tesla-operated robotaxis and owners putting their own cars into the ride-hailing fleet. When asked directly about its schedule for a $25,000 car, Musk quickly pivoted to discussing autonomy, saying that when Teslas are able to self-drive without supervision, it will be “the biggest asset appreciation in history,” as existing Teslas became self-driving.
When asked whether any new vehicles would “tweaks” or “new models,” Musk dodged the question, saying that they had said everything they had planned to say on the new cars.
One bright spot on the company’s numbers was the growth in its sales of energy systems, which are tilting more and more toward the company’s battery offerings.
Tesla said it deployed just over 4 gigawatts of energy storage in the first quarter of the year, and that its energy revenue was up 7% from a year ago. Profits from the business more than doubled.
Tesla’s energy business is growing faster than its car business, and Musk said it will continue to grow “significantly faster than the car business” going forward.
Revenues from “services and others,” which includes the company’s charging network, was up by a quarter, as more and more other electric vehicle manufacturers adopt Tesla’s charging standard.
Another speculative Tesla project is Optimus, which the company describes as a “general purpose, bi-pedal, humanoid robot capable of performing tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring.” Like many robotics projects, the most the public has seen of Optimus has been intriguing video content, but Musk said that it was doing “factory tasks in the lab” and that it would be in “limited production” in a factory doing “useful tasks” by the end of this year. External sales could begin “by the end of next year,” Musk said.
But as with any new Tesla project, these dates may be aspirational. Musk described them as “just guesses,” but also said that Optimus could “be more valuable than everything else combined.”
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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.