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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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Solar and wind projects will take the most heat, but the document leaves open the possibility for damage to spread far and wide.
It’s still too soon to know just how damaging the Interior Department’s political review process for renewables permits will be. But my reporting shows there’s no scenario where the blast radius doesn’t hit dozens of projects at least — and it could take down countless more.
Last week, Interior released a memo that I was first to report would stymie permits for renewable energy projects on and off of federal lands by grinding to a halt everything from all rights-of-way decisions to wildlife permits and tribal consultations. At minimum, those actions will need to be vetted on a project-by-project basis by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the office of the Interior deputy secretary — a new, still largely undefined process that could tie up final agency actions in red tape and delay.
For the past week, I’ve been chatting with renewables industry representatives and their supporters to get their initial reactions on what this latest blow from the Trump administration will do to their business. The people I spoke with who were involved in development and investment were fearful of being quoted, but the prevailing sense was of near-total uncertainty, including as to how other agencies may respond to such an action from a vital organ of the federal government’s environmental review process.
The order left open the possibility it could also be applied to any number of projects “related to” solar and wind — a potential trip-wire for plans sited entirely on private lands but requiring transmission across Bureau of Land Management property to connect to the grid. Heatmap Pro data shows 96 renewable energy projects that are less than 7 miles away from federal lands, making them more likely to need federal approval for transmission or road needs, and another 47 projects that are a similar distance away from critical wildlife habitat. In case you don’t want to do the math, that’s almost 150 projects that may hypothetically wind up caught in this permitting pause, on top of however many solar and wind projects that are already in its trap.
At least 35 solar projects and three wind projects — Salmon Falls Wind in Idaho and the Jackalope and Maestro projects in Wyoming — are under federal review, according to Interior’s public data. Advocates for renewable energy say these are the projects that will be the most crucial test cases to watch.
“Unfortunately they’ll be the guinea pigs,” said Mariel Lutz, a conservation policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, who today released a report outlining the scale of job losses that could occur in the wind sector under Trump. “The best way to figure out what this means is to have people and projects try or not try various things and see what happens.”
The data available is largely confined to projects under National Environmental Policy Act review, however. In my conversations with petrified developers this past week, it’s abundantly clear no one really knows just how far-reaching these delays may become. Only time will tell.
We’re looking at battles brewing in New York and Ohio, plus there’s a bit of good news in Virginia.
1. Idaho — The LS Power Lava Ridge wind farm is now facing a fresh assault, this time from Congress — and the Trump team now seems to want a nuclear plant there instead.
2. Suffolk County, New York — A massive fish market co-op in the Bronx is now joining the lawsuit to stop Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project, providing anti-wind activists a powerful new ally in the public square.
3. Madison County, New York — Elsewhere in New York, a solar project upstate seems to be galvanizing opposition to the state’s permitting primacy law.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio — A trench war is now breaking out over National Grid Renewables’ Carnation Solar project, as opponents win a crucial victory at the county level.
5. El Paso County, Colorado — I don’t write about Colorado often, but this situation is an interesting one.
6. St. Joseph County, Indiana — Something interesting is playing out in this county that demonstrates how it can be quite complicated to navigate municipal and county-level permitting.
7. Albemarle County, Virginia — It’s rare I get to tell a positive story about Virginia, but today we have one: It is now easier to build a solar farm in the county home to Charlottesville, one of my personal favorite small cities in our country.
Getting local with Matthew Eisenson of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
This week’s conversation is with Matthew Eisenson at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Eisenson is a legal expert and pioneer in the field of renewable energy community engagement whose work on litigating in support of solar and wind actually contributed to my interest in diving headlong into this subject after we both were panelists at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference last year. His team at the Sabin Center recently released a report outlining updates to their national project tracker, which looks at various facility-level conflicts at the local level.
On the eve of that report’s release earlier this month, Eisenson talked to me about what he believes are the best practices that could get more renewable projects over the finish line in municipal permitting fights. Oh — and we talked about Ohio.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So first of all, walk me through your report. How has the community conflict over renewable energy changed in the U.S. over the past year?
A few things I would highlight. In Ohio, we now have 26 out of 88 counties that have established restricted areas where wind or solar are prohibited. These restrictions are explicitly enabled by the state law, SB 52. I’d also highlight that while the majority of litigation in our database is state-level litigation and contested case administrative proceedings, there are certain types of projects — particularly offshore wind — that have an extremely high prevalence of federal litigation. A majority of federally permitted offshore wind projects have been subject to federal lawsuits. The plaintiffs in these lawsuits have never succeeded on the merits, but they keep filing them and they drive up costs.
In general, as a topline takeaway, [our] report shows more and more of the same.
You personally do quite a bit of legal work on solar and wind permitting battles in the state of Ohio, where as you noted counties are curtailing deployment left and right. What’s your bird’s eye view of the situation in the state right now?
So Ohio has for years had a state-level siting process. The Ohio Power Siting Board reviews all applications for large-scale energy generation facilities, 50 megawatts or larger. The Siting Board has a set of criteria they are required to apply when they are reviewing an application, but basically only one of them seems to matter in deciding whether a project is approved or denied: whether the project serves the public’s convenience and necessity.
We’re seeing that in the majority of proceedings for approvals of large-scale wind and solar projects, there will be groups that intervene in opposition to the project, and often these groups will argue that there is so much local opposition that the project cannot possibly serve the public interest.
The Power Siting Board has been rejecting that argument in important cases recently. The board is still putting substantial weight on whether local governments are supportive or not supportive of a project, but are not rejecting projects just because of a demonstration of local opposition.
Say you’re a developer and you start facing opposition. What is the right legal avenue? How should they do the calculus, so to speak, on how to navigate legal options?
There’s numerous things developers can do. They can work with the local government and community-based groups to work with the local government to craft host community agreements, community benefit agreements — voluntary but binding contracts with the local community where a developer provides benefits; in exchange, community-based groups would agree to support the project, or at least not to oppose it. These can be very helpful and particularly meaningful in places where a local government itself is not in charge of permitting decisions themselves. So in a state like Ohio, if a developer negotiates host benefit agreements with local township governments and then those governments don’t turn around to intervene against a project, those would be extremely helpful.
It’s also important for developers to do community outreach and build a base of local supporters, and get those supporters to turn out at public meetings. Historically opponents of projects are more motivated to show up at a local meeting than supporters, but it’s really not a good look for a project when you have 500 turn out against it and 10 turn out to support.
For years the opponents were very proactive. There would be a proposal for a project in one county in Kansas and a group of opponents in the neighboring county would propose a restrictive ordinance to block future projects — supporters weren’t thinking proactively in the long-term. I think a concentrated effort will produce meaningful results. But they’re behind.