2 truths and a lie from Tesla’s earnings call
Elon Musk was a little more straightforward on this earnings call, but is still Musk.
On the company’s earnings call yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk struck a markedly down-to-earth tone for someone better known for promising the stars.
He was more hesitant than usual about providing timelines for Tesla’s upcoming projects and a bit more clear-eyed about the effort it would take to reach the company’s ambitious goals.
✅ For example, when asked about expanding Robotaxi to Europe, Musk said, “We’re probably jumping the gun here on Robotaxi in Europe since it took us an immense amount of time just to get supervised self-driving approved in Europe.”
He added, sounding almost un-Musk-like, “We push as hard as we can, but it’s ultimately up to the governments in Europe and the EU to decide what to do.”
And after years of promises to the contrary, Musk acquiesced to what everyone else already seemed to understand about Tesla’s older vehicles: they won’t become autonomous without major hardware upgrades.
✅ “I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD [Full Self-Driving],” he said.
Of course, the more familiar Musk wasn’t entirely absent. He also appeared to make a claim about Robotaxi safety that doesn’t line up with federal data.
❌ “We don’t want to have a single accident or injury with the expansion of Robotaxi,” Musk said in his opening remarks. “And we have, to the credit of the team, not had a single one to date.”
Later on, when asked about the prospect of removing the ubiquitous safety monitor sitting in the front seat on Robotaxi rides, Vice President of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy reiterated, “So far we have zero incidents, and that’s what NHTSA filing also shows.”
The thing is, that isn’t what the data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has a standing order for autonomous and semi-autonomous car service companies to report accidents, shows. The filing lists 15 crashes in Austin so far. (The reporting doesn’t cover the Bay Area, where Tesla Robotaxis have a traditional human driver using supervised FSD.) The incidents mostly involve property damage, with a few minor injuries, but they are crashes no less.
It’s possible that Musk was referring to crashes since Robotaxi expanded to Dallas and Houston on Monday with two vehicles, but that seems like a strange thing to brag about.
The NHTSA hasn’t yet replied to a request for comment on Musk and Elluswamy’s remarks, nor has Tesla replied with an explanation.
