Tesla has confirmed that production of its next generation electric vehicle, using a revolutionary new manufacturing process, will commence in the second half of 2025.
“I don’t want to blow your minds, but I’m often optimistic regarding time.” said CEO Elon Musk during the Q4 earnings call on Thursday morning (Australia time).
“But our current schedule says that we will start production towards the end of 2025.”
The CEO went to great lengths to express the scale of step change in manufacturing technology that Tesla is currently developing for the next generation model which was outlined during Tesla’s Investor Day last year. Tesla says its “Unboxed Process” will reduce production cost by a staggering 50% to below $US20,000 per vehicle.
“This is a revolutionary manufacturing system, far more advanced than any other automotive manufacturing system in the world. Like by by a significant margin.” said Musk during the call.
Musk was asked why Tesla decided to move initial production of the new vehicle from the Mexico plant to the Austin Gigafactory, he said:
“The reason I want to put this new, revolutionary manufacturing line at Giga Texas is because we really need the engineers to be living on the line.”
“I am confident that once it is going, it will be head and shoulders above any other manufacturing technology that exists anywhere in the world. It’s next level.”
Tesla reports record production in Q4 2023
Tesla reported production of 494,989 electric vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2023 representing an annualised production rate of almost 2 million EVs and a 12% increase over the same quarter in 2022.
“Looking at just the Fremont factory alone, we made 560,000 cars.” said Musk. “This is a record, in fact it’s the highest output of any automotive plants in North America.”
“People are often surprised that the highest output car factory in North America is in the San Francisco Bay area.”
“What would have been a rundown strip mall is the highest productivity plant in the Americas.” said Musk. “It was derelict when we got it, and now it’s the most productive plant.”
Tesla also confirmed its Model Y became the best selling car in the world in 2023 with 1.2 million deliveries. The company’s energy storage deployments reached 14.7 GWh in 2023 which was double the capacity produced in 2022. Tesla aims to deliver 250,000 Cybertrucks in North America this year focusing on increasing production capacity to fill huge demand.
The company reported record revenue and cashflow in 2023 with $US8.9B in GAAP operating income for the year and $US2.1B in Q4 alone.
Full Self Driving
Elon Musk also highlighted Tesla’s AI advancements in 2023 reiterating its release of FSD 12 which was a complete architectural rewrite compared to previous versions. Regarding FSD software the company says the new software rewrite replaced 330,000 lines of code with neural networks.
“Nothin’ but nets. Photons in and controls out” said Musk referring to Tesla’s vision based approach to autonomous driving with neural network AI software.
“This is end-to-end artificial intelligence.”
“I think that Tesla is probably the most efficient company in the world for AI inference. Out of necessity we’ve actually had to be extremely good at getting the most out of hardware.”
Forecast between major growth waves.
Tesla’s CFO Vaibhav Taneja said they expect periods of slower growth rates due to the company’s current development phase.
“We are between two major growth waves, the first one began with the global expansion of Model 3 and Y and we believe the next one will be initiated with the next generation platform.” said Taneja.
“In 2024 our volume growth will be lower as we have said, because we’re trying to focus the team on the launch of the next generation vehicle.”
Daniel Bleakley is a clean technology researcher and advocate with a background in engineering and business. He has a strong interest in electric vehicles, renewable energy, manufacturing and public policy.