tesla

Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings beat looks impressive on the surface — 21.1% gross margin, 136% operating income growth, $0.41 non-GAAP EPS. But dig into the shareholders’ letter and a pattern emerges: Tesla pulled every accounting and financial lever available to make a stagnant quarter look like a turnaround.

One-time warranty reserve releases, tariff refund windfalls, stretched supplier payments, and new debt all contributed to headline numbers that mask a fundamental problem — Tesla’s core auto business isn’t growing.

Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the first quarter (Q1) 2026 after market close today.

We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight. Refresh for the latest information.

Tesla (TSLA) will release its first-quarter 2026 financial results tomorrow (April 22) after the market close, with a conference call to follow. Despite leadership continuing to push the narrative that Tesla is now an “AI and robotics company,” the automotive business still drives the vast majority of Tesla’s financial performance.

Let’s look at what Wall Street and retail investors are expecting.

Tesla announced today that its “Robotaxi” service is now rolling out in Dallas and Houston, marking the company’s first expansion beyond Austin and San Francisco. The company shared maps of the two new service areas, which appear to cover small slices of each city.

The Houston geofence covers approximately 25 square miles, according to early user analysis of the maps, while the Dallas zone appears to center around the Highland Park area. For context, Tesla’s Austin geofence has grown to roughly 245 square miles after months of gradual expansion — but that took nearly a year to reach from an initial 20-square-mile footprint.

A Texas Tesla owner says he punched the accelerator to outrun an oncoming train after his car on “Full Self-Driving” drove itself through a lowered railroad crossing arm as the train closed in on the tracks.

Joshua Brown, who says he has logged more than 40,000 miles using Tesla’s driver assist, described the incident as the first time FSD has ever “let me down.”

New photos of the Rivian R2 parked next to the Tesla Model Y are making the rounds on social media, and they offer a great look at how these two critical electric SUVs actually compare in size. The R2 is shorter in length but noticeably taller, with a boxier, more rugged profile.

We decided to dig into the numbers and put together a full dimension-by-dimension breakdown — and the efficiency comparison is where things get really interesting.

Tesla China has denied a Reuters report claiming the automaker is developing a new compact electric SUV. The denial comes just one day after we reported on the original Reuters exclusive citing four sources.

The denial was reported by Chinese financial wire Cailian Press (财联社), a major and well-established Chinese business news service. Tesla China told the outlet that “market information claiming that Tesla is developing a new, smaller, and cheaper electric SUV is inaccurate.”

Elon Musk claimed this week that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” is so much safer than human drivers that it could save 90% of the roughly one million lives lost in car crashes globally each year — a 10X improvement in safety.

The problem is that Tesla has never released the data that would support anything close to that claim, and Musk is already using it to pre-frame the lawsuits Tesla is facing over FSD crashes as an unavoidable cost of progress.

Tesla released its Q1 2026 production and delivery results today, confirming 358,023 vehicle deliveries — about 7,600 units below the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 vehicles.

More concerning than the miss itself is the gap between production and deliveries. Tesla produced 408,386 vehicles during the quarter but only delivered 358,023, adding over 50,000 vehicles to inventory in a single quarter.

Elon Musk announced that Tesla is coming out with ‘something cooler than a minivan’ when pressed by fans for a vehicle with more passenger capacity.

However, we should temper our expectations as Tesla is greatly limiting new vehicle programs amid its transition into a ‘transportation as a service’ company.

NHTSA has escalated its investigation into Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system’s inability to handle reduced visibility conditions, upgrading the probe to an Engineering Analysis covering an estimated 3,203,754 vehicles — the step that typically precedes a recall.

The agency found that FSD’s degradation detection system fails to warn drivers when cameras are blinded by common road conditions like sun glare and fog, and that Tesla may be under-reporting related crashes.

Tesla has wiped its entire Canadian Model 3 inventory, and according to sources familiar with the matter, the automaker sent the US-built units back to the United States.

The move comes as Canada officially opened its new Chinese EV import program on March 1, allowing up to 49,000 Chinese-built electric vehicles into the country at a drastically reduced 6.1% tariff, down from the 100% surtax that had blocked imports since 2024.

Tesla registered 17,425 vehicles across 15 major European markets in February 2026, a 10% increase compared to February 2025. It’s the first meaningful year-over-year growth Tesla has posted in Europe in over a year.

But let’s put this in context: Tesla is comparing against Q1 2025, which was a total bloodbath for the automaker in Europe. And despite the February bump, Tesla’s year-to-date registrations are essentially flat, 25,451 units in January-February 2026 versus 25,474 in the same period last year.

Tesla has launched the seven-seat option for the Model Y Juniper in Europe, adding a €2,500 third-row option to the Long Range All-Wheel Drive configuration. Deliveries are expected to begin in April.

The problem is that no one was really asking for this. The Model Y’s third row remains comically small, and with the stretched Model YL, which has an actual usable third row, in China, the timing of this launch is questionable at best.

A federal judge has rejected Tesla’s bid to overturn a $243 million jury verdict over a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash in Florida, dealing a significant blow to the automaker’s legal strategy as it faces a growing wave of lawsuits tied to its driver-assistance technology.

U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom in Miami ruled that the evidence at trial “more than supported” the verdict and that Tesla raised no new arguments to justify setting it aside. The ruling, made public on Friday, means Tesla’s last hope to avoid paying the massive judgment at the trial court level has been exhausted.

Tesla just launched the most compelling version of the Cybertruck it has ever offered — a dual-motor all-wheel-drive model starting at $59,990, and CEO Elon Musk is already signaling that it won’t last.

In a post on X, Musk responded to the announcement of the new AWD Cybertruck with a cryptic but damning three words: “Only for the next 10 days.”

Elon Musk has reiterated his claim that Tesla will sell the Cybercab directly to consumers for under $30,000 before the end of the year, following the first production unit rolling off the line at Giga Texas on February 17. The announcement immediately set Tesla fans ablaze, not with discussions about the vehicle’s autonomy challenges, but with AI-generated images of YouTuber Marques Brownlee sporting a freshly shaved head.

Calm down, everyone. You almost certainly won’t get to see MKBHD’s bare head.

Tesla filed new comments with the California Public Utilities Commission that amount to a quiet admission: its “Robotaxi” service still relies on both in-car human drivers and domestic remote operators to function. Rather than downplaying these dependencies, Tesla leans into them — arguing that its multi-layered human supervision model is more reliable than Waymo’s fully driverless system, pointing to the December 2025 San Francisco blackout as proof.

The filing, submitted February 13 in CPUC Rulemaking 25-08-013, reveals the massive operational gap between what Tesla calls a “Robotaxi” and what Waymo actually operates as one.

A Tesla owner says his car tried to drive him into a lake while using the automaker’s latest “Full Self-Driving” software. The incident, captured on video and posted to social media, has gone viral with over 1 million views, adding to a growing list of dangerous FSD edge cases that raise serious questions about the system’s readiness.

Tesla has launched its first vehicle-to-grid (V2G) program in the United States, starting in select Texas markets. The “Powershare Grid Support” program allows Cybertruck owners to discharge their truck’s massive 123 kWh battery, equivalent to roughly nine Powerwalls, back to the grid during high-demand events and earn bill credits in return.

The announcement, made by Tesla Energy on social media, marks a significant milestone for a company that has been promising bidirectional charging capabilities for years but has consistently delayed delivering them across its vehicle lineup.