Tesla shareholders have a long list of questions about failed promises for TSLA earnings

Tesla shareholders have voted for the questions they want to ask Elon Musk and Tesla’s management at the upcoming earning results this week. The questions have something in common: they are primarily about failed promises.

It should be interesting to see Elon Musk skate around all those questions.

Tesla is going to release its Q4 2024 and full-year 2024 financial results on Wednesday after market close.

After the release of the results, Tesla will hold a conference call where it will take questions from Wall Street analysts and Tesla shareholders.

The shareholders can vote on the questions to be asked on the Say Technologies platform.

Here, I’ve included a list of the most upvoted questions, and I’ve found a common thread: most of them involve failed promises.

Unsurprisingly, the first question is about “unsupervised full self-driving” (FSD). It’s on top of most Tesla shareholders’ minds as CEO Elon Musk himself claims that Tesla is worthless if it can’t deliver on self-driving – something Musk said would happen by the end of every year for the past 5 years.

Musk’s latest timeline for unsupervised FSD was communicated during Tesla’s last earnings when he claimed Tesla would launch “unsupervised FSD in California and Texas around Q2 2025”.

With the timeline approaching fast, shareholders are asking whether or not it’s still happening:

Is unsupervised FSD still planned to be released in Texas and California this year? What hurdles still exist to make this happen?

As we recently reported, the latest data about FSD shows that Tesla is at fewer than 500 miles between critical disengagement, while the head of the FSD program recently said that unsupervised should achieve a disengagement equivalent to the human collision rate: 1 every 670,000 miles.

It’s also possible that Tesla will release a smaller geo-fenced fleet of self-driving vehicles instead of its broader promised unsupervised self-driving for its customer fleet. In that case, it would require lesser performance, but it would still need a roughly 50x increase over the current performance.

The second most upvoted question is about Optimus:

When will Tesla start selling Optimus and price?

Last year, Musk said that Tesla should use its Optimus humanoid robot more inside the company in 2025 and sell it to third parties in 2026.

The next question is about Musk giving equity access in his private companies to Tesla shareholders:

Elon has said publicly that long term shareholders of Tesla will have the ability to invest in his other companies. Could you provide some clarity/color as to what that looks like? Brokerage firms use FIFO so anyone who trades won’t have the true length of time as investor.

That’s something that he has been talking about for years with SpaceX, but he never made it happen.

Tesla shareholders are also upvoting a question about making FSD transfer permanent:

Can you please tie purchased FSD to our owner accounts vs. locked to the car? This will help us enjoy it in any Tesla we drive/buy and reward us for hanging in so long, some of us since 2017.

This has been asked several times on Tesla earnings call and Musk has always said no. He prefers using a “transfer window” as demand triggers rather than doing the right thing and letting people transfer the software package that they paid for, but Tesla never fully delivers.

I wrote a whole article about this last weekend, explaining how Tesla is doing the wrong thing here.

The next question is about cheaper Tesla vehicles:

Is there a new affordable Tesla model coming soon?

This is something Tesla has been promising for years, but Musk has steered Tesla away from it. He canceled Tesla’s planned “$25,000 model” – saying that it was useless amid self-driving.

Over the last few years, he had Tesla focused on the Cybertruck and Robotaxi instead.

More recently, Tesla had to course correct amid declining sales and they announced two new cheaper models based on Model 3 and Model Y that are supposed to come in the first half of 2025. That appears to be what the shareholders want an update on with this question.

Next, they want to know the status of the Tesla Semi:

What is the status on mass production of the Tesla Semi? How do you project it will affect revenue at scale?

Tesla Semi is one of Tesla’s most delayed vehicle programs. It was first unveiled in 2017 and it was supposed to go into production in 2020. It then entered into a low-volume pilot production in late 2022, and it is only now expected to go into volume production next year.

The start of production at the new factory for the electric truck is expected by the end of 2025.

The next question is about HW3 computers:

Is it expected that Tesla will need to upgrade HW3 vehicles and if so, what is the timeline and expected impact to Tesla’s CapEx?

For almost a year, we have been reporting that HW3 computers have reached their limits. At the last earnings call, Musk finally admitted it might be true.

Since then, HW3 vehicles have fallen further behind HW4 vehicles, but there’s no plan for a retrofit in sight.

The last question asked whether Tesla is giving up on the solar roof:

Has Tesla given up on ramping their solar roof product?

That’s a fair question. Musk once said that Tesla would produce 1,000 new solar roofs per week by the end of 2019, but by 2022, our data pointed to about 23 solar roofs per week.

Tesla has since stopped even reporting its solar deployment.

Electrek’s Take

I predict that Tesla will double down on Optimus with this earnings call and/or announce or unveil their cheaper vehicles.

Optimus gets a lot of flak, but I think Tesla can solve humanoid robots before it can solve self-driving. There’s value in humanoid robots, not nearly as much as Elon claims, as it is often the case, but I think they will start leaning more on that to wow investors than self-driving.

The only other things that meaningfully drive earnings are cheaper vehicles. Tesla previously said that those would launch in the first half of 2025 so they are basically due to be unveiled. I would expect something to be announced on that front.