Tesla Shareholder Meeting June 11, 2019 Full 2019 Tesla annual shareholder meeting: Musk on demand, the Model Y ramp, full self-driving hardware, the coming pickup truck and a European Gigafactory, then shareholder Q&A.
Full 2019 Tesla annual shareholder meeting: Musk on demand, the Model Y ramp, full self-driving hardware, the coming pickup truck and a European Gigafactory, then shareholder Q&A.
Transcript Check, check. Okay, first I gotta take a picture real quick. What a group. Hang on.
All right, everyone's looking sharp. And then one of the board.
All right. Cheese. One, two, three. There you go. I could do a selfie too, but let's not. I appreciate that. All right, as a reminder, if you haven't voted by proxy or would like to change your vote, you may do so by picking up a ballot at the table. Table's back there in the corner over there. Once you've completed the ballot, please hand it to Lisa Brenton. Lisa, can you please raise your hand? There's Lisa. She's over by the table over there. Computer chair. She's our inspector of elections. What I'd like to do is first welcome Robin Denholm, our chair. She's going to give us some opening remarks.
Thanks, Jonathon, and welcome. And good afternoon to everybody joining us here live in the auditorium here, but also online. So thank you. Following the formal part of the presentation, or some might say the more normal or boring part of the presentation, Elon will join us to actually go through a presentation as well. Well, which I'm sure all of you are looking forward to. In addition, I'd like to thank and note several people that are in the audience. Our board is in the audience, or many members of the board are here. And I'd also like to mention the number of executives from Tesla are also here in the room as well. I'm sorry, I promised myself I would not do that today. And finally, Kevin Healy from PricewaterhouseCoopers is here. Tesla's independent auditor is in the room today. So after the voting, as I said, Elon will give a presentation about Tesla and answer questions. So the Q and A is always a highlight of the stockholders meeting. But I would like to start today's meeting by thanking you, our investors, our shareholders, for the tremendous support that you've given Tesla not just over the last 12 months, but also over the last many years. Without you, the progress that we're making as a company towards the mission of moving the world towards sustainable energy would not have happened. When you're changing the world and many industries in the process, you need to have a certain amount of intestinal fortitude as an investor. And when I speak to many of you, our shareholders, you have that in spades. So thank you. I am incredibly honoured to be your chair. And when I sit back and look at what the company is achieving, in particular over the last year with gap profitability for the second half of 2018 and over 245,000 vehicles delivered 245,000 five years ago, that would have just been a dream. And also over 1 gigawatt hour of energy storage deployed in 2018, breaking ground in Shanghai and many, many other achievements. I also take stock at this time of year to think about what we've achieved together over the last five years and over the last 15 years that many of you have been part of that journey as well. It's truly astonishing what the company has achieved. It's also easy to lose sight of that on a day to day basis. There are many highlights to come and the opportunity ahead of us as a company over the next 5, 10 and 15 years is immense. And I want to thank you all for being resilient shareholders and look forward to speaking to many more of you in the months and years to come. I also want to take this opportunity to thank two of our fabulous board members who are actually not standing standing for re election today. They are Brad Buss and Linda Johnson Rice. Linda has served on our board for only two years, but it's been a phenomenal two years for her contribution to us, not just as a member of the board, but also an active member of the compensation committee. And I'd also like to thank her for her amazingly positive attitude and her insights on many topics. And also Brad Buss, who who preceded me as the Audit Committee chair and has been on the board for almost 10 years and he's done amazing work across that entire time. His contributions to the board have been many and I can't list them all today, but it's been awesome to work with him and we will miss them both. And so now I'd like to reintroduce Jonathan Chang to go through the formal part of today's meeting. Thank you.
Thanks, Robin. Robin, our new chair has been doing some great, amazing work with our board and our company. So really appreciate all the work. Robin, I am the general Counsel at Tesla and this starts now. The. I think Robin referred to it as the boring part of the meeting. Often in my meetings she refers to me as the boring part of the meeting, but so this is it. So I'm well suited for it. Okay, let's get started by calling the Tesla's annual meeting of stockholders. To order, please refer to the agenda and the rules of the meeting that were provided for you today. The time is now 2:39pm and I declare that the polls are now open. We have already received over the past few weeks voting proxies from our stockholders and that means that almost all of the votes that will be counted will were already submitted prior to today, prior to this meeting. However, as I mentioned previously, if you wish to submit a ballot to vote your shares or change your prior vote, please pick one up at the table back in the corner by the last door over there and hand it to Lisa Brenton, who's standing there over by the table from Computer Share or any of the Tesla personnel collecting ballots. There's going to be some folks walking around. If you just raise your hand, you can wave them down with the ballots. I'll give a few minutes, few seconds while people go around and collect ballots here. Tesla's Board of Directors has appointed Lisa Breton of computershare to serve as Inspector of Election for this meeting. Lisa has taken and signed an oath as the Inspector of election. Thanks, Lisa. Computershare has certified that starting on April 30, 2019, the proxy materials or a notice of Internet availability of the proxy materials were mailed or provided to all Tesla stockholders of record. As of April 15, 2019, we have a majority of the outstanding shares represented at the meeting. So I declare that there is a quorum present and that we may proceed with the meeting. The items on the agenda are as follows. The first proposal, the election of two Class 3 directors, Ira Aaron Prize and Kathleen Wilson Thompson to serve for a term of three years or if Proposal 5 of our agenda is approved, two years. Proposal 2. To approve Tesla's 2019 Equity Incentive Plan. Proposal 3, to approve Tesla's 2019 Employee Stock Purchase Plan. Proposal 4, to approve and adopt amendments to Tesla Certificate of Incorporation and Bylaws to eliminate applicable super majority voting requirements. Proposal five, to approve and adopt an amendment to Tesla Certificate of Incorporation to reduce the term length for directors. Proposal 6. To ratify the appointment of Price WaterhouseCoopers LLP as Tesla's independent registered public accounting firm for the 2019 fiscal year. Tesla's board has recommended that our stockholders vote for each of those Director Director nominees and for each of those proposals that I just listed above, we have also received two stockholder proposals as described in our proxy statement. The first stockholder proposal is an advisory vote to recommend that Tesla establish a public policy committee. Our board has recommended that our stockholders vote against this stockholder proposal. This stockholder proposal is proposed by Mr. Jing Zhao who is present today. He's here present with his proposal. Mr. Zhao, can you please identify yourself?
Please. Mr. Zhao, you have three minutes to present your proposal.
Shareholder
Thank you very much and good afternoon, fellow shareholders. I will make it very simple because today is too hot. So I want everybody to enjoy the meeting. Just one minute. Shareholder proposal number seven, resolved. Shareholders recommend that Tesla establish a public policy committee to oversee the company's policies, including human rights, environmental, domestic governmental regulation, foreign affairs and international relations affecting the company's business. And I especially thank you, fellow shareholders. Voted for my shareholder proposal last year for independent chairman. That's 16%. I expect you to vote for my proposal today. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Mr. Zhao. I would like to remind our stockholders that Tesla's board has prepared a statement in opposition of this proposal which appears in our proxy statement. Finally, we have also received a stockholder proposal for an advisory vote regarding simple majority voting provisions as described in our proxy statement. Our board has recommended that our stockholders vote against this proposal. This stockholder proposal is proposed by Mr. James McRichey, who is represented here again by Mr. Jing Zhao to present this proposal. Mr. Zhao, you have three minutes.
Shareholder
Thank you very much. Just one minute. Okay. The same thing before proposal number eight. Simple majority vote. Resolved. Tesla shareholders request that our board take each step necessary so that each voting requirement in our charter and bylaws that calls for greater than simple majority vote be eliminated and replaced by a requirement for majority of the votes cast for and against applicable proposals or a simple majority in compliance with applicable laws. Thank you very much. I make it very simple. Thank you. Enjoy.
Great. Thank you. Mr. Zhao. I would like to remind our stockholders that Tessa's board has prepared a statement in opposition to of this proposal which appears in our proxy statement. Are there any proxies remaining in the audience that have not been submitted? Keep your hands up and folks will come around and collect those ballots. Please submit them now if you want them to be counted. No. Okay, it looks like we have an all clear here. I declare that the polls are now closed. Based on the proxies that we have previously received, I'd like to announce that our stockholders have approved the recommendations of the Tesla board on all agenda Items except item 4 regarding the elimination of applicable supermajority voting requirements in our charter and bylaws, and Item 5, regarding the reduction of our director terms. While over 99% of the shares present and entitled to vote on these two items did so as recommended by the board, unfortunately, less than 2/3 or 66 and 2/3% less than that of our total outstanding shares which are required to approve of these items submitted votes. We will formally announce the results of the Voting by filing a Form 8K within four business days of today meeting. All right, that concludes the boring part of this meeting. The official business of today's shareholders meeting is done, which is now adjourned. I now welcome you to stay for the company presentation. We'll have Elon, our CEO coming out soon and then for a stockholder Q and a session with Elon as well. During the course of the session we may discuss our business outlook and make other forward looking statements. Such statements are predictions based on our current expectations. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those disclosed in our Most recent Form 10Q filed with the SEC. Such forward looking statements represent our views as of today, should not be relied upon thereafter and we disclaim any obligation to update them after today. With that, please welcome our CEO. Your CEO, Elon Musk.
Hello. Hey, thanks for coming. So I think we've got a lot of interesting news. I think it's going to be, I think well received. It's been a hell of a year, but a lot of good things are happening and I think it's worth going over those things. So model three, last four quarters is actually outselling all competitors combined in the U.S. so all of them. It's the highest revenue car in the US and best in class performance. And it's actually the best selling car by revenue, including high volume cars like the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord. So the dollar sales, Yeah, I think most people aren't aware of this, but we're about the fourth best selling by numbers, but the highest selling by revenue over the past year of any car in the US So that's remarkable that an electric vehicle is the best selling, highest revenue car in the country. I think 10 years ago nobody would have believed it. And thanks to the hard work, the Tesla team, this is a result. It's great. And as I said in class, the Model 3 is outselling the Mercedes C class, the BMW 3 series, Audi A4, S4 and the Lexus combined. That's in units. The difference is higher in dollars. So we also have the most energy efficient cars in the world. So this is the EPA miles per kilowatt hour and you can see the model 3 is at around 4 and then it ranges off to the right. I don't want to pick on the E Tron, but it's, you know, there's room for improvement. So Etron, If you speak French, that's, that's quite funny. So the new Model S is 370 mile range and you can go. We actually did this with Motor Trend. They drove nonstop from Bay Area to la. So admittedly that was downhill. Sort of. Not really. It feels downhill, but it's not. But on a single charge to go from the Bay Area to LA is pretty wild for any car and especially a full size sedan. And then the new model x range is 325 miles. Despite it being a large SUV. It's worth noting that no car has exceeded, no electric car has exceeded the range of the the first Model S that we came out with in 2012. And yeah, resisting the temptation to pick on competitors, I will not do that. But it's a testament to the Tesla engineering team to be able to have made a car seven years ago that has still not been exceeded in range. And now to have a car that's 370 miles and with steady improvements that are likely to occur over the next few years, it won't be long before we have a 400 mile range car. Yeah, So we get this question a lot and I want to be clear there is not a demand problem. It's absolutely not. Sales have far exceeded production and production's been pretty good. So we're actually doing well on. We have a decent shot at a record quarter on every level. If not, it's going to be very close. But we've got a shot at a record quarter and 90% of orders are coming from non reservation holders. So these are our new customers. Model 3 Market potential when we see trade ins, 63% of the trade ins are non premium cars, which means people are trading up to a Model 3. And 12% are mid sized sedans, 25% other premium vehicles. But it's just interesting that the super majority essentially of the cars that are being traded in are non premium. So it's just this is a lot of potential and when people look at, when people look at total cost of ownership, the actual total cost of ownership because electricity is so much cheaper than gasoline and the maintenance costs are much less, you don't need an oil change or filter change, you basically never need to change the brake pads because of regenerative braking. The actual operating costs of an electric car are much less than a gasoline car. And so it takes a while to educate people on this because the easiest thing to look at is just the lease price or the purchase price. But when factoring in fuel and maintenance, it's actually buying Model three is like buying a camera or an Accord. So better. Yes, better from a cost standpoint. Yeah, it's a great car. It's a car that is designed for you to have the most fun. And we keep putting gems on it like the Fart app, of course. That's one of my favorites. It's like perhaps my, perhaps my finest work. The Autonomy investor day that I think was well received. The Tesla full self driving computer is literally 20 times faster or 21 times faster than the Nvidia system that it replaces. And we expect to be feature complete with Autonomy by the end of this year. So, you know, you'll still need to supervise the Autonomy, but it should be able to go from your garage to your parking space at work without intervention. So then we'll obviously put on billions of miles of testing and then I think probably sometime next year you'll be able to have the car be autonomous without supervision. And then sometime thereafter we'll be able to convince regulators that the Autonomy is safe enough, that the car could actually go around with no one in it. And it's really the critical elements for that are having billions of miles of testing, ultimately tens of billions of miles. So having a huge fleet, having a very powerful AI inference engine, that's the Tesla full self driving computer, and then having the sensors in the car that are necessary for the car to drive, cameras in all directions, radar, ultrasonics, a good imu, gps, that kind of thing.
I think we've laid the groundwork here for a fleet that essentially every car made since October 16th is capable of full autonomy in our view, with a replacement of a computer alone. So you just need to switch out the computer. A lot of people were puzzled as to, how can I say that we would have like, you know, a million robotaxis by the end of next year. And it's if you sum up the vehicles made since October 16th and essentially switch out the computers for the ones that were made after the full self driving computer a few months ago, we will have a million cars that are capable of self driving. We'll still need regulatory approval, but the capability will be there. And this massively increases the value of the car. So in fact I think it's basically financially insane to buy anything except an electric car that is upgradable to autonomy. It's just nuts. You can see one country after another is putting dates on banning gasoline and diesel cars and the environmental pressure to move away from fossil fuels is getting stronger and stronger. So it's just basically mad to buy a fossil fuel powered car at this point because its long term resale value will be less and less and Then it's also important to buy a car that is upgradable, at least to full self driving, because a car that cannot do self driving will also be worth not very much. I've made this comment before, but essentially if you buy a gasoline car that's not full self driving, this is like riding a horse and using a flip phone. I'm like, hello, this is not wise. So it's really. It takes us a bit of time to educate consumers about this, but I think people are starting to get it. And a car is a major investment for most people. It's often their most valuable asset. And if you're going to make a choice about your most valuable asset, you want to look towards the future and say, where are we headed? Clearly we're headed towards electrification. Clearly we're headed towards autonomy. And so that's the kind of car you want to get. So I think people are starting to realize this then with the Model Y. This is the biggest segment of vehicles in the world is the midsize SUV. It's two and a half times bigger than the Model 3 market. And so we think probably demand for the Model Y will be greater than the S3 and X combined. And we put a lot of effort into the efficiency of the car getting incredibly low drag coefficient. And I think we might be able to get the drag coefficient actually lower than the three, which would be quite unusual. And the car has a lot of room inside. I think like a good sense of design or a good design principle is if the car looks bigger, it feels bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. That is a good design. So this car is actually quite big on the inside. And then we expect to hit volume production towards the end of next year. Internally, we're aiming for sooner than that, but we want to have some margin on that timing. So, yeah, I still find it crazy that we have this gigafactory that used to be just rocks. You know, rocks and bushes. And I remember JB and Drew. Hey, guys. Actually, you guys want to come up and join for a sec? Yeah, Yeah, I think it'd be good. You know, maybe you could talk about the gigafactory. And, you know, I remember when we were like doing the calculations for battery capacity and we're like, we need more batteries than all of Earth is currently producing. So it's. Unless we build this thing, that's not going to happen. So, yeah, I mean, maybe you tell the story.
Well, good to see everyone. Hello. Yeah, it was a pretty crazy story. And Elon And I were just talking about it recently, and it's sort of amazing how some really simple kind of napkin math could lead to such a kind of outrageous result. I mean, as you just said, we basically did the quick math and looked at, okay, we're going to build so many hundred thousand cars per year, and this many kilowatt hours per car, therefore, 35 gigawatt hours of cells per year. Well, that's a huge number. And it was actually more than the entire world was producing for all applications, cell phones, computers, cars, everything, just a few years before that. So that was what kind of shocked us and said, wow, this isn't going to work unless we build an entire new facility to solve this ourselves.
Yeah, we're probably not going to get all the battery factories in the world, so therefore, we better build this. And yeah, I mean, the crazy thing is this was basically, I think, five slides, and we showed a picture of a factory in the hills and said to investors, we need money to build this thing. And they gave us money, which is cool,
Yeah, we built it and it happened. There it is right there. It's really giant and it's getting bigger. So we have about 35 gigawatt hours of capacity potential at GIGA right now. And then we're about sort of 70 or 80% of that capacity has been realized.
I think there was a bit of confusion earlier this year because Panasonic said there was 35 and there's technically, yes, but it's not 35 at max capacity yet. But it will be probably, I don't know, end of this year or next, or early next. So. And then it's also lowest cost per kilowatt hour. It's half of all global EV battery production. So if you add up all the ev, all electric vehicles in the world, all the batteries that they use, that's approximately equal to what we make at the Gigafactory.
And maybe just a quick shout out to the whole team out there and the team that's made that happen. I mean, it's been such an epic project. I mean, as you said, starting with dirt, literally dirt in the desert, to now the biggest battery factory in the world. And it took thousands and thousands of people to do it. Kevin had a huge part in that sitting there. So, yeah, it's pretty amazing watching that happen. And I feel super proud to be part of that team.
Yeah. So. And then we're making good progress on the GIG Factory in Shanghai. If you've watched the progress online, it gets followed with an excruciating detail. I think the number of drones flying over the factory is pretty nutty. We need air traffic control, but the shell of the building is basically done at this point. I think this might be the. It's the fastest large factory construction that I've ever seen. And maybe there's something faster, but I'm not aware of it because this is amazing. And we're already installing a lot of the factory equipment, the stamping machines. We'll begin installing the paint shop and the battery module lines and that kind of thing. So this will be obviously extremely important to our future because China is the largest electric car market in the world. And to date we have had to pay import duties, sometimes quite significant ones, ranging from 15 to 40%. And we did not have access to local incentives because those are only if you make the car in China. Now the local incentives are going away, I think approximately when our factory starts. I think this is a coincidence,
at least we will not have the cost of the import duties and
will cost less to make the car in China, so we'll be able to have a more affordable car for the China market. So this is extremely important to Tesla's future. And then Gigafactory Europe, as you can see, we've made great progress here. We just put this picture in, like literally five minutes ago. Deep planning here. This is not the actual place that it will be. This is a generic picture of Europe.
People are going to try and reverse engineer exactly where that picture is.
I'm sure people could figure it out.
Yeah. Lovely factory there. I think it may be near Hamburg or something. But we're still looking at what the right place is to put Gigafactory Europe. Hopefully we'll make that decision towards the end of this year. And it also makes sense to have a car factory, at least on each continent. This is a wise move. We'll continue to expand, I think our activity in the us, but having to not pay tariffs and have a really long delivery chain and high transport costs will make the cars a lot more affordable to people in Europe and in China. So, yeah, we're looking forward to making a decision on this, hopefully towards the end of this year. And in Tesla Energy, we're looking at probably at least doubling energy storage growth for Powerwall and Power Pack compared to 2018. Internally, we have a bigger goal than that, but I think we can at least double it. And so it would be at least sort of on the order of two, maybe approaching 3 gigawatt hours and we're swollen the solar roof in eight states. We're about to complete version three of the solar roof. So this is actually quite a hard technology problem to have an integrated solar panel or solar cell with a roof tile and have it look good and last for 30 years. Like, roofs have to last a long time. So it is the amount of testing that one has to do and do accelerated life testing to say, how can we predict how this will perform if we just spend six months of testing and project that out to 30 years? So it's quite a hard problem and then making it easy to install, getting the costs low. But I'm really excited about version three of solar roof, and I don't want to be overconfident on this, but I think that we can. We have a shot at being equal to a comp shingle roof plus someone's utility costs or being maybe lower than that. So that's like one of the cheapest roofs available. So you can have potentially a great roof with better economics than a normal, fairly cheap roof and your utility bill. So if you can have like basically a better product at a lower price that is obviously will take off like crazy. So. But it is a hard problem to solve. Like many other companies have tried to solve this problem and they have not succeeded. But I think I'm feeling pretty good about this. You guys want to say anything about that?
Other
I would just say that the team is super motivated by that goal and we think we can achieve it. And we are. I mean, we are laser focused on achieving it.
Yeah. Actually, I've had a number of meetings with Drew. Like, bang the table, damn it. We've got to achieve this.
Other
Intention, intelligence, and invention. Make it happen.
Maybe we should actually introduce Drew properly. Yeah, actually, sure. Sorry, we kind of forgot to do that. Drew has been. This is your 14th year at Tesla, so Drew is not exactly a stranger. So Drew joined my team when it was a tiny, tiny team. There were like five or ten of us or something a couple years after the company got started. And he's been kind of, I don't know, my right hand person involved in almost every key initiative that I've done at the company through that whole tenure. And I think you're super amazing. I agree. I do think you guys should see more of Drew. And you've been involved in a lot of stuff and, and are still leading a lot of key initiatives for us. So anyway, introduction to Drew.
Other
Thank you, jb. Yeah, super glad to be here. Talk about A lot of our core technology areas that we've been focused on over the years and yeah, thanks for introducing me, jb.
Shareholder
You're welcome.
So yeah, I mean, Drew and Sam have been really key to a lot of the powertrain innovations, battery innovations, and solar roof and a number of other things. So it's always a pleasure having those engineering discussions.
Other
I have to say, mutually, the feeling is mutual.
All right, cool. Love you too, bro. So we got the version 3 supercharger. It was actually like the scope of technology that is advancing at Tesla is really massive on many fronts. So as I mentioned, we've got version three of the solar roof coming out soon. We've got version three of the Supercharger that's being deployed around the world. And this is a 75 miles in 5 minutes capability, 250 kilowatt system. I'm sure a lot of you have used the superchargers before and they've typically been anywhere from 75 kilowatts to. If you've used one recently, you might have gotten up to 140 kilowatts, but that's the version two. And then version three is 250 kilowatts kilowatts. And when 250 kilowatts are charging a really efficient car, the miles per minute is super good. And in fact, there was recently a test that I'm not sure who it was, but tested like what car could charge the most number of miles in half an hour? It was the Model 3. So yeah, so. And then we'll be publishing new maps for the Supercharger deployment and we're finally going to get the TransCanada highway,
example, and then we're going to go Alaska too. So yeah, actually this map doesn't even include all of the locations. But really like the two critical factors we found for sales in any given region and the really obvious actually are, is there a service center within reasonable distance and are there superchargers on all the routes that you'd like to take? You don't want to have like 80% of the routes because then like, geez, but what about that one trip that you can't do now? So you really want to have Superchargers and service centers are the absolute key to sales. And really we can map our sales to basically people are just sensible. They're like, okay, you need to service your car and you need to be able to travel conveniently on long distance routes. And so wherever we've got that ourselves are good. We also have to have good consumer financing and make sure pricing is competitive. But as soon as people see that they buy the cars. It's pretty straightforward. Yeah. So we'll be expanding the supercharged network quite substantially over time and also enabling Tesla to use other high speed charging networks. So you have adapters for that. And the key is when you buy a car, you're buying freedom, freedom to travel. So you must have the superchargers, you must have high speed charging and then if the car breaks, it must be fixed quickly. I'm actually really excited about our mobile service. So we have mobile service bands that, that will come fix your car as soon as it breaks down. It actually will immediately send a note to Tesla mobile service and will be on its way to fix the car. And so we're actually, we trialed it in the Bay Area and now have extended it to the LA area and a number of others for tire repair. So we'll just come, the van will arrive, give you a new tire in half an hour and you're on your way. It makes a huge difference. And we're adding things like bumper repair and mine like collision repair. So if I look at the things that most trouble customers, things like collision repair taking an eternity and then a third party body shop charging an arm and a leg after taking an eternity. So we're moving a lot of the body repair in house at Tesla
then even providing it on mobile service. And we just did our first bumper replacement from mobile service van. So typically collision repair can take weeks or months. In this case it took less than an hour. Yeah, That's right. Cyberpunk truck.
So obviously got the product roadmap for Tesla is incredibly exciting and with obviously Model Y coming fairly soon, about a year or so. And then the pickup truck which we hope to unveil hopefully this summer. We spent a lot of time on design of the pickup truck. So it's. I think it's going to be great. I think it's the coolest car I've ever seen. To be frank. I think not everyone may share that opinion, but worst case scenario, we'll build a normal looking truck, no problem. We know what those look like. So this is something that'll, if you're driving it down a road, it looks like it came out of a sci fi movie. So it'll be really cool, I think. And then the semi, which we look forward to getting into production hopefully towards the end of next year. A lot of this also is dependent on our ability to manufacture a lot of cells and Make a lot of battery packs. So there's not much point in adding product complexity. If we have enough batteries, then there's complexity, but without gain. So we're matching the product rollout according to the scaling of battery production. That's really the main limiting factor. And then as we scale battery production to very high levels, we actually have to look further down the supply chain and we might get into the mining business. I don't know, maybe a little bit at least. So we'll do whatever we have to to ensure that we can scale at the fastest rate possible. So to this point we are going to have a battery and powertrain investor day that hopefully this summer, before the end of the year for sure. Because I think this is a big deal. I mean I think if I were an outside investor I would really focus on two things. What is the timeline to full self driving and what is your plan to scale and battery production and get the cost per kilowatt hour lower? Those are basically battery cells and full self driving. Those are the two strategic things that are of most importance. Ha ha. Exactly. So these are questions that were asked online and then upvoted. They're actually really smart questions. Been really impressed with. I think it's say.com or say say anything. And yeah, so this is a key question is we've got to scale battery production and match that to vehicle demand. You guys want to say anything about that? Or we don't collect the cat out of the bag too much. But still in the bag.
I think it's right on. I mean those are exactly the right problems that we need to solve to scale and they have been for some time. But it's more obvious now than I think it ever was that we need a large scale solution to sell production.
Yes. And get the cost per kilowatt hour lower and energy density higher.
Other
Yeah. And we're not sitting. Yeah, we're not sitting idly by. We're taking all the moves required to be masters of of our own destiny here, technologically and otherwise. And I think through all the experience we've developed with partners and otherwise, we have solutions in place.
Yeah, good question. What aspects of battery production will integration Maxwell have? We think this is really quite strategic. But we'll leave the details of this to kind of the battery and powertrain investor day. There's some very important technologies there that I think will have a big effect on the cost and scaling of cell production. Both reducing the cost and reducing the capital required to scale cell production. Everyone, Anyone add to it right on Absolutely, yeah. I'm sometimes a little optimistic about time frames. It's time you knew. It's time you knew. Optimism. Would I be doing this if I wasn't optimistic? Geez. So the, you know, we do actually have advanced summit out in early access right now and we're making steady improvements to it. It's close to being amazing. It's not quite there, but it's close. There's a lot of complexity in parking lots, turns out. So it would be very easy if you were on open ground and you summoned the car and it just drives to you, that's no problem. But if you go to navigate through a parking lot and you're effectively going through a maze with a lot of obstacles and people moving and cars moving, that's quite tricky. But it's close to being magical. So I feel good about this. Going to wide release fairly soon. Yeah.
Other
You want it to be good? I mean that's the simplest answer. It's got to be awesome.
It's got to be awesome and super safe. So there can't be. We don't want to run anyone over or that would be bad. So it's tricky. If you make the car really sensitive, then it just goes paranoid and then doesn't move. And then you don't want to make it too aggressive as bad too. So the. And really the threshold is, is it more convenient to summon your car or walk to your car and if it's more convenient to walk to your car, someone is not that useful. So it has to move reasonably fast. Certainly faster than you could just walk there then. Status of Tesla insurance We're pretty close to being able to release that. We have a small acquisition that we need to complete and bit of software to write. But it won't be long before we release that. Pickup truck event. Sometime probably sometime towards the end of summer would be my guess. We're trying to create something here that is really new and not just derivative of all the other vehicles on the road. That when we try to create something new and it's not just basically a copy of the form factor of everything else, but you still want it to be great. It's very hard. This is a very hard thing. And our goal here is to have something that's more functional than an F150, which is a great truck and tough selling vehicle in the U.S.
Yeah. But then also a better sports car than a basic 911. So that's a hard one. But like it's physically possible. So I think we can do it, yeah. Do you think Tesla could rely on SpaceX's Starlink? I think we would have to have a different antenna for Starlink because the Starlink antenna is I think it's actually probably the most advanced phased array antenna in the world, including military. But it's about the size of a medium pizza. It would be fine for trucks and RVs and airplanes and any kind of like a house or a business or something like that. But it would look a little odd on the roof of a sedan. So I think we could make a smaller antenna and maybe use it. But I think most likely we would continue to rely on the cellular networks. The value of Starlink. The main value of Starlink is providing low latency, high bandwidth access to sparse and moderately sparse, relatively low density areas. So basically rural or semi rural areas, places that don't have connectivity right now. So I think it's quite a great system, but it's probably able to serve like 3 to 5% of people in the world. Now that's a lot of people because of all the people in the world. But it's actually not ideal for high density cities. It's really to serve the unserved or poorly served is what Starlink's about. We're going to have tiny wipers. I think actually probably just applying some hydrophobic coatings will most likely solve this problem. So we had this issue with the, the front radar where you can accumulate ice and snow on the front and then the radar can be obscured. But if we apply some, just a thin hydrophobic coating, sort of water repellent coating, then that usually solves the problem. So probably something like that. Or we'll just let you know, please clean the snow off the camera.
So we feel good about demand. That's I think not a major issue. Profitability is always challenging if you're a fast growing company. And I think that the scale at which Tesla is growing is like hard to appreciate. But I mean last year we, we doubled our fleet like so we made as many cars last year as we had in our entire history. And this year, you know, it's going to be like pretty like similar, at least sort of 60 to 80% growth of the total vehicle fleet, maybe more than that. So it's hard to be profitable with that level of growth. We could slow down, but then that would not be good for sustainability and the cause of electric vehicles and solar and storage and all that. But I think we can be cash flow positive despite having a very high growth rate. So. And then what about an Update for, like, rideshare, I guess, like, so we could kind of practice a rideshare fleet with people, and then that would be good for figuring out things for the robotaxi fleet in the future. So, I mean, this might make sense. I mean, we'll probably do something like this. Probably makes sense. Yeah. Sort of a supervised robot.
Yeah, we're happy to take questions from the audience.
Okay. Yeah, Sure. Wait, I didn't get it. Let's do it again. All right.
So let's try which side we're starting with, but I don't know the right side.
Shareholder
Sure. Thanks for taking my question. My name is Brian Campbell. I've been a shareholder of Tesla for a couple of years now. I try to buy more shares as often as I can afford to. I really believe in this company, its products, its mission, its leadership. I feel privileged to be able to cast my lot in with you and I want to thank you and the whole Tesla team for all of your hard work and dedication. My question pertains to Tesla Energy. I've read several analyses concluding that significant hurdles along the path towards sustainable energy is transmission of electricity over long distances. Since renewable energy production and capacity is concentrated in certain regions, being able to efficiently transmit that electricity to other regions seems to be an important part of the equation. I was hoping that you might share some of your thoughts about this part of the equation and if it might make sense for Tesla to someday get involved in electricity transmission.
Thank you. Yeah. I think a big part of the value of solar roof or retrofit solar on the roofs of houses and businesses and whatnot is that so you can have localized power generation. And then if you have a battery storage, that's also very helpful for stabilizing the grid. So you can sort of overproduce energy during the day and then release it at night and actually use the power walls and power packs as a massive network for grid stabilization and for providing energy, essentially flowing it back into the grid. And that will make a big difference to reducing the need for long distance power lines. I think very few people want more long distance power lines. They're generally not great, don't look great, sort of slightly unnerving to drive under them and that kind of thing. So you want localized power generation and then you don't need to build more substations and long distance power lines. I think that's the answer.
Other
Also, storage is a really great way to improve the utilization of the existing transmission grid. The transmission grid is kind of like the highway system. It's very rarely busy. And so what storage can do is make it busy all the time. So you get a lot more utilization out of the existing infrastructure.
Yeah, in fact, like, one of the things I think could be pretty interesting is for utilities and we've done a lot of large scale utility factory installations, most notably the one in South Australia, which has significantly outperformed their expectations. And we're going to be doing a number of other projects in Australia and around the world and we've done some very big projects in California. So I think energy storage, as Drew is pointing out, is actually extremely important. And you could, you could actually probably locally put power packs in the substation. People know what a substation is, sort of like where the high power lines come in and then it gets dropped from like say 11,000 volts to, you know, 400 volts or 500 volts and then it gets distributed to a community. So if you see a bunch of weird looking electrical equipment with a bunch of high powered lines coming into it, that's called a substation. But you could in that same footprint fit a number of power packs and then to Drew's point, when power usage is low, such as at night, it drops considerably. Then you could charge up the power packs and then discharge them during the day and then you wouldn't need to build extra substations and power lines which are very disruptive to communities.
Other
That's exactly what the Southern California Anderson project was. It was at a substation doing exactly that. So it's a good existence proof.
Shareholder
TONY Mazzipelli SHAREHOLDER China is a place where there's a lot of car action right now. There's a lot of volume over there, a lot of growth markets, and they have 60% of the EVs. So I want to ask you about the Giga 3 project and its goal. The building that you're building is a Fremont scale operation, maybe a little bit bigger. And last year you said it was 500,000 units per year target. That seems a little bit low to me because.
Okay, sure, I think it probably for
Shareholder
a company, for a country like China and that would give us like 29% if the other players, providers, product sellers stay still, which they won't. Also, if we're at volume, going higher volume, we learn more, get the cost down. That's a good thing. Also we connect up with the supply chain, which is very powerful over there. You know, advanced car electronics, batteries, Panasonic, Catal, Samsung lg, people like that on the demand side with no import fees. Our cars compare very well to all the other products and the Chinese like Tesla style, luxury, quality range, so. Plus they need help getting rid of smog in their cities, so. And maybe we could even export from that factory to other Asian factories. So why was the Target set at 500, do you think in China we are being aggressive enough?
Oh man. Have you seen how fast that China factory's been built? I mean, I've never seen it months or less. I've never seen anything built so fast in my life. Is pretty epic.
Yeah, okay. So, okay, we can't spend money too fast. You know, we'll run out of it. So there's like we're. Yeah, we're. I mean, I think like long term that factory will probably do more than 500,000. So it's sort of like an interim goal. Maybe it does a million or more long term. But then probably we should look at maybe having like China is pretty big geographically and so it may make sense to have factories in other parts of China in order to reduce logistics costs. A very big impact on the capital efficiency of any company is the time from when you receive raw materials to building the product and then getting the product to the end customer. So if you can compress that time to where, ideally in an ideal circumstance, you receive the payment for the car before you have to pay for all of the ingredients of the car, then the faster you grow, the more capital you have. So it is very important to localize the product production and have the supply chain be close by and for everything to move really fast because then you can actually scale and the faster you scale, the more cash you have. Whereas the counterpoint is if you have to pay for all of the ingredients long before you get paid for the car, which is currently true for cars that are outside the US because you have to put them on a boat, go through customs, then transport them within Europe and China. So our non US production is, is challenging from a cash flow standpoint because you have to pay for everything long before we get paid for the car. And so a big advantage of the local production in China and Europe will be solving for that cash flow gap.
Shareholder
Daniel. Andy, I'm in the public real estate investment industry. Given the continued need for Supercharger expansion, I think there's an opportunity to partner with a public real estate, publicly traded real estate company to buy the land Tesla wants for Superchargers, or even to buy land Tesla currently owns for Superchargers, structure a lease to just initially cover the cost of holding the land. And through my experience in public real estate, I think there would be huge demand to invest in the necessary infrastructure for EV charging, which effectively for Tesla would finance and aggressively speed up supercharger expansion while preserving Tesla's capital. Would that be of interest?
Well, most of our supercharged locations are actually either free or leased at a low rate, so actually sometimes they pay us from.
Shareholder
From what I think though, you provide the capital for the equipment. Correct. Even when you get it for free. I'm not sure if it's a lease or not, but Even cell tower REITs, they have leases on the land and then they lease the equipment. So even your equipment could be financed, I think through a publicly traded real estate company.
Okay. I think that's essentially adding superchargers to the asset backed line. It's a little tricky when dealing with finance companies. They will generally say what's the resale value of that in a worst case scenario? And then it's like sort of tricky to say who would we sell it to? And that I think tends to be their objection. But generally I think a capital efficiency of superchargers is quite good and getting better.
Shareholder
I work in the industry, if you have any questions. I'd love to.
Other
Hi, My name's Dennis McAvoy and I've been a happy Model 3 and Model S owner since 2012. I believe I'm representative of the vast majority of Tesla owners who are super happy with the company and the product. And we think that the next car we're going to get is going to be another Tesla. But that's not what we read in the mainstream media.
Other
You know, if you were, if that was your only source of information on Tesla, you'd think it was shoddy quality cars that spontaneously combust and that the it is nutty and that the company is on the verge of bankruptcy.
Other
And we know that's not true.
Other
It's not true. But I think it's hurting Tesla because I have intelligent friends that are holding off purchasing Tesla cars because of their concern about the future of the company. Company. The company's done a fantastic job at solving the big issues that confronted them in manufacturing and engineering. And my question is, what's the plan to put more energy behind the marketing communications and take this issue head on so that the true great American success story gets told.
No, it's true. True what you say. It's very distressing, makes me sad, but I'm not sure what. Yeah. What to do about it. We do provide a rebuttal, but that is then typically buried. It's like seven paragraphs down, if it's there at all. But some of these things are just incredibly crazy. It's at least 10 times more likely for a gasoline car or a combustion engine car. It's in the name. I mean, come on. It has highly flammable fluid, it's designed to burn, and there's about 200,000 gasoline car fires per year in the US alone. And you know, it's extremely rare for Tesla car to catch fire. And if it does, it's. It's just incredibly rare. And it's used due to some extenuating circumstances. It's very slow and it's almost never harmful. I mean, would you rather have like a gasoline powered cell phone or a battery powered cell phone? I mean it was like no brainer, you know, I think that were to
Other
put the same kind of energy towards solving this problem that you put towards solving the battery module pretty production problem. You could do it, you could change the narrative. Wow.
We're really trying our best. But I am at somewhat of a loss to. It's not like we don't respond or anything. Make a documentary. Yeah. It's the most crazy disinformation campaign I've ever seen.
Other
I'll just say I appreciate your optimism and your passion for the company and I think that is probably the best asset that all of you bring to the table. And if you can share that with everybody, you know, and give them the personal experience that you've had in whatever way that you can, that's really our best defense. So please continue to do so as it seems like you are.
Yeah, I think safety especially, I mean it is paramount for us. It's like the absolute primary thing is to maximize the safety of the car. So it's like. And this bears out in the statistics, so it's really hard to have a serious injury in a Tesla. Like this is quite rare. And when you do look at objective numbers like the NHTSA probability of injury, which is on the Internet, the Teslas have the lowest probability of injury of any car I've tested. So like if it was possible to have a six star, we would have a six star. It's like as literally it's absurdly safe and yeah, you know, there's just a lot of forces that are kind of arrayed against Tesla. You know, there's a lot of forces. So. Okay, sounds good. Yeah, we'll give you the information and you can spread it around. I mean, the reason our sales are good is really because of you guys. And it's sort of customer testimonies and referral is the key to our sales. That's why it's good. So. So yeah.
Shareholder
Thanks, Elon. My name is Steve. I've been a shareholder since 2012 and I've owned your vehicle since 2013 and I've enjoyed both rides.
It's a bit of a roller coaster, that's true.
Shareholder
But I actually enjoyed it coming in in 2012.
Shareholder
Just to that last gentleman's comment, it's obviously on your mind, many people's minds. So I'm just going to sneak in a little suggestion. You're right. The constructive response is so, so challenging. And maybe one little opening would be there are some people, such as Michael Bloomberg, who is both obviously a titan in the media industry and also very, very publicly expresses his career about the environment. Perhaps not a debate, but a discussion, a joint discussion to talk about climate change, public awareness. I think you get the point at where I'm trying to go with that and have it be something public. There might be other people I know. Last year Arianna Huffington expressed her concerns for your well being.
Shareholder
I think your well being would be best served if people. I think really the biggest issue with the media, and I shouldn't say issue, the biggest challenge is there doesn't seem to be anybody in the media who's pointing out what other parties in the media are doing so effectively. Utterly false narratives receive a police escort to the public. Nobody is speaking up about it. So that's why I suggest people like Bloomberg or Arianna Huffington.
That's a good idea. Yeah. I mean, weirdly, there have been quite a few negative articles in Bloomberg, but perhaps talking to Michael Bloomberg would be helpful. I agree. We need to take action here. We'll definitely provide people with clear rebuttals of the disinformation. That's a good idea because we've done it piecemeal. But there's not really like a page that just debunks the myths. You know, you could kind of have to put it together from a number of comments that we've made over time. But we could put it all together on one page and sort of debunk the myth. This would be pretty, pretty good.
Hello, Elon, I'm John from Irvine. And with seeing the Model three being so successful and the solar facet of your business coming up, I was wondering where you see Tesla is on their mission to accelerate the advent of transport and what hindrances or facilitators you see
in the future in that mission? Well, I think we've really helped convince the auto industry to move towards electrification. You know, when we first started out, we sort of like the, you know, kind of the. I mean, to be clear, I've always felt like electric cars and solar were important from when I was in, you know, freshmen in college. And I just always thought that it would just happen because it's just obviously the right thing from a physics standpoint, but this is not guaranteed. And it's actually, you know, sort of. I kind of trace Tesla back to 2003 with JB and I having lunch in El Segundo with Rosen. Harold Rosen. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That was a good conversation.
Well, I mean, I think we've made pretty amazing progress since then. We didn't exactly envision how this would unfold and exactly being here and standing here, at least I didn't.
I thought we just for sure would fail, you know, like.
But it needed to be done. I mean, it was clearly something that was worth doing. Even if the odds of, you know, becoming where we are today, or even 10% of that or 1% of that were slim, it was still worth doing. But it's pretty awesome to see EVs driving around on every road, all over the place. It's incredible, but it's still 1%. So while it's rewarding and it's awesome to see where we've come, there's still a long way to go. So we can't. I don't know, I feel mixed emotions that we shouldn't pat ourselves in the back too much.
Definitely not. But back in 2003, 2004, there was. People thought electric cars were the stupidest thing ever and definitely not going to work, and were bad in every way and were like a milk float or something, or like a golf cart, and they would not look good or go far or go fast, or they would be just bad in every way. And they kind of were. That's like, they generally were. So the, like, the number of times. So talk about the media situation today, which is very negative, but it's pretty much always been negative, actually. This is unchanged from 2003. And I mean, yeah, I mean, way back, you can go way back, like 15 years, and it's just like, oh, Tesla's the dumbest thing ever. It's never going to succeed. And then it's like, well, you know, I do think there's a good chance we won't succeed, but it's worth trying. All right, thank you. And now I think almost every car company has announced electric cars, and some have announced that all of their cars will go electric sometime in the next decade. This is a good thing.
Other
And on the energy side, to complete the picture, I guess I would just briefly say 100% renewable grids were in a similar situation, I would say, in 2003. And now both Tesla and a number of other partners in this effort are succeeding in taking entire islands, you know, parts of nations 100% renewable. And that. That shows the. The growth on that other key aspect of the mission. And yeah, that's been personally very rewarding and for. For JB as well, because in 2003, he was the TA of A class I was in talking all about that.
Yeah, it goes back a while. Yeah, so exactly. So solar and battery storage. Yeah, that was also, like, laughed at, pretty much still kind of is. But it's obviously the key to a sustainable future is, I think primarily solar, obviously, with wind and geothermal, but things that are sustainable long term. And then you have to have battery storage because generally sustainable energy, like the sun, it doesn't shine 24 hours a day, so you have to have batteries. So, like the three. The three elements of sustainable energy future, electric cars, solar and battery storage. And so we're trying to advance that as quickly as possible. And then I think when we show that it can be done, then other companies try to do it as well, and that's great.
My name is Jessica. Side note, I work in media relations,
Shareholder
so I'd love to help change the negative narrative.
First, Elon, I just wanted to congratulate you on the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication. My question for you is, as a horse owner, I'm wondering what the towing capacity for the truck.
I didn't mean to insult horses earlier, by the way.
Horses are cool. It's designed to meet or exceed an F150. So if an F150 can tow it, then the Tesla pickup truck should be able to do it.
So, Elon, we're at about 90 minutes.
Do you want to take one more question from each side?
Yeah. Yeah, we can do a few more questions.
Shareholder
Hi, Ellen. My name is Caleb Elston. I recently got my Model 3 and I'm happy it has hardware 3 in it. So I watched the Investor day for Autonomy, and you talked a lot about the FSG chip, the neural network, but you didn't talk much about the gap between navigate on autopilot today to the end of 2019, I was wondering if you could geek out a little bit on where we're going to go from now till the December, January, February, feature wise, is that already running in your cars like the demo and we're going to cherry pick it or what gives you the confidence that feature complete, not hands off, but feature complete is possible and can you excite us a little bit about what that's going to be like? Thank you.
Yeah, I mean when I drive the latest development version of the software, it can take me from my house to the office, but there are interventions at times so it doesn't perfectly deal with every intersection or every turn. And I think it's possible to. One could obviously just game the system and just make it perfect for a particular route, but then that's just going to work on that route and then if that route changes or there's construction, then it won't work. So it's very hard to come up with a general solution. So when one reads about these other self driving car companies, the issue is that they have very specific solutions, but they're brittle. They rely on very high resolution maps, a lot of lidars, high precision, like really expensive GPS and inertial measurement. But even then it's just not a general solution. And if they go off the route that they're used to, they don't work. So you know, so when we release something, we're releasing it to, to 500,000 cars all over the world. And so it has to be a general solution. So then our progress may appear slower than it actually is relative to others that are developing self driving technology. But in fact I think it is quite a lot more advanced because any element that we release is a general solution.
Other
There's also like a plateau that you will reach. Taking the alternative approach that just having experienced with the team a lot of the work ahead of the investor day, like the trajectory is crazy, especially with the advanced compute capability that we have. So that's my personal comment on it, I guess.
Yeah, we learn a lot in terms of what should we train the neural net to do. And then once we discover, okay, we need to train it to, we need a net that's going to really effectively recognize curves, for example. And previously we trained the net on free space. So now free space is just anything you can drive on that's not going to destroy the car. But this is not comfortable if you're just driving on like dirt or the car just drives over the grass. And technically yes, but it's going to be disturbing. So road edge and curb are two training nets that we are developing right now to say this is independent of drivable free space. So you want to know what drivable free space is for an emergency. So if you need to go on the shoulder of the road to avoid something, then okay, free space is important. But then you also need to know where does true road space end? Because it's undesirable to go past true road space. And then especially for parking lots and tight corners, just recognizing curves. These like little details they make, they're very important.
So but I mean I have most of this working in like the development version that's on my car. I have actually two dev branches, one for enhanced summon and one for full self driving and two different cars. But it would not be good to release that to the general public, I think.
Shareholder
Hi Elon. Hi jb. Tesla team and Tesla board. Huge fan. Best wishes and lots of love from India.
Thank you. Let me guess, you guys have a
Shareholder
great team and you guys are the problem solvers. Thanks for persevering all the way through the financial intellectual business problems. And Elon, you are such a visionary and a leader. Thank you so much. It puts a smile on my face when I hear Gwen Shotwell point out to Mars as it's the fixer upper of a planet. You have instill those values into your employees and every fanboy out there. Thank you so much for all that. And to ask a question, what do you ask this team which has put a roadster up in freaking space. Right. So actually I'm out of questions on that part. So then I thought to myself, any questions? No. And I always felt bad for Nikola Tesla who has been a great inventor of our time. And for a genius that has been, he was always constrained by funds to run his experiments and as a result world lost so much more. Did history repeat itself? I don't know. Maybe. But it's up to us not to repeat the same mistakes and fund this test. Tesla this time to make impossible a reality. As Uncle Ben rightly said, with great power comes great responsibility. People and organizations with excellent balance sheets, you have the power to invest and make a difference. And hence you have the responsibility to do so. It's time big companies unite when it comes to welfare of the planet and sustainability of the generations to come. And speaking of great companies, who knows better than Berkshire Hath pathway of picking a great company? As the market paradigm has now shifted from buying profitable companies to buying companies who are innovating and changing the world for the better. I request Berkshire Management to consider investing in Tesla for the long term. Why? Because you want insurance, they have it. You want automobiles? They have it. Electrification, they have it. Utility, they have it. Robotaxis, they want. What do you want? They have it.
Shareholder
And because there has never been a better opportunity for the world and there has never been a better buy price for Tesla in 2019 than right now. Lastly, congratulations to all the Tesla shareholders in advance who sooner or later going to be part owners of this trillion multi trillion dollar behemoth. And to Elon and team, thank you so very much from all of us and the future generations who will want to thank you and your team for all the great work you did, you do and you will do.
Cheers, thanks. Cool, thank you. Much appreciated. I thought that question may be asked so we, You know, I hope soon that there's the regulatory or like the rules for importing to India are kind of complicated
Yeah, we definitely want to come to India, so. But there are like complicated rules around like the tariffs for importing and then what you're allowed to do as for sales and service and we're currently able to sell as many cars as we can make and so adding additional complexity is not required right now. But I think we really want to come to India as soon as we can. So I think I'll be really surprised if we're not there by next year. I think that's at least next year, I think. Yeah.
Shareholder
Hello, good afternoon, my name is Jennifer Baer and I'm here on behalf of PETA, People for the Ethical of Animals. Hi.
Shareholder
Hi. Yes, the steering wheel. You got it. So during last year's annual shareholder meeting you assured us that the model Y quote would not have any leather in it, including in the steering wheel. If it does have a steering wheel, end quote. We have tried confirming this privately but have been met with silence and the website does not specify. It's also our understanding that all current Tesla models come standard. Standard with a leather steering wheel and need to be special ordered to be vegan.
Shareholder
As you know, the United nations reports that animal agriculture, which includes the leather industry, is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the world's transportation combined. The HIG index has found that in terms of water scarcity, climate change.
I totally agree. Actually ask this question of my team earlier this week and I believe we're close to having a non heated steering wheel that's not leather. There are Some challenges when we heat the non leather material and also how well it wears over time. So a steering wheel actually really needs to be very hardy because of the, there's a lot of like, we have a lot of basically oil and sweat and stuff on our hands. It gets kind of nasty if you don't have like the right surface treatments on the material. So it's an easier proposition to solve it for seats than it is for the steering wheel. So it's actually a remarkable amount of effort to solve for the steering wheel, but it is a thing that we are working on and hope to release soon.
Shareholder
That's fantastic. So can you confirm the Model Y will be vegan as promised?
Shareholder
And that all of Tesla's models will be free of animal products by next year's shareholder meeting?
I'm not, you know, there might be the tiniest bit left, I'm not sure. But Model Y, Model 3, I think I'm confident about that. We have a lot of things to solve, but I think we can for sure the Model Y and the Model 3 soon. And you can also special order for the SNX.
Shareholder
Thank you very much.
Yeah, hi, I'm Dan Hauck. I just have a quick question and that is you've expressed your frustration, I think we're all frustrated with the media narrative around Tesla and you've expressed your frustration in refuting some of the, the false information out there. You know, there's another alternative to that which is to proactively advertise. And my question to you is, are there any thoughts to revisiting the advertising decision?
Sure. Well, as I was saying, like currently we are selling more cars than we can make, so it is not. Spending money on advertising would make things worse financially and sure it will probably increase demand, but we're selling more cars than we can make, so that's not a thing that's necessary right now. And we're trying to make as many cars as possible.
Yeah, and I think like advertising generally I have not, I've had an aversion to advertising because it's just too much trickery in advertising. There's a lot of false association. They'll have a bad product and then put it in a nice environment with good looking people and then trick you into buying. It is like common and you know, and then some of the advertising can be quite strident so it just tends to be sort of bad. So I don't like advertising for that reason. But we could have advertising as information to refute some of these issues. It's tricky, though, because if you have an ad that says, look, our cars don't catch on fire. This is bs, then people might think, are your cars actually catching on fire? What's going on? Because there's so much trickery in advertising, maybe the opposite thing is happening. I wouldn't say that we're against advertising forever, but it hasn't been necessary thus far. And. Yeah.
So, yeah, what about a short film or documentary contest? And then the filmmakers are dying to make this and it's a contest, a challenge.
A film challenge. Sure. That could be cool. Absolutely. So.
Well, definitely give this some thought. There's some good suggestions. Thank you. I'll do one. Last question. Last question. Yeah, last question.
Shareholder
Hi, everyone. I'm Luxfilade. I have a really exciting question. Will Tesla make a quad cars? And if so, when?
Do you mean, like a quad bike or something? What do you mean, a quad car?
Shareholder
Aquatic car, as in boat or submarine. That's a car.
Oh, I see. Okay. Do you mean a car that can go in the water, basically?
Shareholder
On or under or both. The water.
It's funny you should mention that. We do actually have a design for a submarine car, like the one from the sky. The spider loved me. Sort of the Lotus that turns into a sub. And I actually. I thought that was, like, the coolest thing I'd seen in a movie. So I actually have that. The ones from the movie now, that one cannot actually transform because it has, like, fins where the wheels are. This is obviously not going to work, but if you make it a bit bigger, then you can actually have a. A submarine car. It's, like, technically possible. I think the market for this will be small, small but enthusiastic. But we actually do have a design for a submarine car. Like, that would be great. It would be difficult. It would be a bit of a distraction. I think so. But maybe we'll make one as a show car at some point. That'd be really fun. So thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thanks.