Tesla’s Hail Mary — Signs of Progress vs. Historical Concerns – CleanTechnica

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Earlier today, under an article by Steve Hanley on Tesla’s sales crashing even further in Germany and China, in response to another commenter, I wrote that there were “a lot of potential building blocks toward good news,” but the actual real, hard news of the past two years has been dropping sales.

If we just look at consumer demand trends at Tesla and development of new models, recent years do not paint a good picture for the company. Sales have been down, and product launches and refreshes haven’t stopped that trend. There have been no successful product launches since the Model Y. So, looking at recent history, it’s easy to extrapolate that and predict a very bleak few years for Tesla.

However, Tesla staff have also been working hard toward some big goals, and there has clearly been some progress logged. A key, though, is that these are not focused on incremental improvements, but instead dramatic and revolutionary ones. If they work. Frankly, as I’ve discussed in recent weeks, there has been a Hail Mary feeling to a lot of this, as if Elon Musk couldn’t enjoy building Tesla as a normal car company and had to keep betting the company’s future on new revolutionary ideas. That could crash the company, but it could also lead to further growth and global influence. So, what are these potential building blocks to help it get to more consumer demand and more profits again? And what are the near-term objectives Tesla has been working toward?

• Elon Musk has said that they may allow texting while driving with FSD on very soon. “In the next month or two — we’re going to look at the safety statistics, but we’re going to allow you to text and drive, essentially,” he said at the 2025 Tesla Shareholder Meeting. So, Tesla will take over liability for any accidents while FSD is on?…
• Regulators may soon approve Tesla’s FSD in Japan, and FSD approval in China is expected in Q1 2026.
• Back in the US, Tesla plans to launch its Robotaxi pilot service in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, and Miami soon. The geographic area the Robotaxi is trialling in has also expanded in Austin recently.
• Tesla has been posting various job postings related to the Robotaxi program in different locations in recent weeks as well.
• Tesla recently launched its new self-driving hardware chip, AI5, and it significantly outperforms the previous chip, AI14.
• Elon Musk says that the company is aiming to have 500 Robotaxis in Austin and 1,000 vehicles in Silicon Valley by the end of this year.
• Tesla is giving some TLC to the Semi. The company recently updated its front-end design as well as some other elements of the vehicle, improving its efficiency to 1.7 kWh/mile and increasing its payload capacity.
• On that note, the exterior of the Tesla Semi factory now looks essentially complete.
• Tesla Insurance may soon land in Florida. It already exists in:
  • Arizona
  • California
  • Colorado
  • Illinois
  • Maryland
  • Minnesota
  • Nevada
  • Ohio
  • Oregon
  • Texas
  • Utah
  • Virginia
• Tesla launched a new “MultiPass” program in Netherlands in September to make charging at non-Tesla third-party charging stations possible using the Tesla app or keycard, and last week it expanded that to some other parts of Europe — Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium.
• Tesla is launching the Cybertruck in the UAE in Q1 2026. (Though, is that simply because Tesla can’t find enough buyers for it elsewhere?)
• Tesla has launched a new version of the Model Y in China, a long-range RWD version.

Many of the items above are still just plans and projections, but it appears progress is being made.

Now, here’s a bit of a bonus. If you find it entertaining to view and comment on wild claims, these vague plans from Elon Musk on the company’s humanoid robot are … perhaps the best yet:

“So we’re going to launch on the fastest production ramp of any product of any large complex manufactured product ever, starting with building a one million unit production line in Fremont. And that’s Line One. And then a 10-million-unit-per-year production line here (at Giga Texas). I don’t know where we’re going to put the one hundred million unit production line, maybe on Mars. But I think it’s going to literally get to one hundred million a year, maybe even a billion a year,” Musk claimed.

“People often talk about eliminating poverty or giving everyone amazing medical care. There’s only one way to do that, and that’s with the Optimus robot. With humanoid robots, you can actually give everyone amazing medical care. In terms of Optimus will be more precise. Optimus will ultimately be better than the best human surgeon with a level of precision that is beyond human… People always talked about eliminating poverty, but actually, Optimus will actually eliminate poverty.”

What???