TSLA earnings debacle, FSD ticket, Toyota finally waking up? FSGP, more

**Frederic Lambert** (0:05)
And we are live for a new episode of Electrek Podcast. I'm Frederic Lambert, your host.
As usual, I'm joined by Seth Weintraub, coming us live from the beautiful state of Minnesota. How are you doing, Seth?

**Seth Weintraub** (0:18)
I'm good.

**Frederic Lambert** (0:18)
That's right.

**Seth Weintraub** (0:19)
I'm at the Formula Sun Grand Prix finale, and we're getting ready for the cross-country trip down to Amarillo, Texas. Starting tomorrow.

**Frederic Lambert** (0:32)
Nice. Yes. We're going to talk a little bit about that later on with the track portion of the Electrek Formula Sun later on on the show. First of all, we're going to talk about the Tesla earnings and everything that came out of it. We're going to talk about FSD. In my experience, I got a speeding ticket set on FSD last weekend.
It's my fault. I'm responsible on all time on the vehicle. I understand that, but I think it does bring up a good point about a feature that Tesla needs to reintroduce badly for FSD. So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about NHTSA having a probe in FSD. If you've been following my reporting on NHTSA and FSD, I don't have a lot of hope when it comes to NHTSA holding Tesla's feet over the fire with FSD. But I have to admit that this time, the level of inquiries is very interesting. I'm going to talk about that. When I talk about Toyota, maybe finally kind of waking up that it needs to take EV seriously, BEVs I should say, because they take electric vehicles seriously for a long time, but BEVs less so. With the Corolla EV, the next gen Corolla EV, that they basically say that it's make it a break it moment, kind of like a Tesla model to ramp up. But for Toyota that exists for like 100 years, it's interesting. BYV again coming out with a crazy new EV. And at the end, we're going to talk about the Electric American Solar Challenge, because it's just cool shit. All right. The earnings, Seth, Seth is not, since you've stopped investing in Tesla, I think you're not following the earnings. Not as closely. And I envy you, Seth, because it is getting rough sometimes listening to you. And he was under the weather this week, so I'll give him some slack. But oh my God.
Yeah, the earnings, if I'm going to pat myself on the back here with my preview, I was then on with my preview of the earnings earlier this week. I said record revenue, but I have my doubts when it comes to the earnings. Sure enough, record revenue of 28 billions.
Exactly 28?
Where did I put that? Yep.
But the earnings per share was quite a big miss. So there was a bunch of different consensus, but it was between 53 and 55, depending on what consensus you look at. And it came in at 33 cents per kilowatt hour per share. So it's a big miss. And there's a bunch of reasons for that miss. And all of these reasons doesn't matter that much for Tesla shareholders, because we know Tesla is not really a car company anymore. It's all about this optimist robot. It's all about a rebel tax seed. But that's where things were kind of crazy. First, let's look at the financials, because I think they are interesting. The gross margin went down quarter over quarter, now at 16.8%. A lot of that is due to regulatory credits are going away. Still 146 million. It sounds like a lot, because that's like per profit that just injects into your balance sheets, your income statement. But for Tesla, it's nothing like there's just a few quarters ago, Tesla was making half a billion dollars a quarter in regulatory credits. And then Elon Musk got Trump elected and that just crashed.
The against thanks to Trump and the tariffs and everything, the gross margins on the energy also crashed quite a bit. So the operating margin now is just 1.4%. Last year was 4%.
So I cannot stress. I see a lot of Tesla fans being a lot very delusional about, hey, why did the stock crash? It crashed 14% yesterday. And I think I didn't look today, but I think it was down. At least this morning, it was still down too. So the huge crash in Tesla stock wiped out $150 billion in value. So Tesla shareholders woke up today $150 billion less rich because of that. And they think, record revenue of $28 billion, how could it be bad? Look at the operating margin, 1.4% versus 4% last year. So it crashed by more than a half.