Tesla (TSLA) Q3 2026 earnings results and conference call transcript

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Read over all of the important details from Tesla's Q3 2026 earnings release.

Asif Khan October 21, 2026 1:40 PM 1

Tesla has released its Q3 2026 earnings results. The electric vehicle manufacturer is scheduled to begin its earnings call at 2:30 p.m. PT / 5:30 p.m. ET, during which it will give greater insight into the report. Stay tuned to this page as it’s updated in real-time during the call with a live transcript of the talking points.

Listen to the Tesla (TSLA) Q3 2026 earnings call

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Tesla (TSLA) Q3 2026 Earnings Release

Check out the full TSLA Q3 2026 earnings report on the Tesla Investor Relations page.

Highlights

Profitability

• $0.7B GAAP operating income
• $0.8B GAAP net income
• $1.7B non-GAAP net income

Cash

• Operating cash flow of $6.3B
• Free cash flow of $1.5B
• $1.9B increase in our cash and investments

Operations

• Produced and delivered our 10 millionth vehicle
• Launched Cybercab into the Robotaxi fleet in Austin
• Record production at Gigafactory Berlin

Summary

In Q3, we maintained strong momentum on many projects spanning Super Intelligence (SI), robotics and renewable energy that will be critical to building a future of Amazing Abundance. Strength in our core business also continued, and we achieved our second consecutive quarter of TTM revenue in excess of $100B. 

FSD (Supervised) attach rate continued to grow, reaching over 75% of new vehicle deliveries in North America – our most mature market – a nearly twenty percentage point
sequential increase. We believe that FSD is driving demand in markets where it is available, and we continue to work with regulators to get it approved in other markets. 

We started providing Robotaxi rides using Cybercabs on September 3 in Austin. Cumulative unsupervised Robotaxi miles grew eightfold quarter over quarter, driven by sustained double-digit weekly growth.

We ended the quarter with the largest backlog for our passenger vehicles in four years. We rolled out the updated Tesla Semi that is produced on our high-volume manufacturing line in Nevada and unveiled the Next Gen Roadster on October 15. While battery availability continued to be the limiting factor in increasing auto volumes in the quarter, we have made additional progress in securing future supply, as we work toward our goal of maximum utilization of our factories. 

Demand for our Energy Storage business remained strong in the quarter, with our highestever order rate and backlog. Energy storage is the fastest way to add power to the existing grid and is critical to data center uptime. We expect rising data center demand to continue driving demand for our products. Megafactory Texas began production, with planned capacity of 50 GWh. We also advanced LFP supply domestication in the U.S., shipping the first Megapacks built with LFP cells from our factory in Nevada.

We continue to invest in the future through R&D and Capex spend across our businesses, including SI, robotics and energy. Much hard work lies ahead, but we are as optimistic as ever. Thank you to our supporters as we continue to execute on many challenging and important projects.

Revenue - Total quarterly revenue was roughly flat YoY at $28.0B. YoY, revenue was impacted by the following items:

• - decrease in Energy Generation and Storage, partially due to tariff-related customer refunds
• - lower vehicle average selling price (ASP) (excl. FX impact), inclusive of mix impact
• - lower regulatory credit revenue
• - decrease in vehicle deliveries
• + growth in Services and Other
• + positive FX impact of $0.3B
• + higher automotive ancillary sales, primarily driven by an increase in FSD subscriptions

Profitability - Our quarterly operating income decreased 56% YoY to $0.7B, resulting in a 2.6% operating margin. YoY, operating income was primarily impacted by the following items:

• - increase in operating expenses driven by SI and other R&D projects, SBC (including 2025 CEO Performance Award) and SG&A
• - lower regulatory credit revenue
• - lower Energy Generation and Storage gross profit
• + growth in Services and Other gross profit
• + improved vehicle region and product mix, partially offset by lower vehicle average selling price (ASP) (excl. FX impact)
• + lower restructuring and other expenses
• + higher automotive ancillary sales, primarily driven by an increase in FSD subscriptions
• + positive FX impact of $0.1B

Cash - Quarter-end cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments was $45.4B. The sequential increase of $1.9B was primarily a result of positive free cash flow of $1.5B.

Outlook

Volume

• We are focused on maximum capacity utilization at our factories. Deliveries and deployments will be impacted by aggregate demand for our products, supply chain readiness and allocation decisions between sale to customers and use for our owned and operated fleet.

Cash

• We will manage the business such that we ensure a strong balance sheet, maintaining sufficient liquidity to fund our product roadmap, long-term capacity expansion plans – including further vertical integration – and other expenses.

Profit

• While we continue to execute on innovations to reduce the cost of manufacturing and operations, over time, we expect our hardware-related profits to be accompanied by an acceleration of SI, software and fleet-based profits.

Product

• We continue to evolve and augment our product lineup with a focus on cost, scale and future monetization opportunities via services powered by our SI software. We remain focused on growing our sales volumes through a differentiated and efficiently managed product portfolio, which includes leveraging and optimizing our existing production capacity before building new factories and production lines. 
• Production has begun for Tesla Semi in Nevada and Optimus in Fremont.
• Capacity build-out and ramp related to our multi-year infrastructure initiatives, including SI compute, solar, battery material and semiconductor manufacturing are underway.

Tesla (TSLA) Q3 2026 Earnings News Highlights

• Tesla (TSLA) Q3 2026 earnings results beat revenue and EPS expectations
• Elon Musk says Tesla Optimus Robot will ship to outside customers by end of 2027

Tesla (TSLA) Q3 2026 conference call transcript

Tesla’s earnings results conference call is scheduled to begin at 2:30 p.m. PT / 5:30 p.m. ET. Keep an eye on this section of the article for a live transcript of the earnings call, featuring bullet points of important topics.

• Conference call starts at 5:31 p.m. EDT
• Stock at $386/share
• Elon opening remarks
• Third quarter was very strong
• demand is growing rapidly for our vehicles
• going to be ramping production
• biggest driver of demand is full self-driving
• producing and delivering as many cars as we can
• hoping for EU wide approval for FSD within a few months or by Q1
• not a timeframe we can control
• also began production of Tesla Semi in Q3
• Touts Tesla Roadster demo last week
• Laying groundwork for a lot more manufacturing capacity
• aiming for 5 million vehicles a year by approximately 2030
• good shot at achieving that goal
• demand is very strong
• almost sold out of all energy Megapacks
• expect gross margins to increase meaningfully
• after many years of grind and things being fairly flat
• we are heading towards significant growth
• Robotaxi miles driven scaling exponentially
• Hard to overstate at this point
• Very fast week over week growth in autonomous miles
• Cybercab fleet in Austin has grown by a factor of 10 since launch
• I recommend coming to Austin to try out Cybercabs used at scale
• growth of Optimus is an S-curve
• but the left side is shallow and slow to grow
• 10,000 components and it will grow as fast as the slowest component
• expect that it will take Tesla a year to get to 20,000 units per week
• Stock drops to $380/share
• you need to deliver a robot that is safe, reliable and can't wear out in a month
• quite a lot of work to do with respects to the AI in the robot
• I would expect the AI and electromechanical design and the reliability and usage life issues to be solved by the end of next year
• Time to expect when we will be delivering Optimus to companies outside of Tesla will be end of 2027
• I do want to temper expectations around Optimus
• Terrafab update
• Aspiration to be some kind of useful chip at volume by 2028
• The Terrafab will be the most valuable building in the world
• Economic value that will place it among the top 20 countries
• Excited for autonomy and robot
• Thanks employees and supporters
• Started delivery of Megapacks with in-house LFP cells
• Automotive business exited quarter with highest backlog
• Increasing production at all factories
• Takes time
• Model Y continues to outperform
• Highlights different geographies
• Robotaxi miles driven growing
• Taking learnings from Austin expansion to plan other locations
• Trying to take over every part of terrestrial transportation
• We want to own transportation of any kind on Earth
• Net income was impacted by market to market of SpaceX and Bitcoin holdings
• Ended quarter with positive cashflow
• Revising capex guidance to $20 billion
• Primarily funded by cashflow from operations
• Secured $30 billion of shorter term debt funding for future capex
• Money from tariff refunds being used to expand U.S. manufacturing
• Most excited time to be at Tesla
• Autonomy, Robotics, and Energy set up for a bright future at the company
• Investor Questions begin
• How does Cybercab fleet scale passed Austin?
• Ashok answers
• We want to swarm Austin with Cybercabs everywhere
• Going to Dallas next
• What are your thoughts on crowd-sourcing training data for Optimus?
• Elon answers
• It's not the issue for Optimus
• There's a lot we have to get right with the AI
• We are making good progress, but that has to be sorted out
• We need to make 10-20 thousand bots
• building out an Optimus academy for training the robots
• Big difference between Optimus vs. the cars is that we have to bootstrap training
• It's more like how a human learns
• they learn to wipe their own ass which is a huge milestone
• Ashok adds
• Optimus, there is no exoskeleton for humans to get into
• Optimus has to learn by watching humans do something
• Setting up a huge reinforcement learning cycle
• I think we are pretty close.
• Elon says we will have a video to release in a month or so
• I want to release a video that shows Optimus doing things that are not preprogrammed
• Maybe a month or two before we have such a demo video
• another milestone is getting to integrate the Tesla AI 5 chip into Optimus
• Approximately by April 2027
• The refinements will all come together about a year from now
• Initial customers for Optimus will be industrial applications at first
• When can we anticipate FSD-unsupervised in consumer cars?
• Ashok answers
• Somewhere around Q2 2027
• When will the Cybercab be available for customer purchase or ownership?
• Lars answers
• 2027 ish?
• Cybercab will be the first fully autonomous vehicles delivered to customers
• Elon adds
• Cybercab is going to be more of a transport as a service as opposed to a car that you would want to own
• the vast majority of the Cybercab fleet will be Tesla-owned
• Unit economic costs question
• Robotaxi side, utilization improving
• paid rides
• we are not at our goal of 30 cents
• but we see a path to that
• it's all about scaling operations
• We do plan to bring it out to other cities before the end of the year
• as we add more Cybercabs, we learn more from the operations 
• we definitely see a path to get to our 30 cent target
• Optimus costs, we are too early to say that we have got there
• we are still making a lot of design iterations
• Mapping for FSD continues to be a problem with speed limits, parking, and optimized paths
• Why depend on external maps?
• Ashok answers
• building AI navigation system
• You will see the start and end of trips use this in V15 release
• We'll know you better than you know yourself with respects to driving tasks
• What is the current production rate for existing factories? Do you anticipate building new ones?
• Lars answers
• We can only build as fast as our slowest component
• We are working to ramp Cybercab
• Applied for permits to expand Germany factory
• Analyst questions begin
• No questions about SpaceX merger allowed
• Tom from RBC
• FSD question about attach rate
• 30-40%
• exceeds other automakers
• in a weird way, could you be a victim of your own success?
• Will competion be deflationary?
• Easy to get to the first 90%, very hard to solve the problem
• Long tail to get to a safety point of millions of miles with no problem says Ashok
• I don't think anyone can match it in several years
• Customers are asking for FSD demos not specific car test drives
• Opens up a lot of flexibility
• It's a game changer
• Tom followup
• China autonomy competition?
• Says Tesla FSD is better than Chinese competitors
• We are not taking it lightly
• Working with regulators in China
• Released our unsupervised Robotaxi safety report
• Emmanuel from Wolfe Research
• Robotaxi unsupervised miles correlation to revenue and profitability?
• How many miles would you need to generate a gross profit?
• This would become a significant part of our revenue and earnings in 2027
• It starts to become noticeable in Q2, big deal by Q3 and Q4 of next year
• follow up
• How do you expect ramp up of Cybercab production to be?
• Kudos to the engineering team
• Easiest product to scale in terms of manufacturing
• Making sure we have all the regulatory approvals
• Lars chimes in
• We have 50% parts than any car Tesla has ever made
• The listed capacity is lower than the max output of the line
• we are building at a rate that the Robotaxi team has demand
• Andrew from Morgan Stanley asks
• Energy business question
• How are you thinking about Tesla's roll in enabling distributive power and compute?
• Elon answers
• It's still early days on that front
• We'll have a better sense of that by end of Q1 or Q2
• It does have a lot of potential
• Followup on Robotaxi
• Inflection point in Austin
• Bottlenecks more regulatory driven as opposed to software?
• How do you categorize the growth hurdles for Robotaxi?
• Certain software challenges
• Ashok chimes in
• 6 AM to 9 PM
• Expanding availability based on capability of AI software
• We are very risk averse
• We will unlock 24/7 operation and go to higher speed roads
• We do six cities now
• We will expand to more weather conditions, highway, day and night scenarios
• It's definitely technology limited
• Next question from Edison from DB
• Terrafab question
• Do you have a sense on how much capital is required to build it?
• Milestones?
• Elon
• Significant capital
• 10s of billions for Terrafab
• We gotta figure out the relative split between Tesla and SpaceX
• It's not going to be less than $10 bilion of capital equipment
• norh of $100 billion long-term
• Real production will be late 2028
• Followup
• Optimus
• Where do you see most of the Optimus design changes?
• Hand is one of the most challenging hardware area
• Electromechanical systems work decently well
• Bespoke gears are carrying a lot of burden for consumption and reliability
• Elon
• It's mostly the hand and fingers
• it's a hard problem
• Human bodies repair themselves
• It's hard to make a hand that is squishy and can handle wear and tear
• Upgrading the onboard intelligence will be a big step change that will help with capabilities of Optimus
• Humanoid product will be the biggest product on Earth
• Optimus robots will have a recusive function of improvement
• At some point there will be humanoid robots on Earth than humans
• Bank of America question
• Robotaxi question
• Pricing lower than competitors to take market share?
• When comparing to a rideshare with a driver, we don't
• we are manufacturing the cars ourselves
• Basically, our goal is to take over any kind of transportation
• Unless we are stopped by government, I think Tesla will do the majority of passenger miles 
• Followup
• Unsupervised miles driven
• Is it still going to grow double digits going into the end of year?
• How much is that software and how much is Cybercab?
• Do you expect Cybercab to represent the majority of the Robotaxi fleet over time?
• We do see a clear path to over a million vehicles over the next few months
• Pierre from New Street
• 75% of U.S. cars selling with FSD?
• Am I looking at it the right way that FSD recurring revenue improves the profitability of vehicles?
• As it scales further, we will start sharing more metrics around FSD
• Followup
• Every car we are delivering comes with a free month, and people are still signing up.
• Colin at Oppenheimer
• Strategy around ramping Optimus training in spite of incomplete hand design?
• Elon, that's what we are doing
• Building imperfect robots, but training them
• We're growing as fast as humanly possible here
• I will be stunned if anyone has a robot competitive with Optimus when we ship in 2027
• We're doing whatever we can
• We are betting on the Come - Elon
• Terrafab capex ramp?
• Elon - It's not a massive impact now
• Will become more meaningful next year
• Call ends at 6:30 p.m. EDT. 
• Share price at $377.15/share.

Stay tuned to our Tesla page to hear more about the company.

This article is only meant for educational purposes, and should not be taken as investment advice. Please consider your own investment time horizon, risk tolerance, and consult with a financial advisor before acting on this information.

Shacknews staff does not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) in their content. Shacknews strictly prohibits the use of its content for AI training or to generate text, including text in the style or format used for this publication. Shacknews reserves all rights to this work.

Asif Khan CEO/EIC/EIEIO

Asif Khan is the CEO, EIC, and majority shareholder of Shacknews. He began his career in video game journalism as a freelancer in 2001 for Tendobox.com. Asif is a CPA and was formerly an investment adviser representative. After much success in his own personal investments, he retired from his day job in financial services and is currently focused on new private investments. His favorite PC game of all time is Duke Nukem 3D, and he is an unapologetic fan of most things Nintendo. Asif first frequented the Shack when it was sCary's Shugashack to find all things Quake. When he is not immersed in investments or gaming he is a purveyor of fine electronic music. Asif also has an irrational love of Cleveland sports.

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