Tesla may be building out a feature for vehicle-to-vehicle communication
Ian Maddox
Tesla recently wrapped up its 2022 annual shareholders meeting, and CEO Elon Musk hinted at a potentially exciting feature coming to the fleet: vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
Towards the end of the shareholders’ meeting, a gentleman in the audience mentioned how aircrafts use a system called Airborne Collision Avoidance System (ACAS). He elaborated on how ACAS relays an aircraft’s telemetry to prevent a collision.
“Sometimes too much telemetry,” Musk adds and laughs, assumingly referencing the Twitter account that tracks his private jet.
“Do you see Teslas communicating with one another and Dojo turning into some kind of air traffic control for Tesla supply chains and Robotaxi?” adds the gentleman.
Musk answered by saying he hasn’t thought about that before, which is interesting. He added that the goal with Dojo is to be the de facto computer for training the neural net with videos.
“Oh. That’s an interesting idea. I haven’t thought about that,” Musk responds. “Right now our goal with Dojo is to be really good at video training. We have probably the fourth or approaching the third, most powerful computing center in the world for AI training. Our first goal with Dojo is to make it competitive and be more effective at neural net training than a whole bunch of GPUs. We might get there… soonish.”
Musk also added that Dojo is built “from the ground up” to train AI using videos, and building such a computer has never been done before.
This question got Musk’s mind going. He paused for a moment and said there may be some difficulties in getting Teslas to communicate with one another - and it won’t be needed with Full Self-Driving.
“There will be some merits for Teslas to communicate [with] each other, but that won’t be needed for Full Self-Driving at all,” Musk responds. “But for a long time the vast majority of cars will be manually driven, so the value of Tesla-to-Tesla communication is not that high, except for, perhaps, communicating traffic issues, accidents, potholes, and road closures. A Tesla ahead of you has seen a road closure and you get that real-time update to your car so you don’t get stuck in the road closure situation. That’s the stuff that we are working on right now.”
Elon Musk's Answer
In January of 2022, Twitter user and Tesla enthusiast @BLKMDL3 tweeted at Musk asking about this type of feature. “Hey @elonmusk, can we get the air suspension in Model S/X to automatically raise quickly if the car detects a dip in the road ahead and then remember the location for next time?” BLKMDL3 writes. “Would be an awesome feature to have!”
Musk responded with, “Yeah.”
Hey @elonmusk, can we get the air suspension in Model S/X to automatically raise quickly if the car detects a dip in the road ahead and then remember the location for next time? Would be an awesome feature to have!
BLKMDL3’s tweet received quite a bit of attention.
Tesla has recently rolled out updates to improve a vehicle’s ability to raise and lower its suspension when arriving at a specific location. This is so the vehicle doesn’t scuff the pavement and cause damage to its underbody.
Since Musk stated that he hasn’t thought about vehicle-to-vehicle communication or how it would be done, we don’t anticipate this feature rolling out anytime soon. However, we can hope that it gets added to the pipeline of upcoming features due to its seemingly positive reception and want for it. This could also increase the safety of Tesla’s vehicles, even though they’re already the safest cars on the road.
It would be nice for vehicles within a 5-10 mile radius to notify one another of a construction zone, or accident, similar to Waze. This would allow the vehicle to reroute to a more efficient route or handle the situation accordingly. Going a step further, it would be exceptionally cool to see snapshots or videos of the upcoming situation by seeing a “hotspot” in maps, similar to how Snapchat shows hotspots, that are recorded via the vehicle’s cameras to more accurately prepare for it. But this may open a can of worms in regards to privacy.
Turning Tesla’s fleet into a mobile social network may go against Musk’s vision. He’s stated before that any user input in the vehicle should be considered an error, so having an interactive feature such as this may not be in Tesla’s deck of cards.
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It was a rainy April 1st when a news-searching author went on a delve into the depths of April Fools to find fact from falsehood. And while we found a lot of fantastic jokes, we also found some good ideas.
So, with a shoutout to MarcoRP on X, whose April Fool’s Joke gave us a good run for our money for a couple of minutes, we thought to ourselves - what would a Cybercab Charging Station / Cleaning Hub really look like?
Cybercab Wireless Charging Sites
Now, before continuing, we’d like to point out that the image up top is a joke from Marco - it isn’t an accurate or real site map submission from Tesla. However, it gave us the impetus to think critically about what is required for a Robotaxi fleet, based primarily on the Cybercab, to be able to service a city.
Requirements
Tesla will likely need to charge a small fleet of Cybercabs at a single time and in a single place. That means that the site needs to be large enough to cover a major metro area while also still being compact enough to not cost too much money to build out.
In addition, we need to factor in charge times. The Cybercab is likely to launch with a battery around 50 kWh, which will result in a range of approximately 300 miles. With that much range, the average Cybercab may not need to charge more than once or at all during daytime shifts, so instead, most of the vehicles will charge overnight.
MarcoRP
Math and Charge Times
The overnight charging means that most of these vehicles could be charged slowly. When we did some back-of-the-napkin math last year, we determined that Tesla’s wireless charger will likely peak around 17 kW (for comparison, Tesla’s Wall Connector at 32 amps charges at about 7 kW). If we scale Tesla’s wireless charger down slightly to 10 kW, accounting for some energy loss and the potential size of the site, that means a Cybercab will be able to charge in about 5 hours.
Tesla’s upcoming V4 Supercharger unit can currently handle 1.5MW per cabinet, but this slower-speed charging is A/C, not DC, which means there is a step-down loss of about 3-5%. Let’s make that a comfortable 10% for any other overages, but we can estimate around 1.35MW of power. That 1.3MW will easily handle charging up to 100 Cybercabs at once - all wirelessly, using Tesla’s unique beam-forming and beam-steering technology to keep efficiency high at every single stall.
Within about 5 hours, a whole fleet of 100 Cybercabs could be charged overnight when electricity rates are cheaper and still be out in time for the morning commute.
While this is all just hypothetical, it really does make sense that Tesla will be establishing these sites that won’t require much space or a ton of energy.
Tesla recently curtained off a large section of the parking garage at Giga Texas, as well as some of their chargers on the eastern end of the facility, leading us to believe they may just be testing this at scale internally.
There’s a lot to look forward to with Tesla’s V4 Supercharger deployment coming this year and with Robotaxi launching in just a couple of months.
Tesla released its Q1 2025 delivery and production numbers this morning, reporting 336,681 vehicles delivered and 362,615 produced—marking the company’s weakest quarter since 2022. Deliveries declined 13% year-over-year and fell well short of Wall Street estimates, which ranged from 360,000 to 370,000. Some analysts had forecast as many as 407,000 units.
Despite the shortfall, Tesla stock is actually up about 4% this morning, not only suggesting the market had already priced in weaker performance, but that this may be seen as the low point for the company. Tesla began delivering its refreshed Model Y in March, and production across all four Gigafactories was impacted by several weeks of downtime as Tesla retooled lines to accommodate the newer model. However, there’s no doubt that there is some brand impact from Elon Musk.
Comparing Numbers
Most of the deliveries—323,800 units—came from the Model 3 and Model Y lineup, while the “Other Models” category (including the Cybertruck, Model S, and Model X) accounted for 12,881 deliveries. That’s a 31% drop for Model 3/Y and a sharper 45% drop for the Other Models category compared to the previous quarter. However, comparing it to a more applicable Q1 2024, these numbers are only down about 13% for the Model 3/Y and down about 24% for the Model S/X and Cybertruck.
In terms of production, Tesla built 345,454 Model 3/Y vehicles and 17,161 from its “Other Models” line. The company attributed the production drop to the Model Y changeover but said the ramp is “going well.” This still leaves a large gap between production and delivery numbers, although they may not be as large as many had feared.
Q1 2025
Q1 2024
Q4 2024
Model 3/Y Deliveries
323,800
369,783
471,930
Model 3/Y Production
345,454
412,376
436,718
Other Models Deliveries
12,881
17,027
23,640
Other Models Production
17,161
20,995
22,727
Total Deliveries
336,681
386,810
495,570
Total Production
362,615
433,371
459,445
Cybertruck
One major weak point in Tesla’s numbers seems to be Cybertruck deliveries. While Tesla previously expected the Cybertruck to sell more than 250k units per year, we’re already seeing a decline in numbers. This is likely due to several factors, including the higher-than-expected price point of the truck, the unavailability of the RWD model, and the Cybertruck’s polarizing design, which may attract unwanted attention right now.
While the Cybertruck was ramping up production in 2024, making the lower numbers reasonable, the deliveries for Q1 2025 dropped drastically compared to the previous quarter. Cybertruck deliveries are estimated to be in the 5- 6k unit range for the quarter.
The good news to take away here is that the Single Motor variant of the Cybertruck appears to be nearing release. The price of the RWD version is expected to be about $60k USD before any incentives.
Q1 Earnings Call
Tesla announced their quarterly numbers this morning and posted on social media that they’ll live stream their Earnings Call on April 22nd.
This post was later edited to change “Q1 Earnings Call” to “Q1 Company Update.” It’s not clear whether there’s any significance in this change, but it could mean that Tesla has more to announce during the call.
The Company Update will occur on April 22nd at 2:30 PM PT / 5:30 PM ET. The standard Q&A session with executives and Musk is expected to follow the release of additional financial results for the quarter.
Tesla is set to launch its long-awaited Robotaxi service in June, and a cheaper, mass-market model is also planned for this year. With delivery numbers coming in soft and the refreshed Model Y just hitting the road, all eyes will be on forward-looking commentary during the update.
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