Tesla (TSLA) is about to release Q1 2023 financial results today, Wednesday, April 19, after the markets close. As usual, a conference call and Q&A with Tesla’s management are scheduled after the results.
Here we’ll take a look at what both the street and retail investors are expecting for the quarterly results.
Tesla Q1 2023 deliveries
As usual, Tesla already disclosed its Q1 vehicle delivery and production numbers, which drive the vast majority of the company’s revenue.
Tesla also confirmed having produced 440,000 vehicles during the quarter – also a new record.
Delivery and production numbers are always slightly adjusted during earning results.
Tesla Q1 2023 revenue
For revenue, analysts generally have a pretty good idea of what to expect, thanks to the delivery numbers.
The Wall Street consensus for this quarter is $23.617 billion, and Estimize, the financial estimate crowdsourcing website, predicts a higher revenue of $24.048 billion.
Despite the new record number of deliveries, these estimates would represent a quarter-to-quarter decrease in revenue due to Tesla’s implementing large price cuts during the first quarter.
Nonetheless, it would be a massive year-over-year increase from $18 billion in revenue in Q1 2022.
Here are the predictions for Tesla’s revenue over the past two years, where Estimize predictions are in blue, Wall Street consensus is in gray, and actual results are in green:
Tesla Q1 2023 earnings
Tesla always attempts to be marginally profitable every quarter as it invests most of its money into growth, and it has been successful in doing so over the last two years now.
For Q1 2023, the Wall Street consensus is a gain of $0.85 per share, while Estimize’s prediction is higher with a profit of $0.94 per share.
The estimates have a wide range this quarter because of the price cuts Tesla implemented during the quarter. Analysts and investors are looking to see how badly it is going to affect Tesla’s margins and, ultimately, its profits.
Unsurprisingly, Tesla achieving the Wall Street consensus would be a big drop in earnings quarter-to-quarter, and the automaker would be flat on earnings year-over-year.
Here are the earnings per share over the last two years, where Estimize predictions are in blue, Wall Street consensus is in gray, and actual results are in green:
Other expectations for the TSLA shareholder’s letter and analyst call
The obvious thing is the gross margin. Investors are going to be looking for that number first. They want to know by how much it dropped and how much room there is since Tesla continued to drop prices after the end of the quarter.
If Tesla can stay in the mid to high teens, I think investors will be happy, but if it dips lower than that, they might have a problem.
Investors will also be looking at insights from management about the pricing strategy, which seems to be changing fast.
Tesla shareholders will also be looking on an update on Cybertruck production as the start of production gets closer, but knowing Tesla management, I wouldn’t expect much more than it being on track for a start of production this summer and volume production next year.
Cybertruck should not have a material impact on Tesla’s revenue in 2023.
I assume that amid margins going down, Tesla investors are going to want to have an update on Tesla’s self-driving program, which has helped margins in the past, but the program has been stalling for a while now.
According to the Say website, where investors can ask and upvote questions for the meeting, shareholders are particularly interested in Tesla Energy this quarter and its potential future impact on Tesla’s financials.
It has been a growing business for Tesla and with a ramp-up in Megapack production, it should be bigger in Q1, but I wouldn’t expect a massive jump in deployment until the second half of the year.
We will see what Tesla has to say about that.
You can join us live on Electrek this evening for intensive coverage of Tesla’s Q1 2023 financial results starting at around 4 p.m. ET for the results and through the evening for news coming out of the conference call and results.
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GM has scrapped plans to build $55 million hydrogen fuel cell factory in Detroit, triggering a tsunami of headlines about the General’s future plans for hydrogen. The reality? GM isn’t scaling back its hydrogen efforts. It’s thinking bigger.
Like the great Sam Clemens, there seems to be plenty of confidence in the greater automotive press that GM’s decision to cancel a $55 millions fuel cell plant on the former Michigan State Fairgrounds site in Detroit. That plant, a JV with Southeast Michigan’s Piston Automotive, would have created ~140 jobs and built compact hydrogen fuel cells for light- and medium-duty vehicles under the Hydrotec brand.
The new Trump Administration put an end to that flow last week, however, terminating 321 financial awards for clean energy worth $7.56 billion.
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“Certainly the decisions of the DOE are an element of that overall climate but not the only driver,” explained GM spokesperson, Stuart Fowle, in a statement. “We want to prioritize the engineering talent and resources and everything we have to continuing to advance EVs given hydrogen is in a different spot.”
That spot is heavy-duty, off-highway, maritime, and data centers.
Bigger trucks, bigger fuel cells
Fuel cell semi truck; via Honda.
Instead of dying, GM is continuing on the hydrogen fuel cell it’s been on for literal decades – with no plans (publicly, at least) to shutter its Fuel Cell System Manufacturing joint-venture with Honda in Brownstown Township, MI.
That company is not just developing HFCs, they’re out there selling fuel cells today, to extreme-duty, disaster response, and off-highway equipment customers operating far enough off the grid that access to electricity is questionable and to data center developers for whom access to a continuous flow of energy is mission-critical.
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EVs are great, and can unlock more transportation convenience with the ease of charging at home. But for apartment-dwellers, this can be a complicated conversation. So a nonprofit called Forth is here to help, through its Charge at Home program.
One of the main benefits of an electric vehicle is in the convenience of owning and charging the car in the place it spends most of its time. Instead of having to go out of your way to fuel it, you just park it at home, in the same place it spends at least 8 hours a day, and you leave the house every day with a full charge.
But this benefit only applies to those with a consistent parking space which they can easily install charging at. When talking about owners who live in apartment buildings, it can sometimes get more complicated.
While certain states have passed “right to charge” laws to give apartment-dwellers a solution for home charging, apartment charging is nevertheless a bit of a patchwork solution so far.
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And as a result of this, EV ownership among apartment renters lags behind that of single-family homeowners. It’s clear that apartments are holding back people from buying EVs, and that’s bad – lots of people live in apartments, and the gas those cars use pollutes the air just as much as any other.
Certain areas where EVs have hit a point of critical mass (namely, the large California cities) have pretty good EV ownership among renters, but it could still be better. And residents are clamoring more and more for easy EV charging in apartment communities.
So, Forth, a nonprofit advocating for equitable access to clean transportation, set up a program called Charge at Home, which is meant to connect renters, apartment building owners or other decisionmakers with resources to help install chargers at multifamily properties.
The site lets you select your situation – a resident or a decisionmaker for a new or existing multifamily development – and then gives you access to tools for your specific situation, whether you be a resident and developer.
There are a lot of considerations for each of these projects, so it can be helpful to have someone with experience to help you go over it all. Personally, when talking to friends about getting an EV, charging considerations are usually the thing that takes up the bulk of the conversation.
So if the toolkits are still too daunting for you, Charge at Home is offering free charging consultations for multifamily developers, owners, property managers and HOAs.
The charging consultations will last through at least April 2026 – but it wouldn’t hurt to get your requests in soon. Forth may still offer consultations afterwards, but it all depends on funding availability (the program was previously funded by the Department of Energy, which has taken a turn). Regardless, the website will remain up for people to submit questions and find information, whether or not free consultations stick around.
But at the very least, as Forth points out, whether a multifamily development is interested in having EV charging at this moment or not, any developer should think about having the infrastructure, conduit and capacity ready to go for future install of EV chargers, and should consider the needs of current residents who are likely already considering EVs today.
It’s going to be necessary to install this capacity at some point, and doing so earlier can help save money down the line, make your development more attractive to renters today, and allow more renters to make the switch to cleaner transportation which helps air quality and to reduce climate change, both of which harm everyone on the planet.
Head on over to Forth’s Charge at Home site to get access to all the above resources – and to sign up for a consultation before the end of April if you’re a multifamily developer, owner, property manager or HOA.
Update: This article has been updated to account for an extension in program availability.
Electrek’s Take
I’ve long said that the only real problem with EVs is the problem of access to consistent charging for people who don’t have their own garage. Whether this be apartment-dwellers, street-parkers or the like, the electric car charging experience is often less-than-ideal outside of single family homes, at least in North America.
There are workarounds available, like charging at work, or using Superchargers in “third places” where you often spend time, but these still aren’t optimal. The best thing is just to charge your car wherever it spends most of its time, which is your home. When you do that, EVs outshine everything in convenience.
We’ve highlighted some projects before which showed how reasonable it can be to install charging for developments. Every project is going to have its complexities, but when you see projects like this condo complex that managed to install chargers for just $405 per parking spot, all of a sudden it becomes a no-brainer not to have EV charging.
But the fact is, there just aren’t enough apartment complexes out there which have EV charging. So if Forth’s Charge At Home program can help residents or landlords with that, it can go a long way towards solving the only real problem with EVs. Click here to check it out.
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Baltimore County, Maryland, just brought its first large-scale ground-mounted solar farm online, and it sits on what used to be the Parkton Landfill. The 213-acre site, once a symbol of waste, is now generating clean power that will cut costs, slash emissions, and turn an underused piece of land into a long-term energy asset.
Located north of Baltimore City, Baltimore County is one of Maryland’s largest and most populous counties, and its push toward renewables has major implications for the state’s climate and energy goals.
County Executive Kathy Klausmeier called the project a clear example of innovation meeting sustainability: “We are cutting costs for taxpayers and making investments that benefit our communities for decades.”
The new solar farm will provide around 11% of the Maryland county government’s annual electricity, producing roughly 8.2 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) in its first year. That’s the equivalent of avoiding greenhouse gas emissions from burning over 620,000 gallons of gasoline, powering more than 1,150 homes for a year, or driving 14 million fewer miles in gas cars, according to the EPA.
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The 7 MW system includes four large solar arrays of 15,000 ground-mounted photovoltaic panels. It’s part of a growing trend in the US to repurpose capped landfills for renewable energy, turning dormant properties into productive clean energy sites.
Through a power purchase agreement with TotalEnergies, which owns and operates the system, Baltimore County will lock in reduced electricity rates for 25 years, with options to extend the contract for up to 33 years. That long-term deal protects taxpayers from future electricity price hikes while advancing local climate goals.
“Adding another large source of solar electricity to power our County’s facilities reflects our community’s values of making smart investments that take care of the health of our community and environment,” said Greg Strella, the county’s chief sustainability officer.
TotalEnergies Managing Director Eric Potts called the project a “powerful example of transforming underutilized assets into productive resources,” pointing to the dual benefits of cutting emissions and saving money.
Baltimore County’s next landfill solar project, at Hernwood, is expected to come online by 2028. Once that system is up and running, renewables will supply about 55% of the county government’s electricity use.
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