Einride begins fully-autonomous, commercial EV truck operations with GE Appliances
Autonomous EV freight developer Einride announced another key milestone today, deploying full-time, commercial operations with longtime partner, GE Appliances. The autonomous trucks are navigating between GE’s manufacturing facility and warehouse, demonstrating a case for scaled commercialization in the electric freight industry.
Today’s milestone is another notable achievement for a relatively young company like Einride, which was founded in Sweden less than eight years ago. In that time, we’ve followed much of the autonomous truck company’s progress, including partnerships with companies like Maersk and Beyond Meat, as well as expansions into new markets like Germany.
After announcing plans to set up a new headquarters in the US, we’ve seen Einride make huge strides in all-electric autonomous freight mobility the past two years. In June of 2022, the company received approval from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to begin piloting its Pod trucks – marking the first time a purpose-built autonomous, electric truck without a driver on board has received permission to operate on public US roads.
At the time, we reported that Einride’s client, GE Appliances would serve as the key partner in the initial US pilot program to both test and showcase the commercialization capabilities of the autonomous, electric Pod trucks.
18 months later, Einride has shared a progress update with GE in which the former has begun full-time autonomous truck operations between two of the latter’s facilities in Tennessee.
Einride’s autonomous trucks run daily for GE Appliances
Following a successful public road pilot program with GE Appliances last year, Einride reports that its zero-emission autonomous trucks are now operating in Selmer, Tennessee, Monday through Thursday – completing up to seven shuttles of finished goods per day.
The trucks autonomously navigate 0.3 miles between GE Appliances’ manufacturing facility and warehouse while being monitored by one of Einride’s Remote Pod Operators, who can take control of the EVs if needed. In this case, Einride’s first remote operator, Tiffany Heathcott is monitoring the trucks on-site, rather than from her usual hub in Texas.
A relatively short route to begin, yes, but still a milestone for autonomous freight, as Einride’s Trucks are successfully navigating public roads around the clock with no humans present. Henrik Green, Einride’s general manager of autonomous technologies, spoke:
We are very proud to partner with GE Appliances and be able to lead the industry in providing autonomous technology and deploying it in the strongest commercial use case today. We look forward to continuing this work to establish autonomous’ key role in transportation, both with GE Appliances and other partners across markets.
Einride states that its autonomous truck operation is part of a larger project in Selmer with GE, which also includes other industry partners with the goal of creating a freight logistics flow that is entirely automated.
For instance, GE Appliances has also partnered with TaskWatch, whose AI cameras trigger a control board that raises and lowers GE’s dock doors and dock plate, then locks the Einride truck into place. The system then notifies a robot that the autonomous truck is ready to load. The robots come from another GE partner – Slip Robotics – whose technology can autonomously load and unload the vehicles, reducing times by 80%.
Together, Einride and GE Appliances hope to demonstrate the potential of a streamlined holistic logistics system that extends well beyond autonomous, zero emissions trucks and into every single aspect of the process – from factory to delivery. Per Harry Chase, senior director of central materials at GE Appliances:
Our partnership with Einride in Selmer reflects our evolved approach to robotics and automation technology. We are moving from implementing one-off solutions addressing various challenges to creating interoperability among systems that can build consistency and streamline processes in our factories and throughout our supply chain. This implementation in Selmer is helping us reduce emissions, allowing our employees to focus on high value tasks, reducing traffic in congested areas to create a safer work environment, and eliminating some of the most challenging ergonomic tasks like climbing on and off a forklift and hooking and unhooking trailers. We believe robotics and automation technology should work with and for people to improve their jobs.
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Tesla (TSLA) is no longer confidently stating growth in its automotive business for 2025, and it has delayed updating its guidance until the next quarter after a disappointing performance in the first three months of the year.
2024 was Tesla’s first year in a decade where its vehicle deliveries went down year-over-year.
Just a few months ago, in January, Tesla was confident in predicting that it would return to growth in 2025:
“With the advancements in vehicle autonomy and the introduction of new products, we expect the vehicle business to return to growth in 2025.”
Today, Tesla released its Q1 2025 financial results, confirming that it had its worst quarter in years to start 2025.
The automaker is now clearly not as confident about returning to growth in its automotive business this year.
Tesla updated its “outlook” section this quarter to highlight the potential impact of trade policies and now no longer discusses automotive growth in isolation. Instead, it bundled automotive and energy businesses together and said that it will “revisit its 2025 guidance” next quarter:
It is difficult to measure the impacts of shifting global trade policy on the automotive and energy supply chains, our cost structure and demand for durable goods and related services. While we are making prudent investments that will set up both our vehicle and energy businesses for growth, the rate of growth this year will depend on a variety of factors, including the rate of acceleration of our autonomy efforts, production ramp at our factories and the broader macroeconomic environment. We will revisit our 2025 guidance in our Q2 update.
Tesla’s vehicle deliveries are already down about 50,000 units so far this year compared to last year.
It will be challenging to catch up in the current macroeconomic situation.
Tesla again guided the start of production of “new affordable models” in the first half of 2025, which could help the automaker to deliver more cars.
However, as we have previously reported, these new vehicles are expected to be stripped-down Model Y and Model 3, which will cannibalize Tesla’s current sales and limit its growth to those products.
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US DC fast charging is becoming more reliable, and charging stations are getting bigger and busier, according to a new Q1 2025 report from the EV data analysts at Paren.
DC fast charging station reliability is on the rise
Paren’s latest US Reliability Index – “Can I successfully charge at this charger?” – increased from 81.2 points in Q4 2024 to 82.6 points in Q1 2025, a notable jump of 1.7%. According to Bill Ferro, CTO at Paren, “This continues a quarterly trend across the US non-Tesla fast charging infrastructure, which suggests that the ongoing efforts to replace or sunset older hardware are having a positive impact on station uptime. In addition, newer entrants into the field are bringing time-tested hardware along with enhanced driver experiences.”
Utah, Alaska, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Nevada were the top-ranked states for DC fast charging reliability in Q1 2025.
Growth slows, but charging stations are getting larger
New DC fast charging ports grew to 55,580 at the end of Q1 2025, up 3,667 from last quarter, with total stations reaching 10,839, an increase of 794. This is fewer new additions compared to the surge seen at the end of 2024, reflecting typical seasonal slowdowns due to winter weather. However, there’s a bright spot: the average number of ports per station among non-Tesla networks rose to 3.9, compared to 2.7 year-over-year. The Tesla Supercharger network now averages 13 ports per station.
Utilization rates reflect the urban-rural divide
Average utilization – that’s the minutes of a charging session as a percentage of time a station is open each day – dropped slightly from 16.6% in Q4 2024 to 16.2% in Q1 2025, following typical holiday travel patterns. But overall, charging use is climbing, especially in dense urban areas with significant rideshare and apartment communities that rely heavily on public chargers.
Early days for NACS transition
The Combined Charging System (CCS) remains dominant, with 59% of new ports, and the shift toward Tesla’s NACS (J3400) standard is still in its very early stages. Only 104 non-Tesla NACS ports were added this quarter at non-Tesla networks, so drivers of new non-Tesla vehicles need to use their adapters if they want to use Superchargers.
Fixed pricing prevails
Charging operators primarily use fixed pricing (80%), with Time of Use (TOU) pricing making up 16%. Pay-by-time options are rare, used only 4.2% of the time.
California is the only major state where TOU pricing surpasses fixed pricing, while many states, such as Oklahoma, Vermont, and Arkansas, almost exclusively utilize fixed pricing models.
As for the most expensive places to fast charge your EV? The top four metropolitan statistical areas are all in California, with average rates at $0.60 or $0.61 per kWh.
Rural and low-income areas at risk
The Trump administration’s cancellation of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program poses a significant threat to rural and low-income communities. Loren McDonald, chief analyst at Paren, cautioned, “Our data is a harbinger of less expansion in rural and lower-income markets as CPOs will increasingly focus on urban markets, seeing high utilization, often north of 30%, versus markets with less than 5% utilization.”
‘Charging 2.0’ – a new industry phase
McDonald summed up the report by marking 2024 as a pivotal year, stating, “2024 was a year of mixed news in the US DC fast charging industry, but it will be remembered as a pivotal turn to a new era we are calling ‘Charging 2.0’. Charge-point operators and new players in the industry are increasingly focused on creating a great customer experience, improving reliability of chargers, and reaching profitability – a shift from chasing the availability of incentives, racing to get chargers in the ground, and then crossing your fingers that utilization will grow over time.”
Read more: Trump just canceled the federal NEVI EV charger program
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Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the first quarter (Q1) and full-year 2025 after market close today.
We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight. Refresh for the latest information.
Tesla Q1 2025 earnings expectations
As we reported in our Tesla Q1 2025 earnings preview yesterday, the Wall Street consensus for this quarter was $21.345 billion in revenue and earnings of $0.41 per share.
The expectations had been significantly downgraded over the last month, as analysts were surprised by Tesla’s announcement of much lower deliveries than expected in the first quarter.
Did Tesla meet them?`
Tesla Q1 2025 financial results
After the market closed today, Tesla released its financial results for the first quarter and confirmed that it missed expectations with earnings of $0.27 per share (non-GAAP), and it also missed revenue expectations with $19.335 billion during the last quarter.
This is a big miss for Tesla despite the company admitting to selling a lot more regulatory credits this quarter.
At $595 million in credit sales, Tesla would have lost money without it in Q1 2025:
In short, Tesla is on the verge of being a money-losing company.
We will be posting our follow-up posts here about the earnings and conference call to expand on the most important points (refresh the page to see the most recent posts):
Here’s Tesla’s Q1 2025 shareholder presentation in full:
Here’s Tesla’s conference call for the Q1 2025 results:
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