Tesla, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Tesla's fourth quarter 2022 Q&A webcast. My name is Martin Vieka, VP of Investor Relations, and I'm joined today by Elon Musk, Zachary Kirkhorn, and a number of other executives. Our Q4 results were announced at about 3 p.m. Central Time in the update deck we published at the same link as this webcast. During this call, we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. These comments are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our most recent filings with the SEC. During the question and answer portion of today's call, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Please use the raise hand button to join the question queue. But before we jump into Q&A, Elon has some opening remarks.

Elon? Thank you, Martin. So just going through a 2022 recap. It was a fantastic year for Tesla. It was our best year ever on every level. Our team did an amazing job. It's an honor, of course, to work with such an incredibly talented group of people. So in 2022, we delivered over 1.3 million cars and achieved a 17% operating margin, the highest among any volume carmaker. I think maybe among any carmaker. While doing so, we generated $12.5 billion in net income and $7.5 billion in pre-cash flow. Importantly, the Tesla team achieved these records despite the fact that 2022 was an incredibly challenging year due to forced shutdowns, very high interest rates, and many delivery challenges. So it's worth noting that all these records were in the face of massive difficulties. A credit to the team for achieving that. The most common question we've been getting from investors is about demand. Thus far, so I want to put that concern to rest. Thus far in January, we've seen the strongest orders year to date than ever in our history. We currently are seeing orders at almost twice the rate of production. So I mean that that it's hard to say whether that will continue twice their production, but the orders are are high and and we've actually raised the model at Y price a little bit in response to that. So we don't we we think demand will be good despite. Probably a contraction in the automotive automotive market as a whole. So. Basically, price really matters. I think there's just a vast number of people that want to buy a Tesla car, but can't afford it. And so these price changes really make a difference for the average consumer. It's sometimes, you know, for those people who are well, you know, have a lot of money, they sort of forget about how important affordability is. And it has always been our goal at Tesla to make cars that are affordable to as many people as possible. So I'm glad that we're able to do so. And. Yeah, so I think it's a good thing. All things considered. We're also making very good progress on cost control and. We're seeing the the costs of production in Berlin and drop commensurate with the growth in production, as you'd expect. So, yeah. With respect to Autopilot, as of now, we deployed full self-driving beta for city streets to roughly 400,000 customers in North America. This is a huge milestone for autonomy as FSD beta is the only way any consumer can actually test the latest AI-powered autonomy. And we're currently at about 100 million miles of FSD outside of highways. And our published data shows that improvement in safety statistics is very clear. So... We would not have released the FSD if the safety statistics were not excellent. Regarding batteries, production rate of 4680 cells reached 1000 cars a week at the end of last year, and we're increasing capacity for 4680 cells by another 100 gigawatt hours, as announced at Giga Nevada yesterday. Our long term goal is to get to well in excess of 1000 gigawatt hours of cells produced internally. and continue to use other cell providers. So to be clear, we will continue to use other cell providers, just that the demand for lithium ion batteries is quasi infinite and will be for quite some time. So we feel we can scale a lot faster using both suppliers and internally produced cells. And we've got an amazing plan for making the 4680 cell low cost and high energy density. So. Energy storage also see a record growth and with that that is continuing to accelerate. That was worth remembering that the the three pillars of a sustainable energy future are obviously electric vehicles, solar and wind, and then a third key item is stationary storage to store the energy from solar and wind because obviously the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time. So if you have those three things, you can convert all of Earth to a fully sustainable situation, many times over, actually. So I would like to just, you know, make it clear that there is a path to a fully sustainable future for humanity. And we, our goal at Tesla is to accelerate progress on that path as much as humanly possible. So yeah, so we were obviously ramping up mega pack production. And we expect it to grow at a rate quite a bit faster than our vehicle output. So in conclusion, we're taking a view that we want to keep making and selling as many cars as we can. We believe we can keep pushing for strong volume growth while retaining the industry's best operating margins. As we mentioned many times before, we want to be the best manufacturer. Really, manufacturing technology will be our most important long-term strength. And we'll talk more about our upcoming plans at the March 1st Investor Day. And lastly, I want to once again thank all of our employees for delivering another record-breaking year. Congratulations, guys.

Thanks, Elon. And I think Zach has some opening remarks as well.