Tesla’s last manually driven car, the new Roadster, will make its public debut in a month, give or take. Don’t make travel plans just yet.“We may be able to debut that in a month or so,” CEO Elon Musk said in Tesla’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call with Wall Street analysts Wednesday evening. He reiterated that all future Teslas except the Roadster will have Full Self-Driving capabilities.The Tesla Roadster requires a lot of testing before Musk can give a reliable demo of the car, he said. During Tesla’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call last January, Musk said he expected to stage the Roadster’s debut by April—this month.“I think it will be one of the most exciting product unveils ever,” Musk told Wall Street analysts. “I don’t think it will move the needle massively from a revenue standpoint, but it is very cool. I think it might be one of the most spectacular demos ever.”Musk’s remarks were in response to an investment analyst’s question regarding the CEO’s recent posts on his X social media site that Tesla could develop a family vehicle. The analyst also raised past discussion about a Tesla compact.“The Cybercab is a compact vehicle,” Musk replied. “It is a two-passenger vehicle, but very roomy. Most production long-term will be the Cybercab, because 90% of miles driven are with one or two people. It would mean that you’d want the vast majority of your production to be Cybercab.”Tesla Semi.Tesla has just begun production of the two-door, two-seat Cybercab coupe, he said, and will begin production of the semi-truck soon. Musk said production will be slow through the end of this year during start-up, but Cybercab production levels will ramp up “exponentially” by the end of this year and into next year, as production of all its vehicles will increase “substantially” this year.That will not include the Model S/X, which goes out of production at the Fremont, California assembly plant in late July or August, Musk said. Tesla will begin producing its Optimus 3 humanoid robots at the onetime General Motors/Toyota plant afterward. Within four months, Optimus 3 production will increase to an “insanely fast speed” first for internal Tesla use, with sales to customers later next year. Tesla also expanded its Robotaxi service beyond San Francisco and hometown Austin, to Dallas, and Houston this month, Axios Houston reports. While the Cybercab is a dedicated FSD model with no steering wheel or pedals, Robotaxis are Full Self Driving Model Ys, though most are being operated with supervisors behind steering wheels, according to Axios. The Houston program uses a geofenced area of approximately four square-miles in the northwest suburbs, while the Dallas program is about the same size and entails all of downtown plus sections to its north. Tesla is “pushing hard” to get the Robotaxis approved by the European Union, Musk said. The program began in The Netherlands in April, he said, and is up for review in the EU’s Brussels headquarters in May.A Tesla Robotaxi in Austin, Texas.In the earnings call, Musk and CFO Vaibhav Taneja touted the Robotaxi’s zero-accident, zero-injury record. Growing pains have more to do with convenience issues, Musk said.“The car basically gets paranoid and gets stuck.”He recalled the story of a line of Tesla Robotaxis blocking a street because they stopped at an intersection where a Waymo robotaxi—a favorite target for derision—struck a bus.Tesla on Wednesday blew past analysts’ expectations with adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization of $3.668 billion, off auto revenues of $16.234 billion and total revenues of $22.387 billion. But Tesla stock value dropped Thursday over Taneja’s earnings call statement that the company expected to spend more than $25 billion on capital expenditures in 2026.Autoweek SOC EV Newsletter sign upFor the first quarter, Tesla delivered 358,023 EVs globally, up 6.3% from Q1 of 2025. The company saw global sales increases before the Iran War began in late February and drove up oil prices, Taneja said. The US sales number for Tesla in March 2026 was still down year-over-year, when consumers were rushing to beat the impending end of the EV tax credit. According to Cox Automotive’s estimate, Tesla sold 41,055 in the US in March, down 8.4% compared with March 2025 sales. But the numbers were on the rise along with gas prices after the war began, from 38,709 in February and 37,536 in January.
