A lot of people were looking forward to a product pipeline update during Tesla Inc's TSLA fourth-quarter and full-year 2021 earnings conference call. Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave investors just that when he spoke on the call Wednesday night.
"2021 was a breakthrough year for Tesla and for electric vehicles in general," Musk said during his opening remarks.
He highlighted the company's strong numbers and confirmed that production has begun at Giga Texas and Giga Berlin. He also noted that Tesla continues to face supply chain challenges.
See Also: Tesla Q4 Earnings Highlights: $17.7B Revenue Beats Estimates, Production & Delivery Totals And More
"After an exceptional year, we shift our focus to the future," Musk said before providing updates on Tesla's highly-anticipated products.
Full Self-Driving: "Over time we think that full self-driving will become the most important source of profitability for Tesla," he said, adding that if you run the numbers on robo-taxis it's "nutty good" from a financial standpoint.
"I'm completely confident at this point that it will be achieved and my personal guess is that we will achieve full self-driving this year."
Vehicle Models: "The fundamental focus for Tesla this year is scaling output ... both last year and this year, if we were to introduce new vehicles, our total vehicle output would decrease ... so we will not be introducing new vehicle models this year ... we will however do a lot of engineering and tooling to create those vehicles."
Musk mentioned the Cybertruck, the Semi and the Roadster models, which he said will be ready for production "hopefully next year." Then he turned his focus to Tesla's AI humanoid robot, Optimus.
AI Robot: "In terms of priority of products," Musk called it the most important product development the company is working on this year.
"This, I think, has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time ... what happens if you don't actually have a labor shortage? I'm not sure what an economy even means at that point. That's what Optimus is about."
The Tesla CEO said he expects the company to grow "comfortably above" 50% in 2022.
TSLA Price Action: Tesla has traded as low as $539.49 and as high as $1,243.49 over a 52-week period.
The stock was volatile in Wednesday's after-hours session and traded flat around $937.50 at the time of writing.
Photo: courtesy of Tesla.
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