EVwire brief: Elon Musk said on the Q2 2026 earnings call that Tesla will turn its self-driving effort to the Semi "around the end of this year or early next yearโ, once thereโs less need to focus on the complete development of FSD on its passenger vehicles.
Answering the long-running autonomous Semi question on the Q2 2026 earnings call, Musk called a self-driving Semi "very important" for addressing the trucker shortage, but said Semi volumes will remain too small a share of Tesla's fleet, even by the end of this year, to justify splitting the autonomy effort now.
The payoff timing, per Musk: the autonomous Semi "will be in time for the scale-up to high production of the Semi," which starts this year at the new factory in Nevada.
As you allude to, there is a really serious shortage of truckers. So there just aren't enough people who want to drive trucks, which are crucial for transport throughout America. So an autonomous Semi is actually very important to address the shortage of truck drivers.
Musk added that a self-driving Semi will also "dramatically improve safety and comfort for drivers." But priority goes to where the fleet is:
It makes sense for us to focus our self-driving efforts on our high-volume vehicles, so Model 3 and Y. And solving self-driving and really getting to the point where it's a generalized, unsupervised self-driving for those vehicles. Probably around the end of this year or early next year. And I just don't want it to be a distraction on the March of Nines of self-driving. And it will be in time for the scale-up to high production of the Semi.
The "March of Nines" is Musk's shorthand for the long grind from a system that works 99.9% of the time to one reliable enough to run with no human at all, each added nine being roughly as hard as the last.
Two things stand out to me here. Musk just attached a date, however soft, to generalized unsupervised FSD on the volume fleet. And it seems they aim to have it ramped up together with the fleet production ramp up.
Context: the Q2 deck lists the Nevada Semifactory as commissioning, with Semi production "on schedule for production starting in 2026." The economics case is already being made without autonomy: stacked California incentives can bring a Semi to roughly $50K, the Port of LA offers up to $300K per truck, and the charging layer is going public with the first public Megacharger station in Bloomington. A driverless Semi on top of subsidized hardware and megawatt charging is the version of the pitch fleet buyers have been waiting to price in. Full quarter numbers are in our Q2 2026 earnings deck recap.
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