TechCrunch Mobility: The great Tesla rebranding

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent months — years? — attempting to place his company as one thing more than just a maker of electrical autos. When Tesla acquired Solar City in 2016, he (and his comms team) pitched it as a sustainable power company. Over the past yr, he has pushed the concept of Tesla as an AI and robotics company.

Musk’s aspirational branding has slammed proper up against monetary actuality: The bulk of its income comes from promoting EVs. Its latest earnings help this.

The company generated $94.8 billion in income in 2025. Of that, $69.5 billion got here from promoting and leasing EVs in addition to associated regulatory credit. The remaining $25 billion is break up practically down the center between its power technology (photo voltaic) and storage enterprise and “services and other,” which embrace income from its Superchargers, elements sales, and Full Self-Driving subscriptions. That reliance on deliveries means that as EV sales have dipped, so has Tesla’s whole steadiness sheet. Its earnings in 2025 have been 46% decrease year-over-year.

Tesla has tried to develop its non-EV companies to compensate for the decline in sales, and its This autumn and full-year earnings report (and its accompanying name) signaled a shift past the persistent AI-robotics discuss and towards action. For now, that action entails spending cash, not making it. Musk repeatedly pressured that 2026 can be an enormous CapEx yr, more than doubling spending to $20 billion, which might put them in negative-cash-flow territory.

For occasion, Musk announced that Tesla is ending manufacturing of the Model S and Model X, which is more symbolic than materials. Those two fashions symbolize about 2% of Tesla’s sales quantity, a point that Barclays analyst Dan Levy also makes in his most latest notice. Still, it’s a notable end-of-an-era second for Tesla and the broader automotive business, which was endlessly modified when the Model S went on sale in 2012.

The more materials transfer is what Tesla plans to do now.

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Tesla plans to fill the manufacturing void left by the Model S and X with its Optimus humanoid robots, which shall be made at its Fremont, California, manufacturing unit. Musk also intends to scale Tesla’s robotaxi operations to more cities in 2026 and even floated the want for Tesla to build a TerraFab manufacturing unit to shore up chip provide.

But the item that actually stood out to me — and a true Elon Inc round economic system deal — was Tesla’s plan to make investments $2 billion into another Musk company, xAI, and signaled plans to more carefully align those two firms. Meanwhile, other retailers are reporting talks are underway to presumably merge (in some mixture) three of Musk’s firms: SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI.

But let’s come again right down to earth for a second and review Tesla’s current enterprise. Its sales are down year-over-year, while its smaller power storage enterprise made optimistic beneficial properties.

A little bit chicken

Image Credits:Bryce Durbin

We’re not fairly able to share the full particulars, however we’ve heard from one little chicken that there’s some exercise on the fundraising entrance for Waymo. You in all probability noticed reporting last month about Waymo elevating as much as a $15 billion round led by its mum or dad company Alphabet. Based on my conversations, it’s still in “the realm” of $15 billion and large portion is coming from Alphabet, and there’s high curiosity from exterior traders to affix. One little chicken told me one in all the other traders could also be an OEM (unique tools producer.

Stay tuned for more on this.

Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or e mail Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.

Deals!

Image Credits:Bryce Durbin

Waabi will get my “deal of the week” badge — and never just because of the greenback figures connected. The autonomous car startup has raised $750 million in a Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, plus another $250 million in milestone capital from Uber to help the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis completely on its platform.

Uber is already a Waabi backer, collaborating in one in all its earliest raises in 2021. But this is about more than cash. When Waabi first launched, it centered on making use of its autonomous car tech to self-driving vehicles. The cope with Uber is a declaration that it intends to scale its tech across a number of self-driving verticals with a single technology stack.

Can Waabi do it? Others have tried and retreated. Waymo shuttered its self-driving vehicles program to give attention to robotaxis; Aurora, which is also an investor in Waabi, was engaged on each vehicles and robotaxis, too, before deciding to focus just on big rigs.

Other offers that obtained my consideration …

Gatik AI, a startup growing autonomous vehicles centered on the “middle mile,” has signed a cope with a major (unnamed) consumer-goods company. Here’s why it issues: The contract will ship $600 million in income over 5 years. And these are for driverless transport, which means no security driver is behind the wheel. These Gatik vehicles, which run 24 hours a day transferring ambient, refrigerated, and frozen items between distribution facilities and shops, have been working driverlessly since mid-2025. According to the company, it has accomplished 60,000 totally driverless orders without incident.

Luminar’s lidar enterprise has been offered for $33 million to Redmond, Washington-based MicroVision. The company, which is growing its personal sensors, beat out Quantum Computing in an public sale for the property. TC’s Sean O’Kane interviewed MicroVision CEO Glen DeVos about his plans for Luminar. The sales course of did have a little bit of last-minute intrigue when a thriller bidder, with a far bigger provide, made a play for Luminar’s lidar enterprise.

Rad Power Bikes, which began the chapter course of about a month in the past, reached a deal to promote itself to Life Electric Vehicles Holdings (or Life EV) for round $13.2 million. When accounting for Rad Power’s liabilities, the whole worth of the bid is $14.9 million. History lesson: Rad Power has raised $329.2 million since its founding and as soon as had a valuation of $1.65 billion.

Redwood Materials raised $425 million in a Series E round that contains Google as a new investor. The round was led by enterprise agency Eclipse and features a strategic funding by Nvidia’s enterprise capital arm, NVentures, in addition to present traders Capricorn and Goldman Sachs. Read the full story to be taught what Redwood plans to do with the capital.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Image Credits:Bryce Durbin

Obi, a company that aggregates real-time pricing and pickup instances across a number of ride-hailing providers, shared new data on ride-hailing and robotaxis in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are a few takeaways — so please go read the full story — including that the worth hole between Waymo and rides supplied by Uber and Lyft is narrowing.

Uber launched a new division called Uber AV Labs, that is just not — as senior reporter Sean O’Kane factors out — a ploy to start growing its personal robotaxis again. This is a data-sharing play; sensor-equipped Uber vehicles will gather and then share data with companions like Lucid, Waymo, and Waabi. Important notice: No contracts are signed yet.

Waymo is now allowed to function a robotaxi service to and from the San Francisco International Airport (SFO). The company will start providing entry to SFO to a choose variety of riders before providing it to all prospects in the coming months. That win comes with a little bit of tarnish, however. Waymo is under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and National Transportation Safety Board after the company reported one in all its robotaxis struck a toddler close to an elementary college in Santa Monica on January 23.

The San Francisco Police Departmentis investigating an incident involving a Zoox autonomous car that crashed into the driver’s-side door of a parked automobile.

One more factor …

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had a ballot and here’s a enjoyable one: What will the title or ticker of Musk’s mixed supercompany be?

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TechCrunch Mobility: The great Tesla rebranding