TechCrunch Mobility: The great Tesla rebranding

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent months — years? — trying to position his company as something more than just a maker of electric vehicles. When Tesla acquired Solar City in 2016, he (and his comms team) pitched it as a sustainable energy company. Over the past year, he has pushed the idea of Tesla as an AI and robotics company.

Musk’s aspirational branding has slammed right up against financial reality: The bulk of its revenue comes from selling EVs. Its latest earnings support this.

The company generated $94.8 billion in revenue in 2025. Of that, $69.5 billion came from selling and leasing EVs as well as related regulatory credits. The remaining $25 billion is split nearly down the middle between its energy generation (solar) and storage business and “services and other,” which include revenue from its Superchargers, parts sales, and Full Self-Driving subscriptions. That reliance on deliveries means that as EV sales have dipped, so has Tesla’s entire balance sheet. Its profits in 2025 were 46% lower year-over-year.

Tesla has tried to grow its non-EV businesses to compensate for the decline in sales, and its Q4 and full-year earnings report (and its accompanying call) signaled a shift beyond the persistent AI-robotics talk and toward action. For now, that action involves spending money, not making it. Musk repeatedly stressed that 2026 would be a huge CapEx year, more than doubling spending to $20 billion, which would put them in negative-cash-flow territory.

For instance, Musk announced that Tesla is ending production of the Model S and Model X, which is more symbolic than material. Those two models represent about 2% of Tesla’s sales volume, a point that Barclays analyst Dan Levy also makes in his most recent note. Still, it is a notable end-of-an-era moment for Tesla and the broader automotive industry, which was forever changed when the Model S went on sale in 2012.

The more material move is what Tesla plans to do now.

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

But the item that really stood out to me — and a true Elon Inc circular economy deal — was Tesla’s plan to invest $2 billion into another Musk company, xAI, and signaled plans to more closely align those two companies. Meanwhile, other outlets are reporting talks are underway to possibly merge (in some combination) three of Musk’s companies: SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI.

But let’s come back down to earth for a moment and review Tesla’s current business. Its sales are down year-over-year, while its smaller energy storage business made positive gains.

A little bird

blinky cat bird green — **Image Credits:**Bryce Durbin

We’re not quite ready to share the full details, but we’ve heard from one little bird that there is some activity on the fundraising front for Waymo. You probably saw reporting last month about Waymo raising up to a $15 billion round led by its parent company Alphabet. Based on my conversations, it is still in “the realm” of $15 billion and large portion is coming from Alphabet, and there is high interest from external investors to join. One little bird told me one of the other investors may be an OEM (original equipment manufacturer.

Stay tuned for more on this.

Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at [email protected] or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane at [email protected].

Deals!

money the station — **Image Credits:**Bryce Durbin

Waabi gets my “deal of the week” badge — and not just because of the dollar figures attached. The autonomous vehicle 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 support the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on its platform.

Uber is already a Waabi backer, participating in one of its earliest raises in 2021. But this is about more than money. When Waabi first launched, it focused on applying its autonomous vehicle tech to self-driving trucks. The deal with Uber is a declaration that it intends to scale its tech across multiple self-driving verticals with a single technology stack.

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

Other deals that got my attention …

Gatik AI, a startup developing autonomous trucks focused on the “middle mile,” has signed a deal with a major (unnamed) consumer-goods company. Here’s why it matters: The contract will deliver $600 million in revenue over five years. And these are for driverless transport, meaning no safety driver is behind the wheel. These Gatik trucks, which run 24 hours a day moving ambient, refrigerated, and frozen goods between distribution centers and stores, have been operating driverlessly since mid-2025. According to the company, it has completed 60,000 fully driverless orders without incident.

Luminar’s lidar business has been sold for $33 million to Redmond, Washington-based MicroVision. The company, which is developing its own sensors, beat out Quantum Computing in an auction for the assets. TC’s Sean O’Kane interviewed MicroVision CEO Glen DeVos about his plans for Luminar. The sales process did have a bit of last-minute intrigue when a mystery bidder, with a far larger offer, made a play for Luminar’s lidar business.

Rad Power Bikes, which started the bankruptcy process about a month ago, reached a deal to sell itself to Life Electric Vehicles Holdings (or Life EV) for around $13.2 million. When accounting for Rad Power’s liabilities, the total value of the bid is $14.9 million. History lesson: Rad Power has raised $329.2 million since its founding and once had a valuation of $1.65 billion.

Redwood Materials raised $425 million in a Series E round that includes Google as a new investor. The round was led by venture firm Eclipse and includes a strategic investment by Nvidia’s venture capital arm, NVentures, as well as existing investors Capricorn and Goldman Sachs. Read the full story to learn what Redwood plans to do with the capital.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Obi, a company that aggregates real-time pricing and pickup times across multiple ride-hailing services, 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 price gap between Waymo and rides provided by Uber and Lyft is narrowing.

Uber launched a new division called Uber AV Labs, that is not — as senior reporter Sean O’Kane points out — a ploy to start developing its own robotaxis again. This is a data-sharing play; sensor-equipped Uber cars will collect and then share data with partners like Lucid, Waymo, and Waabi. Important note: No contracts are signed yet.

Waymo is now allowed to operate a robotaxi service to and from the San Francisco International Airport (SFO). The company will begin offering access to SFO to a select number of riders before offering it to all customers in the coming months. That win comes with a 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 of its robotaxis struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica on January 23.

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