Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Saturday, January 10th.

Today on Forbes, Tesla's manufacturing hangover is steering Musk into robotics.

Since it began selling electric vehicles in 2008, Tesla has positioned itself as an unconventional carmaker compared to incumbents.

But after back-to-back annual sales

declines, the Elon Musk-led company looks an awful lot like a traditional auto brand in one key

aspect, underutilized auto plants. The Austin-based company this month said its global sales fell

6.7% last year, a second consecutive

annual decline, and that it built 1.65 million vehicles at plants in Shanghai, California,

Germany, and Texas, 119,000 fewer than in 2024. That meant Tesla used just 70% of the more than 2.35 million units of

annual production capacity the company lists for its plants, down from a high of 89% in 2021.

Mike Wall, an auto industry analyst for S&P, said, quote,

The average utilization rate running in North America, as an example, is about 69%,

so it looks like Tesla's at roughly around the same number.

The general threshold of what somebody would deem as healthy capacity, or maybe

optimal capacity utilization, would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% to 80%.

Just two years ago, Tesla was still planning new auto factories in Mexico and India

as Musk anticipated dramatically higher sales growth, led by the popularity of its Model Y and

Model 3 EVs.

But its failure to release new models, beyond the disappointing cyber truck,

intense competition in China, and blowback in the U.S. and Europe over Musk's right-wing

politics, have all impacted the brand. So it's hardly surprising its billionaire CEO is now

pinning Tesla's future on being a Robotaxyi, AI, and robotics powerhouse, businesses that

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