NEW YORK — Elon Musk said he’ll be spending less time in Washington slashing government costs and more time running Tesla after his electric vehicle company reported a big drop in profits.

Musk said on a conference call with analysts Tuesday that “now that the major work of establishing Department of Government Efficiency is done,” that he will be “allocating far more of my time to Tesla” starting in May. Musk said he now expects to spend just “a day or two per week on government matters.”

Tesla struggled to sell vehicles as it faced protests over Musk’s leadership of DOGE, a jobs-cutting group that has divided the country.

The Austin, Texas-based company reported a 71% drop in profits and a 9% decline in revenue for the first quarter.

“Investors wanted to see him recommit to Tesla,” said Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives. “This is a big step in the right direction.”

Tesla shares are down more than 40% for the year.

The company reconfirmed that it expects to roll out a cheaper version of its best-selling vehicle, the Model Y SUV, in the first half of this year.

Tesla also stuck with its predictions that it will be able to launch a paid driverless robotaxi service in Austin in June and have much of its fleet operating by itself next year.

“There will be millions of Teslas operating autonomously in the second half of the year,” Musk said in a conference call after the results were announced. He later added about the personal use of autonomous vehicles, “Can you go to sleep in our cars and wake up at your destination? I’m confident that will be available in many cities in the U.S. by the end of this year.”

Auto analyst Sam Abuelsamid at Telemetry Insight said he doubts Musk’s predictions.

“The system is not robust enough to operate unsupervised. It still makes far too many errors,” he said. “It will suddenly make mistakes that will lead to a crash.”