Electrek

Residential battery storage maker sonnen is reporting two very different stories today: Its German business has filed for insolvency, while sonnen USA says sales have doubled and it’s preparing to expand.

Tesla skipped one of its top shareholder questions on its Q3 2026 earnings call: when Hardware 3 owners will find out if they get a free computer upgrade for the unsupervised “Full Self-Driving” they paid for.

The question ranked fifth by shares on Say. Tesla read and answered questions ranked below it. It went past this one without a word.

BYD will open pre-orders for the Denza N8 EV next week, a large five-seat luxury electric SUV with a CLTC range of over 623 miles (1,000 km).

Seattle plans to add up to 200 public curbside Level 2 EV charging stations by 2030, and residents can now request one near their home or apartment.

The iX5 is set to go on sale in early 2027, but BMW is already offering a loyalty discount to sweeten the deal for those looking to stay with the brand.

Tesla says it’s building its own maps to fix some of the most common problems with its “Full Self-Driving” system, including reading speed limits, parking, and choosing routes. The company’s head of AI described the effort on Tesla’s Q3 2026 earnings call.

It’s a notable shift for a company whose CEO spent years arguing that self-driving systems relying on maps are brittle. And it shows Tesla’s fleet is now doing the same job Waymo’s cars do: mapping the roads so the self-driving system knows what it can’t reliably figure out on its own.

Tesla fans argue that Waymo’s approach differs because it creates HD maps with lidar, but ultimately both are creating their own maps; if your argument is that Tesla’s maps are less well-defined and needed for driving for different reasons than Waymo’s, you don’t really have an argument.

Ferrari’s first electric car, the Luce, will start at $560,800 in the US, with American deliveries planned for the second quarter of 2027. Car and Driver first reported the figure, and Ferrari has confirmed it.

That’s roughly $80,000 under the ~$640,000 number that has followed the Luce since its unveiling in May, including in our own coverage. But Americans aren’t getting a deal.

Kia is betting its new lineup of affordable EVs, like the EV3, can beat the incoming wave of Chinese models in Canada, but affordability is only one part of the equation.

Heybike is once again dominating our daily Green Deals edition with another pair of exclusive deals for our readers, but this time on newer models. You can now score the first-ever $500 savings on the Hybrid Longest Range Commuter e-bike at a new $1,199 low, or jump on the 45-pound Venus Lightweight Cruiser e-bike at a new $999 low. We’ve also got EcoFlow’s October EcoCredits Madness flash sale running through the weekend, with power station deals like the 2,048Wh DELTA 3 Max bundled with 2x 220W solar panels at $1,379 (second-lowest of the year), among others. There’s also the continuing annual low on Greenworks’ 3,000 PSI electric pressure washer, and more waiting for you below. Don’t forget about yesterday’s hangover deals at the bottom of the page, which included the new lows on Heybike’s budget-friendly Mars 2.5 and Ranger S 2.0 e-bikes, a Segway E2 Pro e-scooter deal, and more.

Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.

Volkswagen’s upcoming electric car will be smaller and lower-priced than the ID. Polo, starting at around €20,000 ($22,500).

Record fuel prices driven by the dumb oil war in Iran are fueling a faster-than-expected switch to electric trucks in the world’s biggest freight markets – and Swedish heavy truck brand Scania is scrambling to meet demand with a new factory in China.

Elon Musk now says Tesla will start delivering Optimus humanoid robots to outside customers around the end of 2027. On Tesla’s Q3 2026 earnings call, he said the hands, the robot’s durability and its AI all still need work before then.

Those are the same three problems every humanoid robot company is fighting. And despite Musk’s claim that nobody is close to Tesla, XPeng and Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics look at least as far along.

New Jersey lawmakers are already looking to walk back one of the country’s most controversial e-bike laws, just months after the sweeping new regulations took effect and sparked widespread backlash from riders, bicycle shops, and advocacy groups.

Kia’s electric sports car beat out the Tesla Model Y Performance and BYD’s Sealion 7 in a recent comparison test by the German magazine Auto Motor und Sport, ranking first overall.

Humanoid robots aren’t ready to juice up the massive, 240-tonne electric haul trucks Fortescue is putting to work in Australia’s punishing Pilbara. Instead, the company is using specially modified and massively powerful automotive assembly-line robots from KUKA to wrangle the massive cables needed to deliver a mind-bending 6 MW of power to its trucks’ batteries.

Tesla has lowered its 2026 capital spending forecast. In its Q3 10-Q, the company now says it expects capital expenditures “to be in excess of $20 billion in 2026,” down from the “more than $25 billion” it had guided since April.

The change was in the 10-Q Tesla filed Wednesday, not in the shareholder letter it released the same day. And it lands in a quarter where Tesla reported $1.53 billion of positive free cash flow, a number that depends a lot on timing.

Ford opened orders for the 2027 Mustang Mach-E, which now offers a standard extended-range battery for under $40,000. A new Trail model is also joining the lineup.

Redwood Materials and Rivian are expanding their existing EV battery partnership, adding a fresh battery material recycling effort to the EV startup’s Normal, Illinois, vehicle factory and, potentially, other Rivian-owned sites.

Rio Tinto wants to put Australia’s cheap midday electricity to work at its Yarwun alumina refinery – by storing it in hot bricks and using that heat battery to make steam after the sun sets.

Tesla said today it will sell Cybercab to consumers by the end of this year, raising questions of what end users would do with a vehicle with no steering wheel and no self-driving software.

Tesla now says unsupervised “Full Self-Driving” in customer-owned cars will arrive in Q2 2027. It’s the latest date on a promise Elon Musk has been making to FSD buyers for the better part of a decade.

But there’s a catch. On Tesla’s Q3 2026 earnings call today, AI chief Ashok Elluswamy described it as owners adding their own vehicles to Tesla’s managed Robotaxi fleet, not owners getting a car that drives them anywhere they want to go.

Buried in a press release titled, “Even more colours and even greater convenience for the Cayenne Electric” was news that Porsche, for the first time, would be offering electrically wireless inductive charging on its impressively powerful Cayenne Electric SUV.

Tesla’s energy business deployed more batteries in Q3 2026 but brought in less money. Energy generation and storage revenue fell 16% year-over-year to $2.88 billion, even though storage deployments rose 10% to 13.7 GWh.

Tesla’s shareholder letter blames the drop “partially” on “tariff-related customer refunds.” It doesn’t say how much it refunded, to which customers, or why it was accounted for as reduced revenue.

Tesla says it now has 1.74 million active “Full Self-Driving” subscriptions, up 67% from a year ago. A footnote in its Q3 2026 shareholder letter explains how it gets there: the metric follows “our 2025 CEO Performance Award” and “includes both upfront payment and monthly subscriptions.”

So owners who bought FSD outright, some of them years ago, count as subscribers. That matters because 10 million active FSD subscriptions is one of the milestones Elon Musk has to hit to earn his 2025 pay package. It also matters because hundred of thousands of those FSD “subscribers” were sold unsupervised self-driving, which Tesla has yet to deliver.