Fred Lambert

Waymo is reportedly looking to raise a massive new round of funding that would value the autonomous driving company at over $100 billion as it accelerates its expansion.

Tesla has filed a new patent that strongly suggests the automaker is preparing to integrate Starlink satellite receivers directly into its vehicles.

The reason why is still unclear.

I’ve put over 200 km (125 miles) on Tesla’s latest ‘Full Self-Driving Supervised’ (FSD) v14 update, and I’ve gathered my thoughts in this article.

In short, Tesla FSD v14 is an incremental improvement to the automaker’s advanced driver-assist system (ADAS) and the most impressive Level 2 system available in a consumer vehicle today.

However, it is still far from what Tesla sold to car buyers: unsupervised self-driving.

Chinese EV automaker XPeng confirmed that it has secured an L3 autonomous testing permit in Guangzhou, one of the first such permits in China.

They also released a video of their autonomous software navigating a police sobriety checkpoint without human intervention, showing that it can detect and respond to human hand signals.

Tesla has reported yet another crash involving its Robotaxi fleet in Austin to the NHTSA. The new data keeps the program’s accident rate alarmingly high compared to human drivers, even as the company prepares to remove human safety supervisors from the vehicles.

BYD is making a significant move to boost confidence in its electric vehicles in Europe. The Chinese automaker has announced a major update to its warranty terms, extending the battery coverage to 8 years or 250,000 km (approx. 155,000 miles), whichever comes first.

This new policy significantly outpaces the industry standard and puts pressure on competitors like Tesla and Volkswagen to follow suit.

Tesla has been pulling every demand lever it can find to end the year on a high note, resulting in some of the most aggressive lease pricing we’ve ever seen.

The automaker is now signaling that these deals are expiring at the end of the month, and the price jumps are going to be significant.

We are talking about monthly payments increasing by up to 67% in some cases.

It’s finally happening. After years of promises, missed timelines dating back to the “Autonomy Day” in 2019, and endless iterations of “Full Self-Driving” (FSD), a Tesla vehicle has been spotted driving on public roads in Austin without anyone in the driver’s seat or a safety monitor in the passenger seat.

Elon Musk has confirmed that Robotaxi testing has officially commenced. This is undeniably a step forward for the company’s autonomy ambitions.

But it is also a terrifying leap of faith, given the complete lack of safety data proving the system is ready for this.

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss a very telling Tesla Optimus fail, Rivian’s AI/Autonomy day, Mercedes GLB EV, and more.

Tesla board member and Elon Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk, is back to selling Tesla (TSLA) stocks. According to a new SEC filing, Kimbal has cashed out over $25 million worth of shares and donated a few more as the stock rides high in late 2025.

Tesla’s US sales have taken a significant hit in November, dropping to just 39,800 units according to new data. This comes as the market adjusts to the expiration of the federal tax credit, despite Tesla’s attempt to mitigate the blow with more discounts.

In a massive shakeup for the US electric vehicle supply chain, Ford and South Korean battery giant SK On announced today that they are ending their massive “BlueOval SK” joint venture.

Consumer Reports is out with its latest study on used car reliability, and the headlines are already circulating: Tesla has landed at the very bottom of the list.

The study, which examines 5-to-10-year-old vehicles, ranks Tesla 26th out of 26 brands, placing it behind Chrysler, Dodge, and even Jeep – brands known for decades for their reliability issues.

While critics will undoubtedly use this as ammo to attack the brand, a closer look at the data reveals a much more nuanced picture, one that highlights just how recent an automaker Tesla still is.

BMW is the latest major automaker to officially gain access to the Tesla Supercharger network in North America. Starting today, BMW EV drivers in the US can access over 25,000 Tesla Superchargers, adding a massive boost to the charging options for owners of the i4, iX, and other electric models from the German automaker.

It follows a wave of other automakers gaining access over the last year as the industry transitions to NACS (North American Charging Standard), Tesla’s proprietary connector that has now become the standard.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) this morning to dismiss Waymo’s progress in autonomous driving, claiming that the Alphabet-owned company “never really had a chance against Tesla” and that this will be “obvious in hindsight.”

The comment came as a direct response to a discussion about Waymo’s newly released safety data—a level of transparency that Tesla has yet to match.

Tesla’s November numbers out of China are in, and they confirm what we’ve been suspecting for a while now: the growth story in the world’s most important EV market has officially stalled for the year.

While Giga Shanghai is still churning out vehicles, the local appetite for them seems to have hit a ceiling, and the company is now facing a mathematical impossibility if it wants to avoid a year-over-year decline in 2025.

The Tesla Semi program is gaining momentum with another major logistics player officially joining the fleet. German logistics giant DHL confirmed that it has taken delivery of its first Tesla Semi.

Tesla is pulling every demand lever available as we head into the final weeks of the year. The automaker has launched a new set of aggressive incentives in the US, including free upgrades on inventory vehicles, 0% APR financing, and $0 down leases.

It’s the end of the quarter (and year), and as per usual, Tesla is trying to empty its inventory, but it’s more difficult this year due to the end of the tax credit in Q3 pulling a lot of demand away from Q4.

A new video surfacing from a Tesla demonstration in Miami this weekend shows the Optimus humanoid robot taking a nasty fall. But it’s not the fall itself that is raising eyebrows, it’s the specific hand movements the robot made on its way down, which strongly suggest it was mimicking a remote operator frantically removing a VR headset.

Tesla has officially announced its 2025 Holiday Update, and this year, the automaker is not using the usually bigger update for any groundbreaking stuff, but there are a few interesting new smaller features.

You will find the release notes in this article.

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Tesla allowing texting and driving on FSD v14, Trump killing CAFE’s MPG standard, an Aptera update, and more.

Tesla has officially launched new “Standard” trims for both the Model 3 and Model Y in Europe after launching them in North America. The automaker is aggressively positioning these stripped-down models to undercut competitors and arrest a painful sales slump in the region, with the Model 3 now starting at an impressive €36,990 in Germany.

Elon Musk has confirmed that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system now allows drivers to text and drive, though he added a caveat that it depends on the “context of surrounding traffic.”

This comes just a month after the CEO promised the feature was coming, despite the obvious legal and safety concerns surrounding it.

Does the law agree with this?

For years, the loudest and most persistent argument coming from the Tesla camp, including Elon Musk himself, against Waymo has been simple: “Sure, it works, but it can’t scale.”

The narrative, usually pushed by those heavily invested in the promise of Tesla’s “generalized Full Self-Driving”, was that Waymo was a geofenced parlor trick. They argued that Waymo’s reliance on lidar, radar, and, specifically, high-definition (HD) mapping would mean it would take years to launch in every new city.

But the narrative is now dying, as Waymo went from testing to fully autonomous in a couple of Texas cities in just a few months.