Fred Lambert

Xiaomi is officially launching the next-generation SU7 electric sedan today with a sweeping set of upgrades — up to 902 km of CLTC range, standard LiDAR across all trims, and an 897V charging architecture on the top model.

The updated sedan starts at 229,900 yuan (~$33,000), still undercutting the Tesla Model 3 in China by about 5,600 yuan (~$800) despite a price increase of 10,000-14,000 yuan over the outgoing model. Xiaomi racked up nearly 89,000 pre-orders in the first 24 hours when reservations opened in January.

A growing number of states and federal lawmakers are pushing flat annual fees of $200 to $250 on electric vehicles, amounts that charge EV owners two to three times more than what the average gas car driver pays in federal fuel tax. The proposals are being framed as a way to fund road infrastructure, but the math doesn’t add up.

At a time when EVs represent roughly 10% of new car sales in the US and deliver billions in health, environmental, and energy security benefits, these blanket fees are a punitive approach that discourages adoption rather than fairly distributing road costs.

A viral dashcam video shows a Tesla Cybertruck slamming into a concrete overpass barrier on a Houston highway while allegedly using “Full Self-Driving.” Elon Musk responded by saying Tesla’s logs show the driver disengaged the system 4 seconds before impact.

Tesla fans jumped on this as yet another example of the media spreading FUD about the company. But watching the actual video tells a more nuanced — and more concerning — story about the real problem with FSD.

Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber who helped pioneer the ride-hailing industry, says Waymo is “obviously” ahead of Tesla in the robotaxi race, and that Elon Musk’s company needs a “ChatGPT moment” for its vision-based autonomous driving to catch up.

The comments came during an appearance on the All-In podcast this week, where Kalanick also revealed he’s jumping back into the self-driving game himself with a new robotics venture called Atoms.

Washington state legislators just voted overwhelmingly to allow Rivian and Lucid to sell electric vehicles directly to consumers, ending a 12-year arrangement that gave Tesla exclusive access to direct sales in the state.

Senate Bill 6354 passed the House 84-9 and the Senate 47-2 — a bipartisan blowout that now heads to Governor Bob Ferguson’s desk for signature.

Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s CTO and the former head of Uber’s self-driving car division, totaled his Tesla Model X while using “Full Self-Driving” on a residential street. His kids were in the back seat.

In a new essay published in The Atlantic, Krikorian breaks down the accident and offers what might be the most informed critique yet of the fundamental problem with Tesla’s approach to “supervised” autonomy — from someone who literally built self-driving systems for a living.

Tesla’s “Terafab” semiconductor ambitions to launch this week carry an estimated price tag of $25-40 billion. The math is getting hard to reconcile with a company that generated just $6.2 billion in free cash flow last year while its earnings crashed.

Tesla hasn’t raised capital through a stock offering since December 2020, when it completed the last of three at-the-market offerings that brought in roughly $12 billion in a single year. The Terafab changes the equation entirely.

Elon Musk is once again promising the long-delayed next-generation Tesla Roadster is just around the corner. This time, he says an “unveil” is coming next month — April 2026.

The Tesla CEO made the claim on X today while quote-tweeting a post about the anniversary of the original Roadster’s production start in 2008. He wrote: “New Roadster unveil hopefully next month. It will be a banger next-level.”

The US government has officially confirmed that Tesla is the customer behind LG Energy Solution’s massive $4.3 billion lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery supply contract — ending months of speculation since LG first disclosed the deal last July.

The three-year agreement will see LG produce LFP prismatic cells at its Lansing, Michigan factory starting in 2027, feeding directly into Tesla’s next-generation Megapack 3 energy storage systems assembled at the Houston Megafactory.

Tesla filed one new “Robotaxi” crash report with NHTSA in its February submission, bringing the total to 15 incidents since the program launched in Austin in June 2025. That’s a significant drop from the five crashes reported in the last report, but without specific mileage data from Tesla, there’s no way to determine whether the fleet is actually getting safer.

The new incident involved a Model Y hitting a fixed object at 9 mph in January 2026 with the autonomous driving system engaged. No injuries were reported.

Elon Musk announced on Saturday that Tesla’s “Terafab Project”, a plan to build what he envisions as the world’s largest semiconductor fabrication plant, will launch within seven days.

The problem is that Tesla has absolutely zero experience manufacturing semiconductors, and its track record in the closest comparable venture, building its own battery cells, should give anyone pause.

Donut Lab, the Finnish solid-state battery startup that has faced intense skepticism since its CES 2026 debut, released its first pack-level charging test results today. The 18 kWh battery pack sustained over 100 kW of charging power — a 5C rate — for five minutes straight inside a Verge TS Pro electric motorcycle.

The test marks the first time Donut Lab has demonstrated its technology beyond individual cells, moving to a full battery pack in what the company calls “a real vehicle environment.”

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 Rivian R2, Lucid’s counterattack, and Tesla’s ‘Digital Optimus’.

Elon Musk admitted today that xAI, his artificial intelligence venture, “was not built right first time around” and “is being rebuilt from the foundations up.” The admission comes just six weeks after he had Tesla pour $2 billion of shareholder money into the company.

The timing is remarkable. Tesla disclosed the $2 billion xAI investment in its Q4 2025 earnings report on January 28. Days later, SpaceX acquired xAI in a deal valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. Now Musk is telling the world the thing he just sold to his own public and private investors was broken.

BYD’s Executive Vice President Stella Li confirmed the world’s largest EV maker is studying the Canadian market for a wholly owned manufacturing plant, and signaled it could acquire a struggling legacy automaker to accelerate its global expansion.

The comments, made during an interview in São Paulo, mark BYD’s most aggressive public posture yet toward North American production and consolidation of weaker rivals in the global auto industry.

Canadian electric powersports company Taiga is launching three new electric snowmobiles with a 33% jump in power output to 120 kW and CCS fast charging to 80% in 20 minutes — bringing the same charging standard used by electric cars to the backcountry.

The most interesting addition might be the onboard power system: a 3 kW output at 120V and 220V that turns the snowmobile into a mobile generator, capable of powering a remote cabin through a winter storm.

Tesla’s next-generation AI6 chi, the processor designed to power its autonomous vehicles, Optimus robots, and AI data center, has been delayed by approximately six months. The setback stems from Samsung’s 2-nanometer production line, where a postponed multi-project wafer (MPW) run is pushing the chip’s mass production timeline into late 2027.

The delay adds to a growing pattern of chip timeline slippage for Tesla, which is still waiting on its AI5 chip to reach volume production after Elon Musk said the design was “almost done” in January — six months after claiming it was “finished.”

Tesla Energy Ventures has secured a licence from Ofgem, the UK energy regulator, to supply electricity directly to households and businesses across England, Wales, and Scotland. The licence, effective March 11, marks a significant milestone in Tesla’s six-year push to become a full energy provider in Britain.

The approval comes despite thousands of public comments opposing the application, and it positions Tesla to replicate its Texas-based retail electricity model across the Atlantic.

Elon Musk announced today that “Digital Optimus”, also called “Macrohard”, is a joint xAI-Tesla project that will use xAI’s Grok large language model to power a computer-controlling AI agent. The project is part of Tesla’s $2 billion investment agreement with xAI.

The announcement directly contradicts Musk’s own September 2024 statement that Tesla had “no need to license anything from xAI”, and it lands while Tesla shareholders are actively suing him for breach of fiduciary duty over the founding of xAI in the first place.

A Texas woman is suing Tesla for over $1 million after her Cybertruck, running on Autopilot, attempted to drive straight off a Houston overpass and crashed into a concrete barrier. The lawsuit includes an unusually pointed allegation: that Tesla was negligent in hiring and retaining Elon Musk as CEO.

The case, filed in Harris County District Court, adds to what has become an avalanche of legal consequences tied to Tesla’s “self-driving” claims, and it comes just weeks after a federal judge upheld a historic $243 million verdict against the automaker in a separate Autopilot crash case.

BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle seller, is exploring an entry into Formula 1 as the Chinese automaker looks for ways to strengthen its brand recognition outside of China. The move would represent BYD’s first push into elite auto racing.

According to a Bloomberg report, BYD is considering options ranging from acquiring an existing team to potentially building one from scratch, though no decision has been made.

Tesla, Google, and Carrier are among the founding members of a new industry coalition called Utilize, which launched today with a bold claim: the US power grid is so underused that better utilization could save American consumers over $100 billion over the next decade.

The coalition, which also includes Renew Home, Sparkfund, SPAN, and Verrus, is targeting a problem hiding in plain sight — the US electric grid operates at just 53% of its total capacity on average, according to a Duke University analysis of 22 regional power systems.

Tesla has lost another long-tenured executive: Sendil Palani, the company’s VP of Finance, confirmed his departure after a 17-year run that began when the automaker was weeks from running out of cash.

Palani is one of the last pre-IPO-era leaders still in a senior role at Tesla, and his exit deepens what has become a sweeping drain of institutional knowledge across virtually every critical function over the past two years.

Thomas Dmytryk, the director who led the team that built Tesla’s over-the-air update infrastructure and the software backbone of its Robotaxi ride-hailing service, has announced his departure after 11 years at the automaker.

The departure adds to a relentless exodus of experienced engineering talent at Tesla over the past two years — this time hitting the team directly responsible for the company’s most critical growth narrative.