Fred Lambert

Elon Musk spent years telling the world that solar power was the obvious answer to Earth’s energy needs — that a small patch of desert could power the entire United States. Now, he’s burning millions of tons of fossil fuels to run an AI chatbot that has lost 60% of its downloads, selling the unused compute to a company he called “misanthropic and evil” three months ago, and pitching space-based solar panels right as SpaceX files for a $2 trillion IPO.

The contradictions are stacking up faster than xAI’s unpermitted gas turbines.

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 going back to solar, Volvo EX60 unveiling, Xiaomi YU7 GT, AMG GT, and more.

Today’s episode is sponsored by GM Energy. If you want to experience more resilience and control over your home energy, the GM Energy Home System adds stationary battery power for always-ready backup energy for your home, and the GM Energy PowerBank takes in energy from the grid and stores it for when you need it most. Learn more at gmenergy.gm.com

A camouflaged Lucid Cosmos prototype has been spotted testing on public roads near the Lucid factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. The photo shows the midsize SUV right next to a Tesla Model Y, giving us our best real-world size comparison yet.

The sighting comes as Lucid prepares for the Cosmos’s full public unveil this summer, with production slated for late 2026.

Tesla’s Cybercab has been certified at 165 Wh/mi, making it the most efficient electric vehicle ever produced — by a wide margin. The next most efficient EV on the market, the Lucid Air Pure, consumes 28% more energy per mile.

Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy confirmed the figure, which represents a certified rating — not a marketing claim or internal target. It’s an impressive achievement, but it comes with a massive asterisk: Tesla accomplished this by building a tiny two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel, no pedals, and a sub-50 kWh battery pack.

Xiaomi launched a new entry-level YU7 “Standard Edition” today priced at RMB 233,500 (~$32,400) — undercutting the Tesla Model Y by RMB 30,000 ($4,350) while delivering 643 km of range versus the Model Y’s 593 km.

CEO Lei Jun admitted onstage that the original YU7’s pricing was “not competitive enough” against Tesla, with only a RMB 10,000 (~$1,450) gap. The company also unveiled the 1,003-HP YU7 GT, which shattered the Nürburgring SUV record by 14 seconds.

SpaceX filed its S-1 with the SEC today ahead of its blockbuster IPO, and buried in the 308-page document is a sobering reality check on the Tesla (TSLA) collaborations that Elon Musk has been hyping for months.

The legal language in SpaceX’s own filing reveals that both Terafab and Macrohard — the two major joint projects between Tesla and SpaceX — are in “very early stages” with no financial terms, no intellectual property rights, and no binding commitments finalized.

Tesla has changed the 0-100 km/h acceleration spec on its new $39,490 CAD Model 3 Premium RWD in Canada for a second in less than three weeks. The car now lists a 6.2-second sprint — two full seconds slower than the 4.2 seconds Tesla advertised at launch on May 1.

The repeated spec changes on the Shanghai-built sedan — from 4.2s to 5.2s and now 6.2s — are raising legitimate consumer concerns.

Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (Supervised) driver assistance software is now rolling out in Lithuania, making it the second European country to allow the system on public roads.

The Lithuanian Transport Safety Administration confirmed it has recognized the Dutch RDW certification that first approved FSD in Europe last month.

Tesla has officially confirmed it will not build a manufacturing facility in India, ending nearly a decade of negotiations, false starts, and broken promises with the Indian government.

India’s Minister of Heavy Industries H.D. Kumaraswamy confirmed the decision on May 19, putting a definitive end to one of the longest-running will-they-won’t-they sagas in the global EV industry.

A Tesla Cybertruck owner drove his electric pickup truck into Grapevine Lake in Texas to test the vehicle’s “Wade Mode” feature. The Cybertruck became disabled in the water and the driver was arrested.

The incident is the latest in a growing list of Cybertruck owners taking Elon Musk’s claims about the vehicle’s water capabilities too seriously — and paying the price for it.

Electrek has learned that Tesla (TSLA) is building its massive new solar panel manufacturing operation at its facility in Brookshire, Texas, near Houston. The factory will be co-located with the Megapack Megafactory Tesla is already constructing at the same site.

A source familiar with the plans pointed us to the Houston location, and Electrek was able to independently confirm it. This is the first concrete sign of where Tesla plans to build toward its 100 GW annual solar manufacturing target.

Subaru has dropped 2028 as the target year for launching its own in-house developed electric vehicles, with no new timeline set. The Japanese automaker’s new EV factory will produce gas and hybrid models instead.

The decision comes after Subaru’s operating profits collapsed 90% for the fiscal year, with tariffs alone costing the company roughly ¥229 billion ($1.4 billion) and EV-related write-downs adding another $385 million in losses.

Tesla’s Model Y became the best-selling vehicle in Colombia in March 2026 with 1,791 units delivered — just two months after the automaker’s first deliveries in the country.

The achievement is part of an explosive EV market transformation in Colombia, where electric vehicle registrations surged 304% in April to 5,192 units. But Tesla is already running into trouble with Colombian regulators over delivery delays and misleading claims about its Supercharger network.

Elon Musk claimed that Tesla’s unsupervised “Full Self-Driving” will be “widespread in the US by the end of this year” during a virtual appearance at the Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv today. Tesla currently operates fewer than 30 unsupervised robotaxis across three Texas cities.

The claim marks the latest in a decade-long pattern of Musk promising imminent autonomous driving breakthroughs that fail to materialize on schedule.

XPeng (NYSE: XPEV) announced today that it has rolled the first mass-produced unit of its robotaxi off the production line in Guangzhou. The milestone makes XPeng the first automaker in China to achieve mass production of a robotaxi built entirely through full-stack, in-house development.

The purpose-built vehicle, engineered to L4 autonomous driving standards, is powered by four of XPeng’s self-developed Turing AI chips delivering 3,000 TOPS of computing power — and it doesn’t use any LiDAR.

Tesla is rolling out FSD V14.3.3 today, and among the changes is a 33% speed increase to Actually Smart Summon — the feature now tops out at 8 mph, up from the 6 mph cap (less impressive when you put it like that).

The speed bump is part of a broader update (software version 2026.14.6.6) that also merges the Spring 2026 software features with the FSD branch for the first time.

When Fisker Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024, it left roughly 11,000 Ocean SUV owners holding the keys to vehicles that cost them anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 — and that were rapidly losing the software brains that made them work. No more over-the-air updates. No more connected services. No more warranty. The manufacturer was dead.

What happened next is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the electric vehicle industry. Instead of accepting that their cars would become rolling paperweights, Fisker Ocean owners organized, reverse-engineered their vehicles’ proprietary software, hacked into CAN bus networks, built open-source tools on GitHub, and effectively stood up a volunteer-run open-sourced car company from the ashes of Fisker.

Tesla has increased Model Y prices in the US by up to $1,000 across its Premium and Performance trims. It marks the first price increase on the Model Y in two years.

The move ends a prolonged period of aggressive price cuts that defined Tesla’s strategy throughout 2024 and 2025, signaling a potential shift in how the company views demand for the world’s best-selling electric vehicle.

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 updates to Tesla Robotaxi, Rivian R2 configurator going live, China taking over EU factories, and more.

Today’s episode is sponsored by GM Energy. If you want to experience more resilience and control over your home energy, the GM Energy Home System adds stationary battery power for always-ready backup energy for your home, and the GM Energy PowerBank takes in energy from the grid and stores it for when you need it most. Learn more at gmenergy.gm.com

Rivian has opened the online configurator for the R2, its critical mid-size electric SUV, giving reservation holders their first chance to spec out the vehicle ahead of deliveries. The Performance trim starts at $57,990 — just under Tesla’s Model Y Performance at $58,880.

The configurator launch comes ahead of Rivian’s previously communicated June timeline, signaling confidence in the R2 production ramp at its Normal, Illinois factory.

Tesla has quietly unredacted all 17 of its autonomous driving crash narratives filed with NHTSA, revealing for the first time what actually happened in each incident. The automaker had been the only ADS operator to fully redact its crash reports, marking every single narrative as “confidential business information.”

The data shows what we always suspected: most of Tesla’s crashes were not the fault of the autonomous system. But there are some genuinely concerning incidents buried in there.

Uber is publicly trashing its robotaxi partner Waymo while simultaneously investing more than $10 billion to build its own autonomous vehicle fleet with Rivian, Lucid, and Nuro.

The ride-hailing giant’s executives have spent the last few months taking direct shots at Waymo’s technology and deployment strategy — even as Waymo vehicles still operate on Uber’s platform in Austin and Atlanta.

Tesla has quietly made it mandatory for drivers to provide feedback every time they intervene on “Full Self-Driving.” The prompt, which used to disappear on its own after a few seconds, now stays on screen indefinitely until the driver selects a reason or sends a voice note.

The change arrived with FSD v14.3.2 as part of software update 2026.2.9.9, which rolled out in late April. Tesla didn’t announce the new behavior — the company retroactively updated the release notes to mention it.

Tesla’s Solar Roof was supposed to revolutionize residential solar. Elon Musk unveiled the product in 2016 with the promise of beautiful solar tiles that would replace your entire roof — and he set a target of 1,000 new Solar Roofs per week by the end of 2019. Nearly a decade later, Tesla has installed roughly 3,000 Solar Roof systems total, stopped reporting deployment numbers, and is now quietly pivoting to conventional solar panels.

The gap between Tesla’s Solar Roof promise and reality is one of the most stark examples of unfulfilled ambitions in the company’s history — and it has left thousands of customers stuck with an expensive product that Tesla appears to have deprioritized.