Fred Lambert

The Rivian R2 Performance’s final EPA ratings are now published, and the numbers confirm something impressive: the R2 Performance matches the Tesla Model Y Performance on efficiency at 105 MPGe combined and 32 kWh per 100 miles — while actually beating it on range with 330 miles versus 306.

What makes this particularly noteworthy is the R2’s form factor. The Rivian is a boxier, taller, more utilitarian SUV that weighs nearly 800 lbs more than the Model Y, yet it achieves identical efficiency.

Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna confirmed that the $640,000 Luce, the company’s first all-electric car, is already receiving orders from both existing and new customers. The order book extends toward the end of 2027, according to Bloomberg.

The announcement comes just days after the Luce’s Rome unveiling triggered a 6% stock drop and a brutal wave of design criticism online, with former Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo himself telling Italian media to “at least take the prancing horse off.”

Waymo is beginning to offer select riders trips in its new purpose-built Ojai robotaxi, debuting the company’s 6th-generation Driver hardware across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Trips will be free for a limited time.

The Ojai represents a significant step for Waymo, which has now surpassed 20 million fully autonomous trips across 11 cities — a scale that no competitor comes close to matching.

A major Reuters investigation published today reveals that Tesla’s widely touted “Full Self-Driving” safety statistics are built on deeply flawed methodology — and that the company’s own data labelers, the workers who train the AI system, don’t trust the technology to drive them.

The report, based on interviews with nine former Tesla data labelers, a former self-driving engineer, and 11 traffic-safety researchers, paints a damning picture of the gap between Tesla’s safety marketing and the reality of its autonomous driving program.

NIO officially launched the ES9 today, its flagship executive SUV and the largest battery electric SUV ever produced in China. The three-row SUV stretches 5,365 mm (17.6 ft) long on a 3,250 mm wheelbase, packing 520 kW (697 hp) and up to 620 km (385 miles) of CLTC range.

Pricing came in below the pre-sale figures NIO announced in April, with the base Executive Premium Edition starting at RMB 498,000 (~$69,000) or RMB 390,000 (~$54,000) under NIO’s Battery-as-a-Service rental model. Deliveries begin tomorrow, May 28.

Elon Musk is reportedly floating the idea of merging Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX, just weeks before SpaceX’s massive IPO on the Nasdaq. If it happens, this would literally be the fourth time Musk has orchestrated a billion-dollar transaction between companies he controls.

No one in corporate America is doing this at the scale Musk is. Between SolarCity, Twitter/X, and xAI, Musk has built a playbook for self-dealing that is unprecedented — and now he’s gearing up for the biggest one yet.

Less than a month after we reported that Tesla’s unsupervised “Robotaxi” fleet was finally showing some signs of growth, new data from the Robotaxi Tracker tells a different story. The fleet is actually shrinking.

The number of active unsupervised Tesla “Robotaxis” has dropped to just 20 vehicles — down from the 25 cumulative vehicles we reported in late April — and the total active fleet across all Tesla ride-hailing operations has collapsed to just 34 vehicles.

Ferrari (RACE) shares dropped 6.27% in Milan trading on Tuesday, falling to €290.55 and wiping out roughly £3 billion in market cap a day after Maranello unveiled the Luce, its first all-electric car.

The reaction online was overwhelmingly negative — the design got compared to a Honda Accord, an Apple Store minivan, and a luxury toaster. Investors clearly took the temperature of the internet and ran. But we’ve seen this exact movie before — when Ford put the Mustang badge on an electric SUV.

Ferrari unveiled the Luce today in Rome, completing a three-act reveal that started with specs last October and continued with the Jony Ive-designed interior in February. The Italian automaker flew me to Rome for the launch, and I got about 30 minutes to explore the vehicle up close, though I couldn’t drive it.

What I found was a car that challenges just about every assumption of what a Ferrari should look like, who should sit in it, and how it should sound, while being unmistakably, stubbornly Ferrari in the ways that matter most: emotions.

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.