Fred Lambert

President Trump went on another rambling tangent about electric cars at a Las Vegas rally Wednesday night, telling the crowd he “ended the electric mandate” and mocking EV owners for worrying about range – claiming they have a “disease.”

Out of the entire unhinged rant, Trump did say one accurate thing: the EV take rate in the US is roughly 7%. The problem is that he said it proudly while the rest of the world is rapidly moving to electric transport.

The FCC added foreign-made connected power inverters to its Covered List on July 28, cutting off the federal authorization new models need to be imported, marketed, or sold in the US.

It’s aimed at the radios inside modern inverters, not the power electronics. And it lands on a market where US factories are on track to supply just 40% of combined solar and battery demand next year, according to testing firm Intertek CEA.

Tesla is suing the Canadian province of Manitoba for cutting the automaker out of its electric vehicle rebate program, and the fight has now reached a courtroom.

The province is asking Manitoba’s Court of King’s Bench to throw out the challenge. Tesla says the ban has already cost its Canadian customers at least $560,000 in lost rebates.

Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that “weak sensing” hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance.

He never said the word Tesla. But camera-only is Tesla’s entire bet, and this was a direct shot at it.

Tesla’s sales inside China fell 19% in the first half of 2026 compared to its peak in 2023, dropping to the lowest level in years, according to new data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).

At the same time, exports out of Giga Shanghai surged 127%. Tesla’s China plant is increasingly building cars to ship somewhere else.

A growing number of Tesla owners running the new Full Self-Driving v14 “Lite” build on Hardware 3 (HW3) vehicles are reporting Autopilot computer overheating alerts — and, in some cases, outright computer failures.

The reports have stacked up in the two weeks since Tesla pushed v14 Lite to wide release, and four owners have contacted Electrek directly about the same problem.

After a gunman opened fire at a Twin Falls, Idaho, In-N-Out with an attached Tesla Supercharger last week, EV owners flooded social media with the same suggestion: buy an EVject.

The breakaway charging connector lets you drive off while still plugged in. It sounds like an obvious fix for a horrifying scenario — but it’s a controversial device that doesn’t actually solve the problem, and it points to something Tesla and every other automaker should be building instead.

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 rumors of a Tesla/SpaceX merger, Rivian’s earnings, R2 progress, and efficiency test, new Mercedes GLA, and more.

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into roughly 1.2 million Tesla vehicles after receiving 156 complaints of a front suspension component detaching while driving.

The probe covers 2018-2020 Model 3 and 2021-2023 Model Y vehicles, and it centers on the front lower lateral link separating from the car.

Tesla is looking at cutting loose its China business to clear a path toward a merger with SpaceX, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.

If true, it would be a massive deal in the auto industry. Tesla’s Shanghai factory builds more than half of all Tesla vehicles, so any separation would carve out the single biggest piece of Tesla’s car operation.

Update: Elon Musk has denied the WSJ report, but as usual, that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Rivian reported its second-quarter 2026 earnings today, and there are improvements across the board. It’s a car. The company started delivering the R2, its first vehicle priced under $50,000, to customers on June 9.

The financials came in strong too. Revenue reached $1.658 billion, up 27% year-over-year, and Rivian posted a record $179 million gross profit while beating Wall Street on revenue, earnings, and adjusted EBITDA.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent 2026 turning his X feed into a problem no investor relations team can fix. His posts have escalated from trolling into open white nationalism, and this week his AI company sued the state of Minnesota to block a law targeting nonconsensual sexual deepfakes.

The board of a public company would have fired the CEO for just a fraction of the stuff Musk is posting these days. However, Tesla is not a normal company. Shareholders have given full control to Musk and now, they have to live with it.

Tesla has built its 10 millionth vehicle, the company announced this week. Ten million all-electric cars is a real milestone, and no other automaker has done it.

But it’s arriving later than Tesla once promised, and the company is now building well under the capacity it already has.

Ferrari has already sold every Luce it plans to build in 2026. The automaker’s first electric car hit its full-year sales target — just under 500 units — in less than two months, the Financial Times reported.

That’s despite a brutal wave of design criticism and a €550,000 (~$640,000) starting price that lands the EV near the top of Ferrari’s lineup.

Waymo is putting Google’s Gemini AI assistant inside its robotaxis for the first time, alongside the first major redesign of its rider interface in years.

Both features are launching in the Ojai, Waymo’s purpose-built vehicle, as the company gets ready to open the car up to more public riders.

Volvo has confirmed it’s dropping lidar for good on the EX90 and ES90, and it’s paying owners compensation for a feature they were promised but will never get.

In Norway, that payout is NOK 18,000 (about $1,900) per car, one of several market-by-market checks Volvo is writing after cutting ties with lidar supplier Luminar.

A former Tesla manager who ran the company’s “Full Self-Driving” test fleet in Houston says the operation was so understaffed that its cars became “rolling hazards on public streets,” according to a lawsuit.

The manager, Javier Medrano, filed the wrongful-termination complaint in Houston federal court, and its contents were reported this week. He oversaw the fleet before Tesla launched its driverless “Robotaxi” in the city.

Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has disclosed a 5% stake in Lucid Group, and the market read it as a fresh vote of Saudi confidence in the cash-strapped EV maker.

Lucid (LCID) shares jumped as much as 25% on Tuesday after the filing surfaced, even though the disclosure itself is passive and mostly a technical formality.

Baidu’s Apollo Go started robotaxi road testing in London today, and it’s doing it with both of ride-hailing’s biggest names at once — Uber and Freenow by Lyft.

The launch lands days after Apollo Go ran the first fully driverless trial in any right-hand-drive market, in Hong Kong. Two milestones in one week, on opposite ends of the world.

Tesla has signed a long-term deal to buy 90% of the output of Project Sterling, a big solar and battery plant going up in Arizona.

The project pairs 509 MW of solar with a 360 MW battery, and it’s being built by ContourGlobal, the power producer owned by private equity firm KKR. It’s expected online in 2028.

Mitsubishi is bringing a fully electric vehicle back to North America for the first time in over a decade, and it’s calling the 2027 Eclipse Sportback EV “all-new.”

It isn’t. The Eclipse Sportback is a rebadged next-generation Nissan Leaf, sourced from Mitsubishi’s Alliance partner and reskinned with new bumpers and lights.

Tesla has signed a long-term power purchase agreement to buy the entire output of a 140-MWac solar farm being built in northeast Texas.

The plant, called Lumen Farm, is being developed by Zelestra, an EQT-backed renewable developer. Construction is expected to start in 2027, with the farm going online in 2029.

Tesla is asking a federal judge for emergency access to a supplier’s plant in Troy, Texas, so it can haul out the tooling it needs to keep building the Cybertruck.

The supplier, Angstrom Automotive Group, is closing the plant and won’t let Tesla in. Tesla says that without those dies, several thousand Cybertrucks already committed to customers don’t get built.

BMW is planning an all-electric i4 Convertible for 2028, according to a new report from BMWBLOG citing sources close to the automaker.

That would make it one of a small handful of electric convertibles anywhere in the world. Right now, you can buy exactly one new EV convertible in the US, and it starts at $206,095.