Fred Lambert

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.

XPeng (XPEV) is in talks with Volkswagen about acquiring a factory in Europe as the Chinese EV maker’s contract production in Austria runs out of capacity. The company’s exports hit a record 6,006 vehicles in April, up 62% year-over-year.

The move comes just one day after BYD revealed it is also pursuing European factory deals with Stellantis and other automakers, signaling a broader wave of Chinese automakers moving to localize production on the continent.

China’s top auto industry group is calling for the creation of a standardized budget electric vehicle category — modeled on Japan’s wildly popular K-car ecosystem — to revive sluggish domestic car sales and bring millions of new buyers into the EV market.

The proposal, from the head of the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA), would target elderly consumers and rural markets where cheap, unregulated electric vehicles have flourished dangerously for years.

A Nevada utility just told 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents that it’s redirecting 75% of their electricity supply to data centers — and they have less than a year to find a new power source. It’s one of the starkest examples yet of the AI boom’s impact on everyday Americans.

The case is extreme, but the pattern is not. Across the country, data center electricity demand is reshaping the grid, driving up rates, and pushing a growing number of homeowners toward solar and battery systems — not as complementary power, but as essential infrastructure.

Waymo announced a major expansion of its autonomous robotaxi service area, growing to over 1,400 square miles across 11 US cities. That’s an estimated 27% increase from its previous coverage and more territory than the entire state of Rhode Island.

The expansion starts in Miami, with Austin, Atlanta, Houston, and the San Francisco Bay Area up next for broader coverage.

BYD has overtaken Tesla to become the world’s largest battery energy storage system (BESS) integrator, capturing 13% of the global market in 2025 compared to Tesla’s 10%, according to new data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

The shift marks the end of Tesla’s reign as the top energy storage deployer — a position it held in 2023 and 2024 — as Chinese manufacturers now dominate the rapidly growing stationary storage market.

Rivian is rolling out its new AI-powered voice assistant to all Gen 1 and Gen 2 R1 owners as part of its latest over-the-air software update. The feature, activated by saying “Hey Rivian” or holding the left steering wheel button, requires an active Connect+ subscription.

The assistant is notable because it can actually control your vehicle’s core functions — something that Tesla’s competing Grok assistant still cannot do months after its own launch.

Tesla has quietly removed Basic Autopilot from its online configurator in the Netherlands. New orders now only offer Full Self-Driving (Supervised) — no free driver-assistance tier at all.

The change makes the Netherlands the first European market where Tesla has stripped Basic Autopilot from the buying experience, mirroring the controversial move it made in North America back in January.

Tesla is now testing a virtual waitlist feature at five Supercharger locations, allowing drivers to join a queue through the Tesla app instead of physically lining up at crowded stations.

The pilot comes over a year after Tesla promised the feature following a viral video of a fight between Tesla owners at a full Supercharger station.

Waymo has filed a voluntary recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) covering 3,791 robotaxis after one of its vehicles drove into a flooded road in San Antonio last month. No one was injured.

The key detail: the recall is a software fix that will be deployed over the air to Waymo’s entire fleet — no vehicles need to visit a service center. Waymo has already implemented interim constraints while the full remedy is finalized.

Tesla announced today that it will invest almost $250 million more in battery cell production at its Grünheide factory outside Berlin, more than doubling planned capacity to 18 gigawatt hours per year and creating over 1,500 battery-related jobs.

The investment comes just two months after the automaker successfully scared workers away from IG Metall in a contentious works council election — a vote where CEO Elon Musk explicitly threatened to halt expansion if the union gained control.

A new Reuters investigation documents long wait times, surface-street-only routing, and near-zero vehicle availability across Tesla’s three-city “Robotaxi” service. These all look like convenience problems — but they’re really symptoms of a safety system that can’t scale.

Elon Musk himself told investors at the Q1 2026 earnings call that safety validation is the limiting factor. The “convenience issues” riders are experiencing are the direct result of those safety constraints manifesting as a degraded user experience.

Ford has officially unveiled Ford Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary that will manufacture and sell U.S.-assembled battery energy storage systems (BESS) for utilities, data centers, and large industrial customers. The new unit plans to produce 20 GWh of energy storage annually from its Kentucky gigafactory.

The move formalizes what has been months in the making — Ford’s pivot from struggling EV battery overcapacity to the booming grid-scale energy storage market, where demand is surging thanks to AI data centers and renewable energy buildout.

Deepak Ahuja, who served as Tesla’s chief financial officer for 11 years across two separate stints, is joining Redwood Materials as CFO. The move reunites him with Tesla co-founder and former CTO JB Straubel.

The hire comes at a pivotal moment for Redwood, which recently laid off 10% of its workforce and lost several senior executives as it restructures around a fast-growing energy storage business.

XPeng (XPEV) is expanding its hit Mona budget EV lineup with the L03, the sub-brand’s first SUV, which surfaced in Chinese regulatory filings with up to 650 km of CLTC range, a 183 kW motor, and LFP battery options up to 69 kWh.

Chinese automotive media reports indicate the Mona L03 will start at approximately 150,000 yuan (~$20,500), making it one of the most aggressively priced electric SUVs on the market. XPeng also filed for two additional SUVs — the larger Mona L05 and flagship G9L — signaling a massive product offensive for the second half of 2026.

Tesla’s actual retail sales in China fell 10% year-over-year in April to just 25,956 vehicles, according to new data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) — despite widespread reports last week that Tesla’s China sales had surged 36%.

The discrepancy is the same one we’ve been flagging for months: the 36% figure is based on wholesale numbers from Giga Shanghai, which include exports. The retail figure, which reflects what Chinese consumers actually bought, tells a very different story.