Fred Lambert

Tesla has postponed its highly anticipated Signature Edition delivery event that was scheduled for May 12 at the Fremont factory. The company sent a brief email to attendees today — just three days before the event — offering no explanation and no new date.

The last-minute postponement is leaving buyers who already spent thousands of dollars on plane tickets and hotel reservations holding the bag.

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 Semi, the 4680 battery cell, BMW iX3 price, Rivian R2 pickup, 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

We are also sponsored by NeuroHUD: Check out the NeuroHUD PRO featuring a true Tesla-focused HUD experience with navigation, blind-spot alerts, Autopilot status, and freely switchable display modes now on Kickstarter or Trantor Vision.com

California’s Air Resources Board has officially confirmed the Tesla Semi’s battery capacities through a regulatory filing — and they’re smaller than what Elon Musk originally suggested back in 2022.

The CARB Executive Order A-374-0095, signed on April 15, reveals that the Long Range Semi carries an 822 kWh usable battery pack while the Standard Range comes in at 548 kWh, both using NCMA lithium-ion chemistry with Tesla’s 4680 cells.

Nuro has received a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to test its Lucid Gravity SUVs without a human safety driver on public roads — a critical milestone before the company can launch Uber’s planned robotaxi service later this year.

The updated permit covers testing in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties at speeds up to 45 mph, day or night, clearing the way for fully driverless testing of the vehicles that Uber plans to deploy in a fleet of at least 35,000 robotaxis.

NHTSA announced today that the 2026 Tesla Model Y is the first vehicle to pass its new advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) benchmark tests under the updated New Car Assessment Program. The agency framed it as a milestone for vehicle safety.

The announcement is real progress, and credit where credit is due — Tesla passed all eight ADAS evaluations. But the context around this news is important, and it paints a more nuanced picture than the press release suggests.

Five years after Tesla (TSLA) unveiled its 4680 battery cell at Battery Day with promises of 5x the energy, 6x the power, and 16% more range, the data tells a very different story. Tesla’s homemade cells consistently deliver worse energy density, worse charging performance, and less range than the supplier cells they are meant to replace.

The problem is getting harder to ignore now that Tesla is quietly swapping supplier batteries for its own 4680 cells in European Model Y vehicles — and owners are noticing the downgrade.

Porsche has set a new Nürburgring Nordschleife lap record for “production” electric vehicles. A Taycan Turbo GT with Weissach Package equipped with the new Manthey Kit lapped the 12.94-mile circuit in 6:55.553 minutes.

The time, set by Porsche development driver Lars Kern, is 12 seconds faster than his own previous record in the standard Taycan Turbo GT with Weissach Package set in October 2023 — and more than nine seconds faster than the previous record in the “Electric Executive Cars” category.

Tesla has filed two new trademark applications for the Roadster with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, revealing a stylized wordmark and a distinctive triangular badge that departs from the automaker’s standard branding approach.

The filings are the clearest signal yet that Tesla is preparing to bring the long-delayed electric supercar to market — nearly nine years after the prototype was first unveiled.

Three major Chinese automakers — BYD, Chery, and Geely — are actively hiring staff, scouting dealership locations, and registering trademarks in Canada following the country’s landmark decision to slash tariffs on Chinese-built EVs from 100% to 6.1%. But none of them have actually started selling cars yet.

The biggest beneficiaries of the new quota system so far are Tesla and, to a lesser extent, Polestar — companies that already have established brands and existing sales infrastructure in Canada.

On March 4, 2026, Elon Musk posted on X that “Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form.” Less than eight weeks later, under oath in an Oakland federal courtroom, he was asked whether Tesla has any concrete plans to pursue AGI. His answer: “No.”

That single contradiction — between what Musk tells his millions of followers and what he admits when he’s facing perjury charges — captures the story of his decade-long obsession with artificial intelligence better than any timeline ever could. But here’s a timeline anyway, because the trial of Musk v. Altman is now exposing, under oath, what many of us have long suspected: Musk’s AI ambitions were never about safety, open access, or benefiting humanity. They were about control.

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe confirmed that the company is developing undisclosed variants of the R2, hinting at both a pickup truck and an “R2X” performance model just days after starting volume production of the more affordable electric SUV.

The comments, made in an exclusive interview with Reuters, signal that Rivian’s mid-size platform is set to expand well beyond the three R2 SUV trims announced in March.

Rivian is considering manufacturing its own lidar sensors in the United States, potentially through a partnership with Chinese firms, as the EV maker aggressively vertically integrates its entire autonomous driving stack.

The move would add in-house lidar production to an autonomy strategy that already includes custom silicon chips and proprietary AI software — positioning Rivian as one of the most vertically integrated players in autonomous driving outside of Tesla and Waymo.

WattEV announced an order for 370 Tesla Semi Class 8 electric trucks, making it the largest single electric truck deployment in California. More than 300 of the trucks will be deployed under a joint program with the Port of Oakland.

The order comes just days after the first Tesla Semi rolled off the high-volume production line at the new dedicated factory adjacent to Gigafactory Nevada, marking a significant early win for Tesla’s commercial truck ambitions.

Honda is shelving its massive C$15 billion ($11 billion) EV and battery manufacturing hub in Ontario, Canada, according to a new report from Nikkei. The move escalates what was initially framed as a temporary pause into what increasingly looks like an indefinite retreat.

The decision is the latest domino to fall in Honda’s accelerating withdrawal from electrification, which has already included a $15.7 billion writedown, the cancellation of three key EV models for the US market, and the death of its Sony Afeela partnership.

Two California port trucking operators have ordered a combined 60 Tesla Semi trucks through Forum Mobility, the charging infrastructure provider backed by Amazon and CBRE. It marks one of the largest Tesla Semi fleet commitments to date from the drayage sector.

The orders come from Big F Transport, which committed to 40 units, and NICA Container Freight Line, which ordered 20. Both fleets will operate out of Forum Mobility’s new charging depot under development in Rancho Dominguez, California.

Volkswagen now owns 209.8 million shares of Rivian (RIVN), representing a 15.9% stake in the EV startup, according to a new SEC filing. The German automaker has overtaken Amazon as Rivian’s single largest shareholder for the first time since the company’s 2021 IPO.

The stake increase came after Volkswagen’s US subsidiary purchased 62.9 million new shares on April 30 at $15.90 per share — a roughly $1 billion investment triggered by the joint venture hitting its latest testing milestone.

Emails obtained by Reuters from European regulators reveal significant skepticism toward Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, with officials raising concerns about speeding, icy road safety, and driver distraction — just as the company pushes for EU-wide approval.

The revelations come on the same day that the Dutch regulator RDW is presenting Tesla’s FSD approval to the EU’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles, a critical step toward broader European deployment.

With the Tesla Semi now rolling off the high-volume production line at a qupted price of $290,000 for the 500-mile version, we ran a full total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis against a comparable diesel Class 8 truck. At current diesel prices of $5.35 per gallon, the results are striking.

The Tesla Semi saves fleets between $147,000 and $404,000 over 5 to 10 years of ownership — but those savings hinge almost entirely on what operators pay for electricity and the price of diesel, which is spiking right now.

Trevor Milton, the convicted fraudster who founded Nikola Motors, took to LinkedIn to attack Tesla Semi’s economics with a point-by-point takedown. Despite his near-total lack of credibility, a couple of his arguments actually hold up.

Milton, who was convicted of securities fraud for lying to investors about Nikola’s electric truck technology, posted a lengthy comment on a LinkedIn post about Tesla ramping Semi production, claiming he “knows EV trucking probably better than anyone.”

NIO (NYSE: NIO) delivered 29,356 vehicles across its three brands in April 2026, a 22.8% increase year-over-year. The result pushes NIO’s cumulative deliveries past the 1.1 million mark.

The growth rate, however, represents a significant deceleration from Q1 2026, when NIO posted a 98.3% year-over-year surge across 83,465 deliveries — and March alone hit 35,486 units with 136% growth.

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) fleet has crossed the 10 billion mile mark, according to the automaker’s updated safety page. It’s the threshold that CEO Elon Musk himself set earlier this year as the data milestone needed for “safe unsupervised” driving.

The achievement represents a massive acceleration in data collection — the fleet was logging roughly 29 million miles per day by late April, up from 14 million miles per day at the start of the year. But hitting a round number doesn’t mean Tesla is about to flip a switch on Level 4 autonomy.

A Tesla auto parts shop owner in Sacramento spent about $40,000 and two years converting a 1966 Ford Mustang into a fully functional Tesla — complete with the Model 3’s dual-motor drivetrain, 15-inch touchscreen, and working “Full Self-Driving” (Supervised).

It’s likely the first non-Tesla vehicle to run FSD, and it achieves 258 Wh/mi — roughly matching the efficiency of an actual Model 3.

Tesla has launched a new Model 3 Premium RWD trim in Canada starting at just $39,490 CAD — a record-low price for the electric sedan in the country. The price, which converts to roughly $29,000 USD, is made possible by sourcing the vehicle from Giga Shanghai instead of Fremont, California.

The move marks the first time Tesla is selling China-made vehicles in Canada since the country imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs back in 2024 — and it creates a massive price gap with the Model 3 Performance.

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 Semi entering production, our Xpeng VLA 2.0 test drive, Rivian’s earnings, and more.