Fred Lambert

Elon Musk told Tesla staff to move to using Grok, the AI model from his own xAI (now folded into SpaceX), according to a memo sent to employees on Friday.

The push comes days after Tesla capped employee spending on third-party AI tools — and it lands even though Musk himself concedes Grok is not as good as its rivals.

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 Rivian going back to the stock market market, Xiaomi going big, and a $14,000 tiny EV in the US.

Xiaomi has revealed the SkyNomad N90, the first model in its new SkyNomad series and the company’s first extended-range electric vehicle. CEO Lei Jun posted the first official exterior images today, and a new regulatory filing confirmed the full specs.

The N90 is a full-size, three-row SUV with a claimed combined range of more than 1,500 km (932 miles), aimed squarely at Li Auto and Huawei-backed Aito in China’s fast-growing EREV market.

Australia just posted its biggest month ever for electric car sales, and for the first time seven different EVs each cleared 1,000 units in a single month.

Every one of them is either Chinese-owned or Chinese-built — and that includes the Tesla Model Y that topped the chart, which rolls off the line in Shanghai.

BYD Energy Storage has landed a contract to supply 11.275 GWh of battery storage for Masdar’s Round the Clock (RTC) project in Abu Dhabi — one of the single largest energy storage procurements ever signed.

The RTC project pairs a 5.2 GW solar array with a 19 GWh battery system, making it the world’s largest combined solar-plus-storage plant. BYD’s award covers the majority of that storage.

China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG) has put the world’s largest solar PV-plus-concentrated-solar hybrid into commercial trial operation in the Gobi Desert — and its headline trick is delivering power after sunset without a single lithium battery.

The 1-gigawatt Hami project in Xinjiang stores the sun’s energy as heat in molten salt, letting it keep generating for up to eight hours after dark.

New Jersey lawmakers are advancing a bill that would require driverless commercial vehicles to carry cameras plus two additional sensor types — a mandate Tesla’s camera-only Robotaxi can’t meet.

The proposed law, S1677, would effectively lock Tesla out of the most densely populated US state unless it adds the radar and lidar hardware that Elon Musk has spent years insisting his cars don’t need.

Xiaomi has answered the biggest open question about Sky Nomad: it’s a second product series under Xiaomi EV, not the standalone sub-brand that had been rumored for months.

The company also revealed the first clear look at the lineup’s debut model — a rugged, boxy extended-range SUV — in a set of official teaser posters.

Xiaomi officially confirmed “Sky Nomad,” the name of its new extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) effort, after months of rumors. The first model is a full-size SUV expected to deliver over 1,500 km (932 miles) of combined range.

The announcement puts China’s hottest EV newcomer on a collision course with Li Auto and Huawei-backed Aito, which dominate the country’s lucrative family SUV segment.

Waymo has activated fully driverless operations in Las Vegas, its riders will now see vehicles with no human at the wheel, and the Alphabet unit says Denver, San Diego, and Tampa are next in line.

The move adds four new markets to Waymo’s driverless footprint and pushes the company deeper into its target of 1 million paid rides per week by the end of 2026.

Tesla has leased a 682,000-square-foot speculative industrial building in the Austin Hills Commerce Center, expanding Elon Musk’s already sprawling Central Texas real estate footprint.

The company is set to occupy the second phase of the development at 11801 Decker Lake Road, which is scheduled for completion in January 2027. What Tesla plans to do with the space is still unknown.

Tesla has launched Tesla Home, a home energy management platform powered by an AI engine called Opticaster that it says makes “hundreds of decisions” a day about when to store and use electricity to lower your bill.

However, it’s not an entirely new product as Electrek has been reporting on Tesla’s Opticaster for 5 years.

A private seller in Littleton, Colorado has listed a brand-new 2027 Rivian R2 Performance on Cars.com for $79,900 — roughly $20,000 over what Rivian charges for the same vehicle.

The listing went up July 1, just weeks after Rivian started delivering the R2 to its first customers, and it comes with the kind of cover story flippers tend to lean on.

Tesla is opening the doors of its Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg to outside startups through a new “Cell Giga Challenge,” inviting them to pilot technologies inside its live battery cell production line.

The program comes as Tesla ramps 4680 cell output at Grünheide toward a planned 18 GWh of annual capacity, one of the largest cell operations in Europe.

A scientist who worked on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot is now building a rival of his own — in Europe, not Silicon Valley.

Rémi Cadène, co-founder and CEO of Paris-based startup UMA, unveiled plans for a lightweight humanoid robot called Northstar and says the company is already talking to 50 potential customers.

Rivian has commenced an underwritten public offering of 75 million shares of common stock, a raise worth roughly $1.5 billion based on the stock’s recent price.

The capital raise lands just days after Rivian’s stock rallied on stronger-than-expected Q2 delivery results and a raised full-year outlook.

Code buried in Tesla’s latest iOS app update points to a new feature that would use the in-car cabin camera to verify a driver’s identity before allowing “Full Self-Driving” to activate.

If the system can’t confirm the person behind the wheel matches an authorized profile, it would block FSD and surface a failure message in the app.

Tesla is ramping up production of the Cybercab at Giga Texas, with more than 100 of the steering-wheel-less two-seaters already spotted in the factory’s outbound lots.

The problem is that Tesla can’t sell it to you, and it can’t yet drive itself without a human watching — which raises the obvious question of why Tesla is building the car at all right now.

A Tesla driver was filmed apparently fast asleep behind the wheel at about 100 km/h on British Columbia’s Trans-Canada Highway on Sunday, with two sleeping children in the car.

The obvious question is how Tesla’s driver monitoring — the very system meant to catch this — let it happen. The answer is that the driver was wearing large sunglasses, and that one detail exposes a real gap in how Tesla watches its drivers.

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 the launch of the Tesla Model YL, BMW iX5, and EV sales results for the second quarter.

British battery-electric vehicle registrations jumped 38% in June to 64,440 units, pushing EVs to nearly 30% of the new car market — their strongest monthly performance outside seasonal peaks, according to New AutoMotive data released Friday.

The overall market grew 15% year-over-year to 215,921 units, but EVs did the heavy lifting, and Tesla posted a 42% rebound that signals it may finally be climbing off the floor in Europe.

Tesla has mapped out a Robotaxi service area in Miami, publishing a geofence that covers only a small slice of the metro — mostly West Miami and a strip stretching toward Doral and Sweetwater.

It’s the latest city Tesla has drawn a box around, but the announcement lands with a thud when you consider what’s happened in Texas over the past year.

Harris County prosecutors have charged the Tesla driver who crashed into a Katy, Texas, home and killed a 76-year-old woman with manslaughter, alleging he overrode Full Self-Driving to floor the car to 73 mph in a residential cul-de-sac.

The charging document also reveals something new: in the weeks before the crash, the driver had been Googling that FSD wasn’t aggressive enough.

Tesla told staff it will impose a $200-per-week limit on employee AI spending starting July 6, according to an internal memo reported by The Information (paywall).

The cap lands just months after Tesla pushed employees to use AI more aggressively, a sign that even companies betting their future on the technology are struggling to control its costs.