Fred Lambert

Tesla has launched the Model Y L, its stretched, three-row, six-seat SUV, in the US and Puerto Rico. The automaker confirmed the launch on Thursday, with the vehicle now configurable online.

The Model Y L arrives first as a “Launch Series” priced at $61,990 — more than Tesla’s own Model Y Performance and both of its main three-row EV rivals.

Elon Musk has directly rejected a popular fan theory that Tesla is secretly further ahead on Optimus than it lets on, warning instead that production of its humanoid robot “will be extremely slow at first.”

The comment cuts against a bullish narrative that Tesla’s quiet stretch on Optimus is a strategic head-fake — and lines up with the company’s own repeatedly delayed timeline.

Lucid is replacing almost its entire executive team under new CEO Silvio Napoli, bringing in a new CFO, CTO, and three other C-level leaders in a single announcement.

The overhaul lands just over a week after the struggling EV maker cut 18% of its workforce and pulled its 2026 production guidance.

Tesla delivered 480,126 vehicles in the second quarter of 2026, up 25% from the same quarter a year ago and roughly 74,000 vehicles above Wall Street’s consensus estimate.

It’s Tesla’s strongest second quarter ever and its first year-over-year delivery growth after two straight years of decline.

A Tesla Semi was involved in its first known fatal crash, killing two people on U.S. 50 in Nevada on Sunday morning.

The driver of the Class 8 electric truck reportedly fell asleep before rear-ending two passenger vehicles stopped at a red light, according to preliminary statements from investigators.

A growing number of Tesla Cybertruck owners are losing the ability to charge at home due to failures of the truck’s Power Conversion System (PCS), the unit that handles AC charging and steps the high-voltage pack down to the 48-volt system.

Tesla is aware of the problem and is quietly replacing the part case-by-case, but it has not issued a recall, and owners are waiting weeks for replacement units they can’t source.

BYD delivered 557,090 fully electric vehicles in the second quarter of 2026, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg, putting the Chinese automaker back on top of the global battery-electric race.

Tesla is expected to report around 396,500 deliveries for the same quarter — a gap of more than 160,000 units in BYD’s favor.

Michael Burry has disclosed a new short position against Tesla (TSLA), revealing that he shorted the stock at $416.22 on Tuesday.

The bet is one piece of a broader basket of new shorts the “Big Short” investor placed against what he describes as an inflating AI and semiconductor bubble.

Tesla has hired a 17-year Intel manufacturing veteran, Gary Jiang, to serve as “Director, Terafab,” the first named leadership hire tied to the automaker’s ambitious Austin chip fab project.

The executive, who started at Tesla this month, most recently ran tool installation and ramp for Intel’s cutting-edge 18A process — exactly the experience Tesla lacks in-house.

Tesla says it has started engineering tests of its first production Cybercab on public roads in Austin, marking the first time a customer-spec unit of the purpose-built robotaxi has been validated outside the factory.

But a video shared by the company shows the two-seater driving with a supervisor sitting in the front passenger seat — a reminder that the car still isn’t operating on its own in Tesla’s paid service.

A new proposed class action accuses Tesla of selling “Full Self-Driving” on millions of vehicles that are physically incapable of delivering it — and to make its case, the 51-page complaint repeatedly cites Electrek’s own reporting.

The suit, Waller v. Tesla (No. 4:26-cv-05350-KAW), was filed June 4 in the Northern District of California and covers cars built with Tesla’s Hardware 1, 2, 2.5, and 3 computers — effectively every Tesla sold with the FSD option from 2017 through early 2023.

Tesla has started rolling out FSD v14 “Lite” to its Hardware 3 (HW3) cars, the company’s AI chief Ashok Elluswamy confirmed today. The build, firmware version 2026.20.5.1, is going out first to early-access drivers.

It’s the first major Full Self-Driving update for the roughly 4 million HW3 vehicles that had been frozen on FSD v12.6 since early 2025 — but it remains a supervised, hands-on Level 2 system.

Trailers loaded with millions of dollars of Tesla car and home batteries have been stolen straight from loading docks at the company’s Nevada operations at least 11 times since December, according to sheriff’s records.

Nine of the suspected cargo thefts happened in January alone, and a local detective investigating the cases calls the situation “an epidemic right now.”

Tesla released its company-compiled delivery consensus for the second quarter of 2026, and Wall Street analysts now expect the automaker to deliver 406,024 vehicles.

That would be just 5.7% growth over the 384,122 vehicles Tesla delivered in Q2 2025 — a modest recovery for a company that has posted two consecutive years of declining sales.

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 Slate’s $25,000 electric pickup, Polestar being banned from the US, Tesla FSD crashes coming into focus, and more.

Slate Auto’s electric truck now starts at $24,950, but some buyers will still drive one home for under $20,000 thanks to state-level EV rebates.

The catch is that those discounts depend heavily on where you live and how much you earn — and several of them may not apply to Slate at all.

Tesla has quietly settled the lawsuit brought by the family of a pedestrian killed by a Model Y running “Full Self-Driving,” according to Bloomberg. The terms were not disclosed.

It’s the first known pedestrian death tied to FSD — and the same crash that triggered the federal investigation now hanging over 3.2 million Tesla vehicles.

Tesla’s Semi program lead Dan Priestley shared a video of the electric truck holding its line on icy winter surfaces, sliding under control rather than skidding out of it.

The clip is a rare look at the Tesla Semi’s Vehicle Dynamics Control (VDC) system doing exactly what an electric drivetrain is supposed to do better than a diesel one: catch a heavy rig before it gets away from the driver.

Polestar is pulling new vehicles out of the US market starting with model year 2027 after the Commerce Department declined to grant it authorization under the Connected Vehicle Rule, the company confirmed today.

The decision effectively ends new-car sales in the US for the Geely-owned Swedish EV brand — even though one of its models is assembled in South Carolina.

Robin Zeng Yuqun, the founder and chairman of CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, just poured cold water on the solid-state battery hype, saying the much-anticipated technology is only at “level four” of a nine-step readiness scale.

Speaking at “Summer Davos” in China this week, Zeng predicted that an inflection point for the technology won’t arrive until 2030 — and even warned that its commercial viability has yet to be established.

Tesla plans to hire another 1,000 workers at its Gigafactory outside Berlin, the automaker confirmed Thursday, as it moves to ramp production at its only European plant.

The hiring push comes as Tesla targets 7,500 vehicles per week at the Grünheide factory starting in October — a sharp acceleration after more than a year of falling sales in Europe.

Sunrun, Tesla, and Renew Home announced an agreement today to aggregate more than 16 gigawatts of home batteries, thermostats, and other devices into what they say would be the largest distributed power plant in the country, aimed squarely at the surging electricity demand from data centers.

The deal sent Sunrun (RUN) shares up as much as 26% on Wednesday, as Wall Street bet the residential solar company can turn AI’s power crunch into a recurring revenue stream.

The family of a 76-year-old woman killed when a Tesla Model 3 crashed into her Katy, Texas, home has sued Tesla and the driver, alleging the company’s “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” systems are defectively designed.

The wrongful death suit lands just days after the crash — and it leans on the same argument that produced last year’s landmark $243 million Autopilot verdict against Tesla in Florida.

Slate Auto, the EV startup backed by Jeff Bezos, finally revealed pricing for its bare-bones electric truck today: $24,950 to start. The company opened preorders the same day.

Slate also boosted the base model’s estimated range from 150 miles to around 205 miles, making the price look even better against a US new-car market where almost nothing starts under $30,000.