Fred Lambert

For the first time ever, Tesla has revealed how many people are actually paying for Full Self-Driving. The answer: 1.1 million, roughly 12% of its cumulative vehicle sales.

The disclosure came in Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings report, where the company revealed “Active FSD Subscriptions” as a new metric. The number includes both upfront purchases and monthly subscribers, but excludes free trials.

Update: Tesla has since added a critical piece of information: 1.1 million “subscribers” actually includes people who bought the FSD package outright, which accounts for 70% of that number.

Tesla disclosed in its Q4 2025 earnings report that it has invested $2 billion in xAI, Elon Musk’s private AI company. The investment comes while Tesla shareholders are actively suing Musk for breach of fiduciary duty over his founding of xAI in the first place.

You can’t make this up.

Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the fourth quarter (Q4) 2025 and full-year 2025 after market close today.

We are updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight. Refresh for the latest information.

The SEC is not letting up on Elon Musk. In a new legal reply filed today, the regulator is asking a federal judge to grant summary judgment and find the Tesla CEO liable for violating securities laws during his 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X).

A week ago, Elon Musk announced that Tesla had started Robotaxi rides in Austin “with no safety monitor in the car.” The stock jumped 4%. Headlines celebrated the milestone. But since then, not a single rider has reported actually getting one of these unsupervised rides.

The announcement came on January 22, just days before a major ice storm hit Austin and, conveniently, less than a week before Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings report today.

The service has started back since then, but no one is getting the “unsupervised” rides.

Tesla’s brand value collapsed by $15.4 billion in 2025, marking the third consecutive year of decline, according to new research from Brand Finance. The company’s recommendation score in the U.S. has plummeted to just 4.0 out of 10, down from 8.2 just over two years ago.

Pilot, the nation’s largest operator of travel centers, has announced a partnership with Tesla to install Semi chargers at select locations along major highway corridors. The first sites are expected to open in Summer 2026.

Tesla is pushing a new software update that adds a handy workaround for when your charge cable gets stuck in the charge port, a common problem in cold weather when the port can freeze shut.

Tesla (TSLA) will release its Q4 2025 and full-year 2025 financial results on Wednesday, Jan. 28, after the markets close. As usual, a conference call and Q&A with Tesla’s management are scheduled after the results.

Here, we’ll look at what the street and retail investors expect for the quarterly results.

For the first time since Tesla launched the Model 3 in China in 2019, another automaker has outsold it in the premium electric sedan segment. And it’s a smartphone company.

Xiaomi delivered 258,164 units of its SU7 sedan in 2025, nearly 30% more than Tesla Model 3’s 200,361 deliveries, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).

This comes just weeks after we reported that Tesla confirmed its first year of domestic sales decline in China. The writing was on the wall, and now we’re seeing the direct consequences.

Tesla has officially begun Cybertruck deliveries in the United Arab Emirates, marking the electric pickup’s first sales in the Middle East and its second international market after South Korea.

Tesla appears to be quietly rolling out a new version of its Full Self-Driving computer, with new Model Y owners discovering their vehicles are equipped with “Hardware 4.5”, or AI4.5 as it’s being labeled internally.

The discovery comes from owners taking delivery of Fremont-built Model Y vehicles in late December and January, who found a computer labeled “AP4.5” or “AP45” in their cars. The sightings match a part number (2261336-02-A) that was previously spotted in Tesla’s Electronic Parts Catalog for a new FSD computer.

As usual, Tesla made no announcement about the change.

Benjamin Bate, Tesla’s Director of Vehicle Operations and Engineering at Fremont, has left the automaker after over 8 years to become a plant manager at Chemelex.

Bate’s departure, which we spotted on his LinkedIn profile, adds to the now-constant stream of experienced talent leaving Tesla.

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’s latest Robotaxi grift, Volvo EX60 being a beast, Aptera in danger, and more.

Just as Tesla investors were getting excited about a potential rollout of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) in its second-largest market, China has reportedly shut down Elon Musk’s latest timeline.

According to a new report from Chinese state media, Musk’s claim that FSD would be approved “next month” is simply “not true.”

This feels like a case of “Elon time” meeting China’s no-nonsense.

Aptera Motors has announced the pricing of a new $9 million public offering, and the terms are putting significant pressure on the stock today. The solar electric vehicle startup is issuing shares at $2.00, a steep discount to yesterday’s closing price of $2.41, as it races to secure capital for production.

Tesla has officially removed Basic Autopilot as a standard feature for new Model 3 and Model Y orders in North America, effective immediately. The move forces buyers to subscribe to the $99/month Full Self-Driving (Supervised) package to access lane-keeping capabilities that were previously free.

It appears to be a somewhat desperate move amid demand and profit headwinds.

Earlier today, Elon Musk announced on X that Tesla had “just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car.” Tesla’s stock immediately jumped over 4% on the news. Headlines across the financial press celebrated the milestone.

There’s just one problem: it appears to be another game of smoke and mirrors. The Robotaxi cars spotted without “safety monitor” were all being followed by a trailing black Tesla supervising the “driverless” Robotaxi.

It means Tesla didn’t “remove the safety monitor”, it just moved them to a vehicle behind them.

Tesla has started offering Robotaxi rides without a safety monitor in Austin, Texas. After yet another set of missed timelines and a full decade of broken promises, Elon Musk is finally getting a version of the “win” he has been desperately seeking. But considering the alarming crash data we have and the evidence of heavy remote monitoring, should we be excited or terrified?

Update: New video evidence shows that Tesla’s supposedly “unsupervised” Robotaxis in Austin are being closely followed by black Tesla trailing cars with safety monitors inside. Tesla didn’t remove the safety monitors – it just moved them to a different vehicle.

Lemonade has launched what it calls “Autonomous Car Insurance”, a first-of-its-kind product that slashes rates by approximately 50% for Tesla owners when Full Self-Driving is engaged. It’s a bold bet on FSD technology, and it significantly undercuts the discount offered by Tesla’s own insurance product.

It again shows the difference between what Tesla claims and delivers regarding autonomous and assisted driving.

We are excited to announce a major addition to the site today: the launch of Electrek Forums.

Tesla has published a new patent that describes a way to squeeze more performance out of its aging HW3 self-driving computers. While the technology is interesting, nothing points to it actually enabling Tesla to deliver on its long-standing promise of unsupervised self-driving on HW3 vehicles.

In 2016, Tesla announced that all vehicles produced thereafter would become capable of “Full Self-Driving” — at one point, CEO Elon Musk even specified “level 5 self-driving,” which means capable of driving anywhere, anytime, under any condition.

We are approaching a decade since that promise, and it’s nowhere close to being fulfilled.

In fact, it looks like Tesla is doing everything it can to not fulfill its promise to HW3 owners.

A new report confirms that Tesla has reduced its workforce at Gigafactory Berlin by roughly 1,700 employees over the last year. The cuts come despite the plant manager repeatedly denying any staff reductions were taking place.

Tesla is once again telling customers that the window to transfer their Full Self-Driving (FSD) package to a new vehicle is closing at the end of the quarter. While the automaker is framing this as the “last” chance, the history of this program suggests it is being used more as a quarterly demand lever than a hard deadline.

But how does the move to “subscription only” play into this?