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Fred Lambert

fredlambert

Fred Lambert is the Editor-in-Chief and one of the founding members of Electrek. He mainly covers electric vehicles and renewable energy.

He is also the co-founder of Combat Edge, a MMA stats website.

Lambert made a name in the EV space through a steady stream of exclusive scoops about Tesla, including being the first journalist to try Tesla’s Autopilot feature back in 2015. Lambert also repeatedly broke stories about new Tesla products like Enhanced Summon, Model S design refresh, Tesla Autopilot 2.5, and more.

In 2020, he was also the first to report that Tesla’s new planned Gigafactory in the US would be located in Austin, Texas months before the official announcement.

His reporting has been used by many mainstream news organizations, like the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many more.

Lambert has appeared on television (CNBC) and has been featured in national papers for his expertise in electric vehicles.

You can contact him by email at fred@9to5mac.com or on Twitter @fredericLambert

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Tesla sued over fatal crash in Texas home that killed 76-year-old woman

Tesla fatal crash autopilot texas

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.

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Slate Auto’s electric truck starts at $24,950 with 205 miles of range

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.

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Ferrari replaces marketing chief after Luce EV launch backlash

Ferrari Luce electric car hero

Ferrari has replaced its long-serving chief marketing and commercial officer, Enrico Galliera, just weeks after the rocky debut of the Luce, the automaker’s first electric car.

The company named former BMW Italy boss Massimiliano Di Silvestre as Galliera’s successor, effective July 1, after a launch that wiped roughly 8% off Ferrari’s stock in a single day.

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Tesla admits FSD was on in fatal Texas crash, blames driver for ‘overriding’ it

Tesla fatal crash autopilot texas

Tesla now confirms that its self-driving system was engaged when a Model 3 left a residential road in Katy, Texas, and killed a 76-year-old woman inside her home — but the company says the driver overrode it by pressing the accelerator to 100%.

Everything points to a pedal misapplication while the car was under “Full Self-Driving.” Does that mean Tesla is not at fault?

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Tesla, NatPower strike $5B deal for 25 GWh of Megapack storage

Arizona battery storage

Tesla and independent energy firm NatPower have reached a deal to build 25 gigawatt-hours of battery storage in Italy and Britain, the first phase of a program worth up to $5 billion.

Under the multiyear agreement, NatPower will deploy Tesla’s Megapack systems and use Tesla’s trading software to decide when to buy and sell electricity — extending Tesla’s reach deeper into Europe’s fast-growing grid storage market.

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NHTSA probes fatal Tesla crash into Texas home that killed woman

Tesla Autopilot crash home texas

Federal safety regulators are now investigating the fatal Tesla crash in Katy, Texas, where a Model 3 left a residential road, tore through a brick home, and killed a 76-year-old woman inside.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Monday it is examining the June 20 crash, after the driver told deputies his Tesla was on Autopilot at the moment of impact.

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Lucid lays off 18% of staff, its second deep cut in four months

Lucid hands free driving

Lucid Motors is laying off 18% of its workforce, roughly 1,500 employees, just four months after the EV maker cut 12% of its staff. The company also confirmed Monday that it has eliminated the second production shift at its Casa Grande, Arizona factory.

It’s the second mass layoff under a new leadership regime that is barely three weeks old, and it lands as the US EV market cools and automakers retreat from their electric plans.

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Chinese sodium-ion battery matches Tesla on build quality, teardown finds

Tesla Hina battery cell sodium teardown

A commercial sodium-ion battery from Chinese manufacturer Hina matches Tesla’s lithium-ion cells on manufacturing quality and internal design, according to an independent teardown published in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

Researchers at Germany’s RWTH Aachen University measured cell-to-cell resistance varying by just 5.3% across 120 cells — a sign of tightly controlled mass production rivaling the best lithium cells on the market.

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Tesla driver says it was on Autopilot before fatal Texas home crash

Tesla fatal crash autopilot texas

A driver told Harris County investigators that his Tesla was on Autopilot before it left a residential road in Katy, Texas, crashed through the brick wall of a home, and killed a 76-year-old woman inside.

The crash happened around 8 p.m. Friday in the 21300 block of Rose Hollow Lane, according to the Harris County Precinct 5 Constable’s Office and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.

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Maserati boosts Folgore EV range by up to 85 km in 2026 refresh

New 2026 Maserati Folgore EV lineup - Grecale Folgore, GranCabrio Folgore, and GranTurismo Folgore

Maserati revealed updates to its Folgore electric lineup, with the GranTurismo Folgore now claiming over 540 km (335 miles) of WLTP range — an improvement of roughly 85 km over the previous version thanks to new energy management algorithms.

The range gains come as Maserati fights for relevance amid a sales collapse that saw deliveries drop to just 7,900 units in 2025, down 30% year-over-year and the lowest since 2012.

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Tesla HW3 claim grows to 7,000 owners, gets law firm backing for collective action

Tesla Robotaxi hero

The Dutch collective claim against Tesla over broken “Full Self-Driving” promises on Hardware 3 vehicles has reached nearly 7,000 verified participants and secured backing from law firm Kennedy Van der Laan for a formal legal action.

The initiative, which launched in April with 3,000 signups in its first week, is now preparing to transfer the case to a foundation that will pursue the claim on behalf of all participants under Dutch collective action law.

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Sweden tells EU to reject Tesla ‘FSD’ unless speeding is removed

Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta Hero

Sweden’s transport authority has told the European Union it should vote against approving Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” across the bloc unless the system’s ability to exceed posted speed limits is removed.

The recommendation, in a previously unreported April 30 letter to the EU’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles (TCMV), lands just before the committee is due to take up the matter on June 30, ahead of an eventual vote on a bloc-wide rollout.

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Tesla teases new FSD features — but it’s still not the self-driving promised

Tesla Self-Driving

Elon Musk says Tesla’s Full Self-Driving will soon remember your parking preferences and let you talk to it through Grok, like giving directions to an Uber driver.

The features sound useful, and they reflect how genuinely impressive FSD has become — but they also underscore that it remains a supervised driver-assist system, not the unsupervised self-driving Tesla has sold to owners for years.

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Rivian CEO signals self-driving prices, like Tesla’s, will fall

Rivian autonomy

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe says the money automakers charge for self-driving software won’t last, comparing autonomy to airbags: a paid option today, baked into the price of every car tomorrow.

The comments, made in a new interview with WIRED, amount to a quiet warning shot at Tesla, which just moved its “Full Self-Driving” package to a subscription-only model at $99 per month.

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Trump’s DOJ intervenes to keep Musk’s xAI gas turbines polluting Memphis

SpaceX colossus gas turbines pollution

The US Department of Justice has asked a federal court to throw out a Clean Air Act lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, arguing that the company’s unpermitted gas turbines near Memphis are a matter of “national, economic, and energy security.”

The move puts the Trump administration in court alongside Musk to defend dozens of methane-burning turbines that have been running without air permits in one of the most polluted regions of the country.

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Lucid Cosmos design revealed in patent filing ahead of 2026 launch

Lucid Comos design patent images

Lucid has registered the design of its upcoming Cosmos with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, giving us the clearest look yet at the sub-$50,000 crossover the automaker is betting its future on.

The filing, published last week, shows the production design of Lucid’s first mass-market EV from every angle, inside and out, months before its expected reveal this summer.

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Tesla ‘Robotaxis’ are not crashing because they are not running

Tesla Robotaxi fleet shrinking hero

Tesla didn’t report a single at-fault “Robotaxi” crash in the latest NHTSA autonomous-vehicle data — its only fresh incident was a Model Y getting rear-ended while stopped, clearly the other driver’s fault.

That sounds like good news for Tesla’s safety record. But live fleet data points to the real reason the crashes have dried up: Tesla’s robotaxis are barely running, and the active fleet is shrinking a year into the program.

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