Fred Lambert

The Dutch vehicle authority RDW has granted Tesla a type approval for its “Full Self-Driving” Supervised system in the Netherlands, marking the first European country to officially approve the driver-assist technology.

The approval, which falls under the UN R-171 regulation for Driver Control Assistance Systems, comes after more than 18 months of testing and is currently valid only in the Netherlands. Other EU member states can choose to recognize it nationally, but that process is not automatic.

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 cheaper EV model coming and going in the same week, FSD v15, Rivian R2 EPA numbers, and more.

Tesla China has denied a Reuters report claiming the automaker is developing a new compact electric SUV. The denial comes just one day after we reported on the original Reuters exclusive citing four sources.

The denial was reported by Chinese financial wire Cailian Press (财联社), a major and well-established Chinese business news service. Tesla China told the outlet that “market information claiming that Tesla is developing a new, smaller, and cheaper electric SUV is inaccurate.”

Tesla has added Sunwoda (also known as Xinwangda) as its fifth global power battery cell supplier, with LFP cells already shipping on Shanghai-built vehicles destined for export markets.

The move continues Tesla’s aggressive push to diversify its battery supply chain and squeeze costs as automotive gross margins remain under pressure — down to roughly 15% from a peak of 27% in 2021.

Tesla’s actual retail sales in China crashed 16% year-over-year in Q1 2026, with March alone plunging 24% — despite several media outlets reporting that Tesla’s China numbers were up for the quarter.

The discrepancy comes down to the difference between wholesale and retail numbers. Tesla’s wholesale figures include vehicles produced at Giga Shanghai and exported to other markets, masking a significant decline in actual Chinese consumer demand.

Elon Musk is once again promising that the next version of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” software will “far exceed human levels of safety.” This time it’s V15. The problem is that he made virtually identical claims about Version 12 in 2023 and V14 in 2025 — and neither came close to delivering.

Musk posted the claim today in response to a user’s detailed review of FSD v14.3 after 600+ miles of testing. He acknowledged that “point releases will bring polish” to the current version before projecting that V15, the next major release, will achieve what every previous version was supposed to achieve.

Tesla is hitting back at a growing gray market of unauthorized devices that unlock Full Self-Driving (FSD) in regions where the software hasn’t been approved. The automaker has been remotely disabling FSD on affected vehicles — permanently revoking access without warning.

Reports are surfacing from owners in Europe, South Korea, China, and Turkey that Tesla remotely woke their vehicles, detected the unauthorized CAN bus devices, and stripped FSD entirely — reverting them to basic Autopilot.

Tesla is reportedly developing an all-new smaller, cheaper electric SUV — two years after CEO Elon Musk killed the company’s affordable EV program and called building cars for human drivers “pointless.”

Reuters reports that four people familiar with the matter say the new compact SUV would be produced at Tesla’s Shanghai factory, priced substantially below the Model 3’s $34,000 starting price in China and $37,000 in the US.

Tesla has quietly switched on a public configurator for its Supercharger for Business program, and the numbers tell us exactly what it now costs a third party to buy into the network: $500,000 in hardware and roughly $940,000 all-in for a standard V4 8-stall site.

The tool also spits out ROI estimates that swing wildly by location — from a 4-year payback in San Francisco to 7 years in Manhattan — and effectively prices Tesla’s own cut at a flat $0.10/kWh.

Elon Musk claimed this week that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” is so much safer than human drivers that it could save 90% of the roughly one million lives lost in car crashes globally each year — a 10X improvement in safety.

The problem is that Tesla has never released the data that would support anything close to that claim, and Musk is already using it to pre-frame the lawsuits Tesla is facing over FSD crashes as an unavoidable cost of progress.

Tesla stock is down roughly 20% year-to-date in 2026, and JPMorgan thinks the bleeding is far from over. Analyst Ryan Brinkman reiterated his Underweight rating this week and stuck with a $145 price target — implying another ~60% downside from where TSLA trades today.

The note landed days after Tesla disclosed a Q1 delivery miss and the largest single-quarter inventory build in company history.

Tesla has started rolling out Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v14.3 to HW4 vehicles, and the headline change is under the hood: Tesla rewrote the AI compiler and runtime from scratch on MLIR, which the automaker says delivers a 20% faster reaction time.

The update, shipping as software version 2026.2.9.6, also brings a new parking spot pin on the map, better behavior around emergency vehicles and school buses, and Tesla’s first public acknowledgement that it’s leaning on MLIR — the compiler infrastructure built by Chris Lattner, who briefly led Tesla Autopilot back in 2017.

Tesla is not actually going to build its own chip fab. Intel is going to do it for them.

That’s the real takeaway from Intel’s announcement today that it is joining the “Terafab” project alongside Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI — the $25 billion Austin chip factory Elon Musk unveiled with great fanfare last month.

A Tesla driver was found passed out behind the wheel of his car as it drove itself through busy streets in Vacaville, California. Police caught up with the vehicle and arrested the driver on suspicion of driving under the influence of both alcohol and marijuana.

It is the latest in a long string of incidents where Tesla owners have treated the automaker’s driver-assist systems as if they were a designated driver — and it keeps happening because Tesla keeps marketing them that way.

NHTSA has closed its investigation into Tesla’s “Actually Smart Summon” feature after documenting 159 incidents, all involving minor property damage.

The agency found zero injuries and zero fatalities linked to the feature, and determined that Tesla’s six over-the-air software updates adequately addressed the issues. No recall was issued.

Xiaomi has hired Dieter Lorenz, Tesla’s Senior Manager of Delivery Operations for Central Europe, as its new Head of Delivery & Logistics Europe. The move signals that Xiaomi is aggressively building an operations infrastructure on the ground in Europe well ahead of its confirmed 2027 market entry.

Lorenz isn’t the only Tesla operations employee making the jump, either. At least one other former Tesla operations staffer in Europe has also landed at Xiaomi, suggesting a deliberate recruitment push targeting Tesla’s European logistics expertise.

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 EV deliveries from Tesla, Rivian, and others, Toyota’s electric pickup truck, and more.

The national average gas price hit $4.09 per gallon this week — up 33% from a year ago — as yet another oil crisis hammers American drivers. But this time, the math on switching to electric is so overwhelmingly clear that millions of drivers are doing the calculation and reaching the same conclusion: they can’t afford not to drive electric.

Electrified vehicle consideration jumped to 23.8% of all car shopper research activity in mid-March, the highest weekly level of 2026, according to Edmunds data. Online searches for EVs surged 17% in a single week as gas prices spiked.

Stellantis is in early talks to assemble electric vehicles from its Chinese partner Leapmotor at the idled Brampton, Ontario plant, according to Bloomberg — a factory that was supposed to be retooled for Jeep production with over $500 million in Canadian government subsidies.

The proposal has already drawn fierce opposition from Ontario Premier Doug Ford and the Unifor union, which represents about 3,000 laid-off workers at the plant.

Mercedes-Benz has confirmed it will introduce steer-by-wire technology in 2026, becoming the first German automaker to bring the system to production. The facelifted EQS electric sedan will be the first model to get it.

Along with the new steering system, Mercedes is ditching the traditional round steering wheel for a flat-bottomed yoke design — and it’s a look that will divide opinion.

Tesla released its Q1 2026 production and delivery results today, confirming 358,023 vehicle deliveries — about 7,600 units below the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 vehicles.

More concerning than the miss itself is the gap between production and deliveries. Tesla produced 408,386 vehicles during the quarter but only delivered 358,023, adding over 50,000 vehicles to inventory in a single quarter.

Elon Musk confirmed today that Tesla has stopped producing the Model S and Model X. Custom orders are no longer accepted, and only about 600 vehicles remain in inventory worldwide.

The CEO shared a throwback photo from the original Model S production launch at the Fremont factory in June 2012, writing on X: “Custom orders of the Tesla Model S & X have come to an end. All that’s left are some in inventory. We will have an official ceremony to mark the ending of an era. I love those cars.”

Xiaomi has recruited Kong Yanshuang, formerly Tesla’s General Manager for the China region, to take charge of its growing automotive sales operations. The hire signals a significant professionalization of Xiaomi’s EV retail strategy as the company targets 550,000 deliveries in 2026.

Kong joined Xiaomi in early March and is currently in a work handover phase, replacing Li Xiaorui, the former director of Xiaomi’s automotive division, according to a report from Jiemian News.

Elon Musk announced today that Tesla “Full Self-Driving” v14.3 is currently in employee beta testing and will “probably go to wide release end of week.” Musk has described v14.3 as the version that will make your car “feel like it is sentient.”

If that sounds familiar, it should. Musk has promised that the “next update” will be the transformative one for about a decade now — and the most recent v14.2 updates have actually been degrading in key areas.