Fred Lambert

Xpeng’s head of autonomous driving told Electrek that the company is spending roughly 300 million RMB (~$41 million) per month on AI training alone and believes it has already reached parity with Tesla’s FSD v13 — with v14 within reach before the end of summer.

I sat down with Dr. Xianming Liu, head of Xpeng’s General Intelligence Center, the day after he delivered a keynote at CVPR 2026 in Denver — sharing the stage with Tesla’s Ashok Elluswamy and leaders from Nvidia and Waymo at one of the world’s top computer vision conferences.

UK-based EV conversion specialist Electrogenic has converted five of Jason Momoa’s cherished vintage vehicles to electric power — including three 100-year-old Harley-Davidson motorcycles reimagined as plug-in hybrids. The builds are featured in Season 2 of Momoa’s HBO documentary series On The Roam, streaming now.

The project includes two extremely rare classic Land Rovers converted to all-electric drive with 150+ miles of range, a battery-equipped off-grid camping trailer, and the three Harleys that can switch between electric, petrol, and combined hybrid power on the fly. Electrogenic is now selling conversion kits for both the Land Rovers and the Harleys.

Audi unveiled the Nuvolari today, a 1,001-hp hybrid supercar powered by a 4.0-liter V8 biturbo and three electric motors. Limited to 499 units at roughly $700,000 each, it is the most powerful and fastest production vehicle in the brand’s history.

The reveal is notable for what it represents beyond raw performance. Audi pledged in 2021 to launch only electric vehicles starting in 2026 — and instead, it just unveiled a V8-powered supercar as its flagship.

SpaceX’s amended S-1 IPO filing, published yesterday, reveals that xAI purchased another $269 million worth of Tesla Megapack products in April 2026 alone. That single month exceeds what xAI spent on Tesla Megapacks in all of 2024.

The purchase brings total Megapack spending by xAI to roughly $1 billion since 2024 — a staggering figure that underscores both how power-hungry AI data centers have become and how deeply intertwined Elon Musk’s companies are.

A Quebec Tesla owner has filed a class action request against Tesla over heat pump failures, seeking damages for all Tesla owners in the province after being stuck with a $4,477 repair bill when her Model 3’s heat pump died after just six years.

The lawsuit covers every Tesla model equipped with a heat pump — Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, and Cybertruck — and alleges the automaker has been hiding a known defect from buyers.

Tesla announced today that its unsupervised “Robotaxi” service now covers the entire Austin metro area, a significant expansion of its geofenced operating zone.

It’s a notable milestone on paper, but the actual fleet serving this massive area remains tiny — just ~20 active unsupervised vehicles, according to the latest data, a number that has actually been shrinking.

Tesla has retroactively modified “Full Self-Driving” purchase agreements to add “supervised” language that did not exist when owners originally bought the product. In some cases, the original documents have been made entirely inaccessible.

Electrek has confirmed the issue with multiple owners. The contracts in question were signed between 2016 and early 2024, when Tesla sold the package as “Full Self-Driving Capability” — with no mention of “supervised” and the implicit promise of unsupervised autonomy.

Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Emergency Situations has confirmed it will purchase additional Tesla Cybertrucks after the electric pickup proved effective in rescue operations in Almaty, the country’s largest city.

The Central Asian country has become the latest small international market to adopt the Cybertruck, as Tesla continues to struggle with collapsing domestic demand for the electric pickup.

Covenant Logistics, one of the largest trucking companies in the US with a fleet of over 2,600 tractors, completed a two-week evaluation of the Tesla Semi in California — including a loaded run over the notorious Grapevine pass on I-5.

The company’s VP of Sustainability and Innovation, Matt McLelland, said the driver “was amazed at the performance of the Tesla Semi and felt a level of confidence that was hard to match in a diesel truck.”

Tesla has been granted a new patent for a miniature camera cleaning system with a built-in wiper designed to keep vehicle cameras clear for autonomous driving.

The patent addresses one of the most frustrating and well-known issues with Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system — dirty cameras that constantly trigger alerts telling drivers to clean them. But Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet in Austin already has its own camera washer hardware that consumer vehicles don’t get.

Rolls-Royce has unveiled the Spectre Series II, bringing a 16% range increase to 308 EPA-estimated miles, a switch to the NACS charging standard in the US, and a 670 hp Black Badge variant that becomes the most powerful Rolls-Royce ever built.

The update addresses two of the biggest criticisms of the $398,000 electric super coupe: limited range and reliance on CCS charging infrastructure. But it comes as Spectre sales dropped 47% in 2025, falling to just 1,002 units globally.

Otherwise, the electric vehicle has been quite a success for the brand.

I was the first journalist to test Tesla’s Autopilot before it launched over a decade ago. I’ve tested every version of Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving” since. FSD v14 is by far the most impressive — and that’s exactly what makes it the most dangerous.

The danger isn’t that FSD v14 is bad. The danger is that it’s so good enough that it can make you stop paying attention — and Tesla is not doing enough to discourage complacency.

In fact, I’d argue that it is actively encouraging complacency with its marketing.

BYD says it will assume full financial liability for at-fault accidents that happen while its “God’s Eye” urban driving system is active in China — with no cap on the payout.

It’s a commitment Tesla has never made for “Full Self-Driving,” and it flips the industry’s standard liability model on its head.

A Beijing court held its first hearing in a consumer fraud lawsuit against Tesla over its “Full Self-Driving” software, with 10 owners seeking more than 3.95 million yuan ($583,000) in damages.

The case, which we first covered when it was filed last September, has grown from 7 to 10 plaintiffs and marks China’s first collective legal challenge targeting Tesla’s FSD promises.

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 alarming Robotaxi numbers, Ferrari’s controversial Luce, Waymo Ojai, and more.

Today’s episode is sponsored by GM Energy. If you want to experience more resilience and control over your home energy, the GM Energy Home System adds stationary battery power for always-ready backup energy for your home, and the GM Energy PowerBank takes in energy from the grid and stores it for when you need it most. Learn more at gmenergy.gm.com

The Rivian R2 Performance’s final EPA ratings are now published, and the numbers confirm something impressive: the R2 Performance matches the Tesla Model Y Performance on efficiency at 105 MPGe combined and 32 kWh per 100 miles — while actually beating it on range with 330 miles versus 306.

What makes this particularly noteworthy is the R2’s form factor. The Rivian is a boxier, taller, more utilitarian SUV that weighs nearly 800 lbs more than the Model Y, yet it achieves identical efficiency.

Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna confirmed that the $640,000 Luce, the company’s first all-electric car, is already receiving orders from both existing and new customers. The order book extends toward the end of 2027, according to Bloomberg.

The announcement comes just days after the Luce’s Rome unveiling triggered a 6% stock drop and a brutal wave of design criticism online, with former Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo himself telling Italian media to “at least take the prancing horse off.”

Waymo is beginning to offer select riders trips in its new purpose-built Ojai robotaxi, debuting the company’s 6th-generation Driver hardware across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Trips will be free for a limited time.

The Ojai represents a significant step for Waymo, which has now surpassed 20 million fully autonomous trips across 11 cities — a scale that no competitor comes close to matching.

A major Reuters investigation published today reveals that Tesla’s widely touted “Full Self-Driving” safety statistics are built on deeply flawed methodology — and that the company’s own data labelers, the workers who train the AI system, don’t trust the technology to drive them.

The report, based on interviews with nine former Tesla data labelers, a former self-driving engineer, and 11 traffic-safety researchers, paints a damning picture of the gap between Tesla’s safety marketing and the reality of its autonomous driving program.

NIO officially launched the ES9 today, its flagship executive SUV and the largest battery electric SUV ever produced in China. The three-row SUV stretches 5,365 mm (17.6 ft) long on a 3,250 mm wheelbase, packing 520 kW (697 hp) and up to 620 km (385 miles) of CLTC range.

Pricing came in below the pre-sale figures NIO announced in April, with the base Executive Premium Edition starting at RMB 498,000 (~$69,000) or RMB 390,000 (~$54,000) under NIO’s Battery-as-a-Service rental model. Deliveries begin tomorrow, May 28.

Elon Musk is reportedly floating the idea of merging Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX, just weeks before SpaceX’s massive IPO on the Nasdaq. If it happens, this would literally be the fourth time Musk has orchestrated a billion-dollar transaction between companies he controls.

No one in corporate America is doing this at the scale Musk is. Between SolarCity, Twitter/X, and xAI, Musk has built a playbook for self-dealing that is unprecedented — and now he’s gearing up for the biggest one yet.

Less than a month after we reported that Tesla’s unsupervised “Robotaxi” fleet was finally showing some signs of growth, new data from the Robotaxi Tracker tells a different story. The fleet is actually shrinking.

The number of active unsupervised Tesla “Robotaxis” has dropped to just 20 vehicles — down from the 25 cumulative vehicles we reported in late April — and the total active fleet across all Tesla ride-hailing operations has collapsed to just 34 vehicles.

Ferrari (RACE) shares dropped 6.27% in Milan trading on Tuesday, falling to €290.55 and wiping out roughly £3 billion in market cap a day after Maranello unveiled the Luce, its first all-electric car.

The reaction online was overwhelmingly negative — the design got compared to a Honda Accord, an Apple Store minivan, and a luxury toaster. Investors clearly took the temperature of the internet and ran. But we’ve seen this exact movie before — when Ford put the Mustang badge on an electric SUV.

Ferrari unveiled the Luce today in Rome, completing a three-act reveal that started with specs last October and continued with the Jony Ive-designed interior in February. The Italian automaker flew me to Rome for the launch, and I got about 30 minutes to explore the vehicle up close, though I couldn’t drive it.

What I found was a car that challenges just about every assumption of what a Ferrari should look like, who should sit in it, and how it should sound, while being unmistakably, stubbornly Ferrari in the ways that matter most: emotions.