Fred Lambert

Tesla has expanded the geofence for its unsupervised “Robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas, growing the area where vehicles can operate without a safety monitor inside the car.

But social media sightings indicate that only a handful of vehicles — somewhere between 4 and 8 Model Ys — are actually running without a human safety monitor. And even those still operate under remote supervision from Tesla.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has named Tesla among 18 US companies whose Middle East operations it is threatening to attack in retaliation for the killings of Iranian military leaders. The threat carries an explicit deadline: 8:00 PM Tehran time on April 1.

Tesla has been rapidly expanding across the Gulf over the past year, with showrooms, service centers, and more than 30 Supercharger stations now operating in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar — all directly in the crosshairs.

General Motors has shut down production at Factory Zero in Detroit for the second time in less than three months, temporarily laying off 1,300 workers. The plant won’t restart until mid-April.

The idling, which began on March 16, marks the latest in a string of production cuts at the facility GM once positioned as the flagship of its electric vehicle future — a $2.2 billion showcase that has become a symbol of the company’s rapid EV retreat.

A Tesla showroom in Parramatta, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, was set ablaze in an overnight attack that destroyed three vehicles and damaged the building. Jerrycan lids were found at the scene.

The fire is being investigated as a suspected arson — the latest in a global wave of attacks on Tesla facilities that has been going on for over a year now.

Tesla (TSLA) has lost another senior leader as Jose del Corral, the automaker’s head of product for customer experience, announced today that he is leaving after almost eight years to join Coinbase.

Del Corral’s departure lands on the same day as yet another Cybercab production leader’s exit, extending a talent drain that has now stripped Tesla of institutional knowledge across virtually every critical function of the business.

Mark Lupkey, the manufacturing operations leader who oversaw Cybercab assembly and end-of-line ramp at Giga Texas, has announced his departure from Tesla. He is the third senior leader directly involved in bringing the Cybercab to production to leave the company in just over a month.

Lupkey spent nearly eight years at Tesla across two separate stints, working his way through some of the automaker’s most demanding production programs before taking on the Cybercab assembly role in Austin.

Tesla North America’s official account on X promoted a video interview of a new Cybertruck owner who says his ophthalmologist recommended he buy a Tesla with “Full Self-Driving” because he is losing his eyesight.

The problem is that Tesla itself classifies FSD as a Level 2 driver-assist system that requires driver monitoring at all times — and the driver is responsible for the vehicle at all times. Those two things are fundamentally incompatible.

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 coming with minivan but cooler?, used EV sales rising, sodium batteries are coming, and more.

The US electric vehicle market has split into two diverging realities. New EV sales cratered 28% year-over-year in Q1 2026 to just 212,600 units, according to new data from Cox Automotive — but used EV sales surged 12% to 93,500 units, with prices now within $1,300 of equivalent gas cars.

The data, presented in Cox Automotive’s Q1 2026 Industry Insights call on March 25, reveals the clearest picture yet of how the federal tax credit’s expiration is reshaping the EV market — and creating what may be the best buying opportunity in the history of electric vehicles.

Tesla published its company-compiled Wall Street consensus for first-quarter 2026 deliveries on Thursday, and the number — 365,645 vehicles — paints a picture of a company still struggling to return to meaningful growth after two straight years of declining sales.

The consensus, drawn from 23 sell-side analysts, implies an 8% increase from the 336,681 vehicles Tesla delivered in Q1 2025. But that comparison is misleading, and the market knows it.

France’s Finance Minister confirmed that between 30% and 40% of Gulf refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed by Iran’s retaliatory strikes, leaving a shortage of 11 million barrels per day on global oil markets. The destruction is now pushing consumers toward electric vehicles at a pace not seen since the 2022 gas crisis.

With gas prices approaching $4 per gallon nationally and already past $5 in California, data from multiple sources shows EV interest surging across the board — from Google searches to dealership inquiries.

California’s top transportation regulator has made it explicit: Tesla is not operating an autonomous vehicle service in the state. The company holds the same permit as a limousine company.

Pat Tsen, the deputy executive director for consumer policy, transportation, and enforcement at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), confirmed that Tesla’s ride-hailing operation is classified as a standard chauffeur service — not a “robotaxi” — and is subject to none of the safety reporting and data transparency requirements imposed on actual autonomous vehicle operators like Waymo and Zoox.

Elon Musk announced that Tesla is coming out with ‘something cooler than a minivan’ when pressed by fans for a vehicle with more passenger capacity.

However, we should temper our expectations as Tesla is greatly limiting new vehicle programs amid its transition into a ‘transportation as a service’ company.

Tesla has filed new site plans with Travis County detailing a significant expansion of its Giga Texas campus, including the long-promised “ecological paradise” along the Colorado River and infrastructure for the recently announced Terafab North Campus.

The filings, which include a permit application for “Tesla North Campus” submitted to the Travis County Fire Marshal on March 13, reveal the scope of Tesla’s ambitions for a campus that already stretches across 2,500 acres in southeast Austin.

BYD is moving fast to establish a physical retail presence in Canada, with plans to open 20 branded dealerships within its first year in the market. The world’s largest EV maker is already scouting locations in the Greater Toronto Area.

The push comes just two months after Canada slashed its 100% tariff on Chinese-built EVs to 6.1%, a dramatic policy reversal that has unlocked the Canadian market for Chinese automakers for the first time.

BYD outsold Tesla in Europe for the second consecutive month in February, registering 17,954 vehicles compared to Tesla’s 17,664, and the year-to-date gap is becoming a chasm.

The data is particularly damning for Tesla because February 2025 was one of its weakest months in years, with factories shut down for the Model Y Juniper changeover. The fact that Tesla can barely grow from that low bar a year later tells you everything about the state of the brand in Europe.

Tesla Semi program lead Dan Priestley took Jay Leno on an extensive tour of the production-intent electric truck, revealing significant engineering details — including 1,000 lbs of weight savings that bring the 500-mile version to payload parity with diesel trucks.

The episode is packed with new technical information about the powertrain architecture, charging capabilities, and production readiness as Tesla prepares to ramp its dedicated Semi factory outside Reno, Nevada, to 50,000 units per year.

A newly published Tesla patent application describes a sophisticated dual-battery management system designed to integrate an auxiliary battery pack with a vehicle’s primary pack — including a configuration where the auxiliary battery lives inside a towed trailer.

The patent was filed in August 2024, months before Tesla officially cancelled the Cybertruck’s bed-mounted range extender, suggesting the automaker’s engineering team continued developing the underlying technology even as the original product was being abandoned.

Donut Lab has now released five independent test reports from Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre on its solid-state battery — and not a single one addresses the two claims that actually matter: the 400 Wh/kg energy density and the 100,000-cycle life.

The Q1 2026 deadline that Donut Lab set for delivering production batteries inside Verge Motorcycles is eight days away. The latest report, a cycling test dated March 13, adds another data point — but the overall picture remains unchanged.

Tesla and SpaceX have unveiled “Terafab,” a joint $25 billion chip fabrication facility in Austin, Texas, that Elon Musk claims will produce 1 terawatt of computing power annually. It would be the largest semiconductor fab ever built — by an absurd margin.

Musk took the stage at the defunct Seaholm Power Plant in Austin on March 21 to officially launch the project, calling it “the most epic chip building exercise in history by far.”

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 turning to energy, BMW i3 EV making a splash, Donut Lab update, and more.

Tesla’s European arm announced today that it has completed all vehicle testing for Full Self-Driving (Supervised) in the Netherlands — but the expected approval date has slipped yet again, from March 20 to April 10.

The announcement, which Tesla framed as progress, also reveals that a broader EU-wide approval is now not expected until the summer.

Elon Musk’s plan to build 100 GW of solar manufacturing capacity in the United States just got its first major price tag: $2.9 billion in equipment from Chinese suppliers, according to a Reuters exclusive.

If the deal closes, it marks the biggest concrete investment yet in Musk’s solar ambitions, and a stunning reversal for a company that effectively abandoned its solar business just two years ago.

NHTSA has escalated its investigation into Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system’s inability to handle reduced visibility conditions, upgrading the probe to an Engineering Analysis covering an estimated 3,203,754 vehicles — the step that typically precedes a recall.

The agency found that FSD’s degradation detection system fails to warn drivers when cameras are blinded by common road conditions like sun glare and fog, and that Tesla may be under-reporting related crashes.