Electric Cars Archive

After outdoing Tesla’s global revenue last year, Chinese auto manufacturer BYD just outsold it in Europe for the first time too.

During an interview with CNBC, Elon Musk laid out some of the details for next month’s robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas, most of which was already known. It will be a small number of vehicles, only 10-20, in the first week, but will increase in size week by week. It will be geofenced to the parts of Austin “that we consider to be the safest,” Musk said. And the vehicles will be monitored by remote operators who can intervene in case of emergency. “We’re going to be extremely paranoid about the deployment as we should be,” he added. “It would be foolish not to be so we’ll be watching what the cars are doing very carefully.” The rest was the standard bluster about “over a million Teslas doing self-driving in the US” and why he thinks Waymo’s use of lidar is fundamentally flawed.

The company is walking back some of its long-term electrification plans, cutting 3 trillion yen (about $20.8 billion) from its investment in electric cars over the next six years. Instead, it’s shifting focus to hybrids, though still plans to be selling only EVs by 2040.

Tesla’s Optimus robot has been plagued by fakery since it launched with a dancer in a suit followed by remote manipulation at the cybercab event. So what is this? Generative AI? A man behind the curtain in a mocap suit?

The paintless, affordable EV pickup truck started taking reservations just over two weeks ago and crossed the 100,000 mark this past weekend, reports TechCrunch.