Transportation Archive

One of the busiest travel weekends of the year doesn’t seem like an ideal time to update more than half of the world’s over 11,000 A320s. Still, a potential issue involving solar flares was serious enough that the company pushed the software update Friday. American Airlines said that 340 of its planes required the update, which it expected to take about two hours each. According to Reuters:

Last month Musk promised there would be “500 or more” of the (supervised) Robotaxis in Texas by the end of the year. Today he told an X user the fleet should “roughly double next month.” But given best estimates put the current number of cars around 30, double that is... nowhere near 500.

The workers, part of Project Sandbox, were one month into an expected three month stint, Business Insider reports. Around a dozen people were involved, though it’s not clear how many were cut.

October sales are down 48.5 percent across Europe compared to 2024, according to data released by the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association on Tuesday. For the year, Tesla’s sales are down about 30 percent in the region, while industrywide EV sales jumped 26 percent. While the company’s car business struggled, Elon Musk was focused on robots and winning shareholder approval for his newly minted $1 trillion pay package.

All cars are currently required to have automatic emergency braking by 2027. But that mandate could get tossed under a new plan by Senate Republicans to eliminate certain safety rules, in the interest of making cars more affordable. Also under scrutiny are alarms warning if there’s a child left in the rear seat. Weirdly they’re not targeting expensive creature comforts, like heated steering wheels and wireless charging. Just the safety ones.

Stranger Things, a show that ostensibly is riff on the “kids on bikes” adventures from the 1980s, recently held a promotional event where fans rode bikes along a car-free street to celebrate the final season. But no “kids on bikes” event would be complete without Coach Balto, the founder of Bike Bus World, who also helped inspire my own bike bus journey. I’m excited to see him continuing the spread the word about street safety and childhood independence in the Upside Down.

This Associated Press report explains that after getting authorization for a domestic license plate reader in 2017, the readers “have become a major — and in some places permanent — fixture of the border region.”

A woman died and her husband was seriously injured after first responders struggled to retrieve them from a burning Model 3, according to a new lawsuit filed against the company. The crash took place January 2023 in Washington state and is the latest to allege that Tesla’s door handle design is trapping people inside their vehicles.

The Gravity Touring, with 337 miles of range and a native NACS charging port for Tesla Supercharger access, will start at $79,900 (excluding destination fees). That puts Lucid’s SUV in direct competition with a host of luxury EVs, including the Rivian R1S, BMW iX, Polestar 3, and Tesla Model X.