Founded in 2003, Tesla is the top manufacturer of electric vehicles in the US. Led by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, the automaker upended the industry with the futuristic designs and technology of the Gigafactory, the Model S sedan, the Model X SUV, the mass-market Model 3, and soon, the Model Y compact SUV and the unconventional, Blade Runner-inspired pickup Cybertruck. The company has also experienced a number of growing pains on the path to that status as a leader, including public clashes with government agencies, and it commonly faces questions about its technology, issues with its manufacturing, and the treatment of its workforce. The Verge covers all of Tesla’s product launches and ambitions, including energy generation and storage, and the push towards autonomous cars.
Props to Fred Lambert at Electrek for catching this: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is requesting from Tesla all information about a document called “Radar Saves Us” in its investigation into Full Self-Driving crashes. The details could prove that Tesla knew its camera-only approach to autonomous driving was flawed, which could trigger another massive recall for the company.
Tesla filed an NHTSA crash report that lists the driver as “Remote (Commercial / Test),” which Electrek says is a first for Tesla. It’s one of numerous accidents with Tesla’s robotaxis in the past year, and involved a Model Y hitting a tree stump while trying to get out of a dead end road.
Not what anyone expected — or wanted — but a Tesla-branded balance bike is now available for the junior edgelord in your life.
New Jersey wants driverless cars, so long as they have multiple sensors. But Tesla’s are camera-only.
The terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed, but the lawsuit concerned a 71-year-old woman who was killed by a Tesla Model Y driver using Full Self-Driving. It was the first known pedestrian fatality linked to FSD, Bloomberg reports. The news comes as Tesla faces another lawsuit from the family of a Texas woman who was killed in her home by a speeding Tesla driver.
The fire occurred in Martin County late last week after “a brake pad from the trailer hauling the six Teslas ignited and quickly spread to the vehicles,” according to local news outlet WPTV. Both lanes of Florida’s Turnpike and part of I-95 were shut down as toxic fumes and smoke clouded the area.
Tata Electronics, an India-based manufacturing partner for both companies, says it’s investigating a “cybersecurity incident” after the World Leaks ransomware group posted more than 200,000 component and specification documents on the dark web. The files reportedly include inspection standards for iPhone circuit board components, and drawings for the Model 3 revamp that Tesla launched in 2023.
That’s what investigators in Harris County, Texas, aim to find out after Michael Butler’s Model 3 smashed into the home of a 76-year-old woman, killing her in her own living room. Tesla’s driver assist system has been linked to thousands of crashes and dozens of fatalities, and yet the company claims its tech makes driving safer.
He said the company’s autonomous ridehail vehicles would be available to half the US population by the end of 2025. Well, here we are in June 2026, and Tesla only has 59 vehicles in a handful of Texas cities. Bloomberg breaks down the growing chasm between Musk’s bombastic predictions and the realities of a very slow, often inconvenient robotaxi service.
That’s the conclusion from a Reuters investigation that includes a hard look at Tesla’s statistical methodology and interviews with company insiders. Tesla workers routinely review video clips from FSD-enabled vehicles of animal deaths or narrow misses with children. And there’s a lot of speeding:
One employee said labelers saw Teslas regularly exceeding speed limits by 20 to 30 miles per hour after the automaker introduced an FSD “Mad Max” mode enabling more-aggressive driving. Another labeler reported seeing an FSD-piloted vehicle traveling 60 mph in a 25-mph zone.
During a recent episode of Ryan McCaffrey’s Ride the Lightning podcast, Tesla’s chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, confirmed its second-gen Roadster (first announced in 2017) will be built in Texas. The company’s vice president of engineering, Lars Moravy, also confirmed that alpha prototypes of the vehicle are currently in testing.
The rocket company says it’s ‘highly dependent’ on Musk’s leadership. And that his other companies are possible competitors.
Karpathy, who had also been on the founding team of OpenAI, says he will be working on R&D at Anthropic. Previously, he had been working on “new kind of school that is AI native,” and he says he’s still “deeply passionate about education” and plans to go back to it “in time.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is testing advanced driver assist systems, and the first vehicle to receive passing grades is the 2026 Model Y. The vehicle was inspected in four categories: pedestrian automatic emergency braking; lane keeping assistance; blind spot warning; and blind spot intervention. These pass/fail tests have recently been added to the agency’s New Car Assessment Program. NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison said that the Model Y demonstrated “lifesaving potential of driver assistance technologies and sets a high bar for the industry.”
In an earnings call last month, Elon Musk was feeling bullish that Full Self-Driving (Supervised) would soon be authorized in the European Union, especially after the Level 2 automated system was approved for use in the Netherlands. But according to emails seen by Reuters, EU regulators are in no rush to give the green light. They have issues with FSD, including “the system’s tendency to speed, whether it is safe to use on icy roads and drivers’ ability to circumvent features designed to prevent cell-phone use.”
No courtroom updates today, but we have updated our rundown of the evidence with the latest exhibits added in Elon v. Musk, including details of the donated Tesla Model 3s.
Eight months after the iOS app launched, Tesla has released an Android version of its Robotaxi app. The service expanded to Houston and Dallas last week, but still seems to only have a small number of vehicles actually on the road.
[Google Play]
Reporting from Bloomberg on how many Cybertrucks Elon’s other companies have been buying:
SpaceX, the Musk-led rocket and satellite maker, accounted for 1,279 — or more than 18% — of the 7,071 Cybertrucks registered in the US during the fourth quarter, according to registration data that S&P Global Mobility provided to Bloomberg News. The billionaire’s other ventures acquired another 60 vehicles during those months.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed its investigation into Tesla’s Actual Smart Summon, or ASS, which allows owners to remotely control their vehicles from a smartphone app. The agency’s Office of Defects Investigation was probing an estimated 2.6 million vehicles with the parking feature after dozens of reports of crashes. But the agency closed the investigation after concluding that the risk of crash severity was low because the speeds were very slow.
