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.
The police department in Anaheim, California, apparently wants to “be the first” with a Cybertruck, according to an email sent to Tesla modification company Up.Fit and obtained by 404 Media.
Up.Fit has already shown what a Cybertruck for police use may look like. The Anaheim PD later confirmed to 404 Media that the email was “a joke” but that it would still like a Cybertruck for “community engagement.”
[404 Media]
The Wall Street Journal put a number on Musk’s reported donation to a political action committee backing Donald Trump’s campaign and on the formation of America PAC. He’s not on the most recent list of contributors, but both Winklevoss twins, current SpaceX / former Tesla board director Antonio Gracias, and early PayPal exec Ken Howery are.
In a post on X, the CEO said the event to reveal the company’s long-promised fully autonomous robotaxi was delayed to make time for more design changes, include an ‘important’ change to the front of the vehicle. Musk also teased “a few other things” that will shown at the October event. The event was supposed to take place on August 8th, but now has been delayed until sometime in October. Tesla still hasn’t confirmed an exact date.
Current and former Tesla employees told Business Insider that the images and videos from Musk’s Teslas have “received meticulous scrutiny,” allowing the automaker to tweak its software to address hiccups on certain routes. The company similarly prioritizes driving data from Tesla influencers, Business Insider reports:
The result is that Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD software may better navigate routes taken by Musk and other high-profile drivers, making their rides smoother and more straightforward.
Misleading claims about Tesla’s alleged autonomous vehicle development are a dime-a-dozen, but this quote in the Wall Street Journal about China’s AV program was enough to exasperate ex-Waymo CEO John Krafcik.
Just to be clear: Waymo operates fully driverless vehicles, while Tesla’s Full Self-Driving requires a human driver behind the wheel.
According to Not a Tesla App, the 2024.26 update in testing has features like parental controls that limit speed and acceleration or notify about late-night drives, an AQI symbol for poor local air quality, and scheduled charging.
It also adds built-in apps for Amazon Music and YouTube Music streaming in the US if you have Premium Connectivity or an active Wi-Fi connection.
Last month, we reported that Tesla had purchased $2 million worth of lidar sensors from Luminar, a surprising deal given Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s very public disparagements of autonomous vehicle companies that partly rely on the laser sensor. This week, a reader sent us this photo of a Tesla Model Y with Luminar’s Hydra sensors mounted on the roof. The back of the vehicle says “Engineering Vehicle,” which could mean the company is using lidar to validate its self-driving software (although Musk has claimed that wasn’t necessary “anymore”).
Tesla recently filed a $1 billion lawsuit against a former supplier, Matthews International, alleging trade secret theft of its EV battery technology. Matthews has been supplying Tesla with machinery since 2019, and the company says it has been been swiping trade secrets related to dry electrode battery manufacturing. Tesla got those secrets by acquiring a company called Maxwell Technologies back in 2018.
Posts on the Cybertruck Owners Forum, Reddit, and on X say that Tesla has notified them their Cybertruck deliveries are being pushed back. Some say they were told it was a wiper blade issue, while others say they weren’t given a reason.
The reports come just two months after the company recalled all Cybertrucks over stuck accelerator pedals. Tesla didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.
[Tesla Cybertruck Forum - News, Discussions, Community - Cybertruckownersclub.com]
Tesla CEO Elon Musk got his big compensation package approved yesterday, but how many really voted in favor? Well, it seems 1.78 billion shares voted in favor of Musk’s payday, while 529 million voted against — a 72 percent margin, excluding shares held by Musk and his brother Kimbal, as The New York Times reports. Musk took a victory lap on the mic at the shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas.
[www.sec.gov]
The shareholder meeting ends with several people pitching Musk on their personal business ideas. He adds another note about FSD’s rate of improvement. And that’s the end.
Thanks for following along with us! We’ll have more coverage of the meeting tomorrow, so stay tuned for that.
Musk kind of sidesteps a question about whether there’s a succession plan in place in the event that he gets hit by a car — or just decides to leave. “I think Tesla has a good future without me,” he said. “I think I’m a helpful accelerant to that future.”
“People will have super helpful humanoid helper robots,” Musk says in response to a question about robot personalities. “And, yeah, you’ll be able to customize the personality, customize the voice and really kind of, the robot will kind of get to know you as well and know your preferences.”
Let’s be real: people are going to try to bang the robots. We all know it.
Musk is asked when the Cybertruck will go international. He responds saying it was designed with American specs in mind, and a new and redesigned version would be needed for the European and Chinese markets. There won’t be an international model this year, he confirms.
Trump has been a huge critic of electric vehicles on the stump. But Musk says he talks to Trump a lot and maybe its just a put-on. “I think a lot of his friends now have Teslas,” Musk says. “And they all love it. And he’s a huge fan of the Cybertruck. So I think those may be contributing factors.”
He goes off on a tangent about “homicidal maniacs” after one shareholder asks him how he’s doing with everything. We have fully left the substantive portion of the meeting and are now just coasting on vibes.
This sounds like a question about financial risks of autonomy, but it could also be seen as one about human collateral. Musk leaps to his usual difference: “There’s a small chance of something bad happening. But when you look at the sort of safety per mile, it’s very clear that the safety better than human driving.”
In response to a question about bundling software, Musk says the company will continue offering free trials of Full Self-Driving to new customers as long as there are new versions of the software to release.
Musk is known for his tendency to over-hype his companies products, but this is definitely above the normal level. “I don’t want to trivialize what’s necessary to get there. I mean, it’s an immense amount of work that is required to get there, like super difficult, but we are moving very fast down that road,” he says before shifting to Q&A.
Musk says that it has several humanoid Optimus robots performing tasks at its factory in Fremont. They’re taking cells off the end of the assembly line and putting them into shipping containers. By the end of next year, Musk predicts Tesla will have a thousands robots working in its factories.
[Twitter]
Musk quipped in response to the recent layoff of the Supercharger team, which left many charging station projects stalled. Musk says there will be more Superchargers this year than the rest of the industry combined and promises to give other manufacturers adapters to use Tesla stations (which are still in limited supply).
He first pitched this idea of Tesla’s fleet running inference compute for AI during the last earnings call. “So there’s 100 hours of 100 gigawatts of inference compute, which I think we should use. Why not?” he says.
We asked some experts. They’re skeptical.
HW4 will be “five times” more powerful than HW3. And then HW5, which will go into the company’s Optimus robots, will come out 18 months after HW4.
I’m old enough to remember when Elon Musk said that Tesla vehicles had all the hardware they needed for full self-driving.
There were only two covered mystery vehicles during last year’s Master Plan Part Three event. Now we have three. One’s definitely the robotaxi. The other could be the forthcoming revamped Roadster. What about the third? The long-awaited more affordable Model 2?
We’re getting the greatest hits: Cybertruck, Model Y best-selling car globally, and Tesla Semi. Musk said last week he approved volume production plans for the Semi, which has been stuck in low-volume mode since 2022. So that’s news.
That’s Musk’s recommendation for clearing up the question of the Cybertruck’s cool factor. (I would ask my own kids, but they’re too busy blasting Skibidi Toilet non-stop.)
In light of defeated proposals to get Tesla to be more transparent about its carbon emissions, Musk puts up this slide that shows the company is producing less pollution.
Now he’s touting Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, which the company claims is already performing tasks at Tesla’s factory. “I think the ratio of robots-to-humans will probably be at least two to one,” he said, predicting there will be eventually 10-30 billion humanoid robots.
