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.
Elon Musk says the company has been testing self-driving Model Y cars around Austin without anyone in the driver’s seat for the “past several days.” That’s good news for the company’s fledgling robotaxi business, which may launch as soon as June 12th. Though as Electrek points out, a few weeks of driverless testing is a far cry from the six months Waymo worked through before its Austin launch this year.
[x.com]
After outdoing Tesla’s global revenue last year, Chinese auto manufacturer BYD just outsold it in Europe for the first time too.
BYD sold 7,231 battery-electric cars in Europe in April — up 169 percent over the same month last year — which was enough to just overtake Tesla, which once led Europe’s market but now sits in tenth. Tesla sales of 7,165 are 49 percent down on 2024.
[bloomberg.com]
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.
China has implemented new export controls for rare earth minerals and magnets. The changes could upend the shift to electric vehicles.
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?
Does it even matter if Tesla can’t mass produce them without China’s rare earth magnets?
In the two days leading up to being let go, former Tesla employee Matthew LaBrot published a website calling for Tesla to “move forward without Elon as CEO,” then attended a Tesla Takedown protest, reports Business Insider.
It’s not the first time a former Tesla employee has claimed to have been fired for criticizing Musk.
[businessinsider.com]
The US Patent and Trademark Office rejected Tesla’s request to trademark the term for being “merely descriptive” and describing “similar goods and services by other companies,” reports TechCrunch:
Tesla needs to give the agency specific plans for how and why it deserves the “Robotaxi” trademark.
The examiner also wrote that Tesla will need to tell the USPTO if “competitors” use the terms “ROBO, ROBOT, or ROBOTIC to advertise similar goods and/or services.”
Tesla has three months to respond before the application is abandoned.
Robyn Denholm, who was appointed chair of Tesla’s board of directors after the SEC forced Elon Musk to step down, just sold over $32 million worth of shares in the company. As Electrek notes, it appears that she is close to liquidating her entire position in Tesla, with only 85,000 shares left and 300,440 stock options expiring later this year. Several Tesla investors have urged the board to rein in Musk, who’s political alliance with the Trump administration has done irreparable damage to the company’s brand. But under Denholm’s leadership, the board has done essentially nothing to curb Musk’s worst tendencies.
The Tesla CEO has long promised driverless cars that can go anywhere. But now he’s acknowledging that there will be “parameters.”
The restrictions on rare earth minerals and related magnets came in response to Trump’s escalating tariffs and we’re now seeing some direct impact. Tesla’s occasional CEO says his plan to build thousands of Optimus humanoid robots this year is contingent upon the availability of those magnets needed for the robot’s motors.
”China wants some assurances that these are not used for military purposes, which obviously they’re not,” said Musk.
Starlink also wasn’t intended for military purposes... until it was.
DOGE is gutting the agency that enforces environmental laws Elon Musk’s companies have been accused of breaking.
The company is working on a cheaper Model Y that will initially be made in the US, codenamed E41, but the start of production has been delayed, Reuters reports. Tesla apparently wants to make 250,000 of these vehicles in the US in 2026.
Reuters also says that a “bare-bones version” of the Model 3 is in the works.
Tesla conducted an internal analysis last year that concluded its upcoming driverless Cybercab is shaping up to be another Cybertruck-level flop, The Information reports:
One of the first assumptions was that the U.S. car market could shrink from 15 million a year to roughly 3 million because Robotaxis would be used for five times as many hours as privately owned cars, which sit in driveways and parking lots most of the time. Then the analysts subtracted Americans who wouldn’t switch to a driverless EV. These included people in rural parts of the country who often travel vast distances that are impractical for Robotaxis; suburbanites with kids and complicated pickup and drop-off schedules; and active people who routinely cart around a surfboard or a mountain bike.
That pushed probable annual Robotaxi sales well below 1 million vehicles a year. “There is ultimately a saturation of people who want to be ferried around in somebody else’s car,” said one person familiar with the situation.
Of course, Elon Musk doesn’t really care whether it succeeds or fails. AI is Tesla’s future, for better or worse. (It will be worse.)
[theinformation.com]
Tesla has stopped taking orders in China for new Model S and Model X EVs, which are manufactured exclusively in California and imported. With tariffs now at 125 percent on US imports, you can guess why.
It will still sell its Model 3 and updated Model Y, which are built in Shanghai and make up the overwhelming majority of its Chinese sales — Reuters reports it imported fewer than 2,000 S and X vehicles in 2024.
Elon Musk’s new single-motor RWD political-statement-on-wheels starts at $69,900, making it the cheapest Cybertruck yet, according to Teslarati. With a range of 350 miles, it also bests the dual-motor AWD model by 25 miles. Range can be extended to 362 miles when opting for the $750 soft tonneau cover but swastikas might be added for free. US deliveries begin in June.
Tesla is certainly sweetening the pot by offering the cheaper Long Range All-Wheel Drive version, which starts at $50,630 including destination and order fees. But given all the chaos swirling around Elon Musk and his company, I can’t recommend this purchase in good conscience. Sure, the Model Y is a very popular car — it was once the best selling car in the world, EV or otherwise — but there are now plenty of EVs you can buy that are not associated with controversial billionaires who make fascist salutes and brag about feeding humanitarian aid programs “into the wood chipper.“ Just saying.
[insideevs.com]
Reports of Elon Musk’s impending departure from the White House could not have been better timed for Tesla’s stock prices, which had started plummeting after its dismal Q1 report was released this morning. Within hours of the news breaking, the price not only recovered but surged an extra 5 percent. (As always when it comes to Musk’s relationship with the Trump administration, let’s see how long that surge lasts.)
[politico.com]
That’s Tesla bull Dan Ives from Wedbush reacting to this morning’s first quarter production and delivery report, in which the company clocked a 13 percent decrease in sales year over year. Ives, who strongly believes in Elon Musk’s vision of AI, robotics, and self-driving cars, is nonetheless adamant that the billionaire CEO needs to take the proverbial bull by the horns. He writes:
The time has come for Musk....it’s a fork in the road moment. The more political he gets with DOGE the more the brand suffers, there is no debate. This quarter was an example of the damage Musk is causing Tesla. This continues to be a moment of truth for Musk to navigate this brand tornado crisis moment and get onto the other side of this dark chapter for Tesla with much better days ahead.
[wedbush.bluematrix.com]
