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.
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]
As it enters its third month, the Tesla Takedown movement shows no signs of slowing down.
Is Tesla really cooked? Watch as The Verge transportation editor, Andrew Hawkins, walks us through how Elon Musk’s unprecedented takeover of the federal government has transformed public opinion of his car company into something increasingly toxic instead of futuristic, with some owners suddenly selling their cars even at a loss.
An arrest has been made in connection with a recent incident where someone wearing all black threw Molotov cocktails at vehicles and spray painted “resist” on the doors of a Tesla collision center in Las Vegas.
As reported earlier by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and other outlets, Paul Hyon Kim has been arrested and is facing charges including arson as well as the destruction of property, and law enforcement officials said he would also be booked on federal charges later today.
The company’s sales in January and February are down nearly 43 percent year over year, according to new registration data from the EU. Meanwhile, overall electric vehicle registrations are up 28 percent across the continent, as EVs capture 15.2 percent of total EU market share. People still really like EVs, just not the one associated with Elon Musk.
The Chinese automaker reports 777 billion yuan ($107 billion) revenue for 2024, comfortably topping Tesla’s $97.7 billion over the same period. The two companies shipped similar numbers of EVs last year, but add in BYD’s hybrids and it delivered more than double the vehicles Tesla did.
Last week the company unveiled car charging tech that’s twice as fast as Tesla’s, delivering 249 miles of range in just five minutes.
[bloomberg.com]
Tesla news lately includes a leader with a second or maybe seventh job in politics, protests, vandalism, a White House lawn advertisement, record high trade-in numbers, and a Cybertruck recall to fix glued-on trim pieces that can’t stay attached.
So, to beat the allegations that it might be cooked, tonight Musk and Tesla put on a hastily announced “all hands” meeting that was streamed publicly. Business Insider reports employees were only notified of the unusual event shortly before its scheduled start at 9:30PM ET. You can watch it here (Tesla says you should skip to 28 minutes in since it didn’t start on time, or try YouTube), but today’s Decoder episode on Tesla is probably better and shorter.
One of Tesla’s usually favorable Wall Street analysts, Dan Ives from Wedbush, published a note pleading with CEO Elon Musk to spend less time at DOGE. “Tesla and Musk are facing a defining chapter in their future and how Musk handles this next few months will be pivotal to the long term growth trajectory of Tesla in our view,” Ives wrote. Another thing Ives says Musk needs to do is prepare lower-cost vehicles for 2025.
The Tesla Takedown movement is rallying against Elon Musk, and it’s only getting bigger.
The Financial Times compared the electric automaker’s capital expenditure in the last six months of 2024 to its valuation of the assets that money was spent on, and discovered that $1.4 billion has “gone astray.”
Looking at last year, in the third and fourth quarter combined, Tesla spent $6.3bn on “purchases of property and equipment excluding finance leases, net of sales” according to its cashflow statements. Over on the balance sheet, however, the gross value of property, plant and equipment rose by only $4.9bn in that period, to $51bn.
$6.9 billion minus $4.9 billion equals $1.4 billion, or the sum the paper says appears unaccounted for. It’s a bit complicated, but unless Tesla reports the missing money in its next earnings report, it could indicate that something fishy is going on — beyond a stock collapse amid a global protest movement.
Can you trick a Tesla’s camera-based Autopilot system, which has been linked to hundreds of crashes, using simulated rain, fog? Will it barrel through a wall covered in an image of the road beyond, like Looney Tunes’ Wile E. Coyote slamming into the Road Runner’s fake tunnels?
Yes you can, according to Engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober’s testing. (Bonus: Rober also uses LiDAR to map Disney’s pitch-black Space Mountain coaster. )
Tesla has been promising more affordable models as the thing that will help pull it out of its current rut. But a new report out of China (by way of Electrek) suggests that they’re likely to be stripped down Model Ys. This follows reports that the company was testing sub-$35,000 Model 3s in Mexico with cheaper materials and fewer screens. Based on the 36kr report, the project is being spearheaded by Tesla’s Chinese engineers — which makes sense, because car companies in that country have really cracked the code on cheap EVs.
