Tesla now says unsupervised “Full Self-Driving” in customer-owned cars will arrive in Q2 2027. It’s the latest date on a promise Elon Musk has been making to FSD buyers for the better part of a decade.

But there’s a catch. On Tesla’s Q3 2026 earnings call today, AI chief Ashok Elluswamy described it as owners adding their own vehicles to Tesla’s managed Robotaxi fleet, not owners getting a car that drives them anywhere they want to go.

Tesla’s energy business deployed more batteries in Q3 2026 but brought in less money. Energy generation and storage revenue fell 16% year-over-year to $2.88 billion, even though storage deployments rose 10% to 13.7 GWh.

Tesla’s shareholder letter blames the drop “partially” on “tariff-related customer refunds.” It doesn’t say how much it refunded, to which customers, or why it was accounted for as reduced revenue.

Tesla says it now has 1.74 million active “Full Self-Driving” subscriptions, up 67% from a year ago. A footnote in its Q3 2026 shareholder letter explains how it gets there: the metric follows “our 2025 CEO Performance Award” and “includes both upfront payment and monthly subscriptions.”

So owners who bought FSD outright, some of them years ago, count as subscribers. That matters because 10 million active FSD subscriptions is one of the milestones Elon Musk has to hit to earn his 2025 pay package. It also matters because hundred of thousands of those FSD “subscribers” were sold unsupervised self-driving, which Tesla has yet to deliver.

Tesla says battery supply, not demand, is what’s holding back its car sales. In its Q3 2026 shareholder letter, the automaker wrote that “battery availability continued to be the limiting factor in increasing auto volumes in the quarter.”

It also claims it ended Q3 with “the largest backlog for our passenger vehicles in four years.” But the numbers in the same letter don’t line up with a company that has more buyers than cars.

Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the third quarter (Q3) 2026 after market close today. We’re updating this post with all the details from the financial results, shareholders’ letter, and the conference call later tonight.

The earnings call with management is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. ET.

Lucid’s European robotaxi deal now has a driver. Bolt announced today that its fleet of at least 25,000 autonomous Lucid vehicles will run Nvidia’s Alpamayo Stack self-driving software, starting with a data-collection program in Madrid in 2027.

That gives Lucid two robotaxi customers on two different autonomy systems: Nuro’s software for Uber’s Gravity robotaxis in the US, and now Nvidia’s for Bolt in Europe.

Tesla reports its third-quarter 2026 financial results tomorrow, October 21, after the market closes. The earnings call follows at 5:30 p.m. ET.

Wall Street expects revenue to come in flat and earnings per share to drop 10% from a year ago, even though Tesla just beat its own delivery consensus by more than 24,000 vehicles.

Polestar and the University of Oxford put 12 drivers in eye trackers and heart-rate monitors and sent them around a Swedish racetrack in two versions of the Polestar 4. The goal was to put numbers on something no spec sheet captures: how performance feels to the person driving.

The 544 hp Polestar 4 Dual motor with Performance pack delivered 32% higher peak acceleration than the 268 hp Rear motor version on matched laps, and it needed 15% less steering effort to do it. Drivers also rated it far higher on the experience.

Huawei’s smart car business is signing on to CATL’s battery swap network, giving the world’s largest battery maker another heavyweight partner for a technology most of the industry wrote off a decade ago.

Yinwang, the Huawei-controlled automotive unit also known as Newcool, signed a strategic cooperation framework with CATL and its swap subsidiary CAES on Monday. CATL’s Choco-swap network already counts 2,520 stations across about 200 Chinese cities.

Foxconn is buying half of Mitsubishi Electric’s auto parts business for ¥115 billion ($727 million), its biggest bet yet on turning years of EV promises into a real car business.

But the target, Mitsubishi Electric Mobility, isn’t an EV company. It’s a traditional Tier 1 supplier that makes everything from alternators and ignition coils to radar sensors, with a smaller electric powertrain business attached.

Tesla’s proxy for its 2026 annual meeting, filed today, confirms that one of its supposedly independent directors now sits on SpaceX’s board. Ira Ehrenpreis, who chairs both Tesla’s compensation committee and its governance committee, joined SpaceX’s board in February.

That’s one of several details in the filing that line up with a Tesla-SpaceX merger. There’s a three-item ballot, an auto-voting program that kicks in for the next vote, and Musk pay terms that pay out on a deal price alone.

Mercedes-AMG has unveiled the GT SUV, an all-electric performance SUV with up to 1,153 hp from three axial-flux motors and DC fast charging at up to 710 kW.

It’s AMG’s answer to the Porsche Cayenne Electric, and on paper, it may be more impressive. The first units hit US dealerships in summer 2027.

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we’ll focus on the Tesla Roadster unveiling, but we may also cover a few other topics.

Two California Highway Patrol officers are recovering from serious injuries after a Tesla drove into their patrol car at a crash scene on Interstate 80 in Fairfield. The 22-year-old driver told investigators he was asleep with Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” engaged.

CHP released dashcam video of the impact on Thursday. It’s the latest Tesla to plow into an emergency scene, a failure federal regulators started investigating five years ago.

Waymo is bringing its robotaxis to Canada, and Toronto is first. Its cars will start driving the city’s streets in the coming days, and the company wants its first public riders on board in 2028.

That makes Toronto Waymo’s fourth announced market outside the US, after London, Tokyo, and Singapore. But there’s a catch: Ontario doesn’t have rules for a commercial driverless service yet.

Tesla has unveiled a new version of its next-generation Roadster. As expected, it received Tesla’s latest design “cyberfication” and cold-gas thrusters to allow it to jump and flip through the air.

The livestream featured impressive stunts but offered few details. Tesla released more information on X after the event, but there’s still no price and no production date.

Obrist, the Austrian engineering firm famous for ripping battery cells out of a Tesla Model 3 and bolting a gas engine into the frunk, is bankrupt. Three companies in the Obrist Group are insolvent with combined debts of about €31.8 million, or roughly $37 million.

The company spent over a decade pitching its “HyperHybrid” range extender as the smarter alternative to battery-electric cars. It never got a single production vehicle out of it.

Rivian’s point-to-point driving feature will first reach owners through an invitation-only “Autonomy Early Access Program,” and the owners it picks will have to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get in.

The program, laid out on a new Rivian support page, covers US R1 Gen 2 and R2 owners who pay for Autonomy+. Rivian says point-to-point launches to that group in late 2026 and won’t expand broadly until 2027.

Tesla’s latest crash reports to federal regulators add two more “Robotaxi” crashes where a remote operator, not the car’s autonomous system, was driving when it hit something.

That brings it to five in the data now. And every remote takeover that has shown up in a Tesla crash report has ended in a collision.

A Tesla crossed the grass median of Route 55 in New Jersey, hit a tree, slid into oncoming traffic, and struck an SUV head-on. The SUV’s driver, 68-year-old Phillip Eastman, was killed.

Police reported it as a driver who lost control. What they didn’t say, and likely didn’t know, is that Tesla’s own report to federal regulators says the car’s driver-assist system was engaged. This is part of an ongoing Electrek investigation matching reported crashes to Tesla’s redacted NHTSA data.