In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Jamie’s first drive in Aptera’s solar car, Tesla Cybercab specs revealed, Lucid Cosmos design leak, and more.

Telo confirmed that its Mini-sized MT1 electric truck will charge at 400 kW sustained — a charging rate that puts it in the company of luxury EVs costing two to three times as much.

The startup also revealed a dual 800V/400V split-pack battery architecture designed to maximize performance on any fast charger, not just the latest high-voltage stations.

Maserati revealed updates to its Folgore electric lineup, with the GranTurismo Folgore now claiming over 540 km (335 miles) of WLTP range — an improvement of roughly 85 km over the previous version thanks to new energy management algorithms.

The range gains come as Maserati fights for relevance amid a sales collapse that saw deliveries drop to just 7,900 units in 2025, down 30% year-over-year and the lowest since 2012.

The Dutch collective claim against Tesla over broken “Full Self-Driving” promises on Hardware 3 vehicles has reached nearly 7,000 verified participants and secured backing from law firm Kennedy Van der Laan for a formal legal action.

The initiative, which launched in April with 3,000 signups in its first week, is now preparing to transfer the case to a foundation that will pursue the claim on behalf of all participants under Dutch collective action law.

Sweden’s transport authority has told the European Union it should vote against approving Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” across the bloc unless the system’s ability to exceed posted speed limits is removed.

The recommendation, in a previously unreported April 30 letter to the EU’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles (TCMV), lands just before the committee is due to take up the matter on June 30, ahead of an eventual vote on a bloc-wide rollout.

Elon Musk says Tesla’s Full Self-Driving will soon remember your parking preferences and let you talk to it through Grok, like giving directions to an Uber driver.

The features sound useful, and they reflect how genuinely impressive FSD has become — but they also underscore that it remains a supervised driver-assist system, not the unsupervised self-driving Tesla has sold to owners for years.

Tesla’s head of quality, Kahiree Gans, is leaving the automaker to return to Stellantis — the same company Tesla poached him from less than three years ago.

Gans has updated his LinkedIn profile to list his new role as “Vice President, Global SQD” at Stellantis, while describing himself as “Ex-Tesla Head of Quality.”

Elon Musk has exercised the entirety of his 2018 Tesla (TSLA) CEO pay package, acquiring 303,960,630 shares for a paper gain of about $116 billion, according to a new SEC filing.

But he didn’t sell a single share to do it — and the stock he received is locked up until 2028.

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe says the money automakers charge for self-driving software won’t last, comparing autonomy to airbags: a paid option today, baked into the price of every car tomorrow.

The comments, made in a new interview with WIRED, amount to a quiet warning shot at Tesla, which just moved its “Full Self-Driving” package to a subscription-only model at $99 per month.

The US Department of Justice has asked a federal court to throw out a Clean Air Act lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, arguing that the company’s unpermitted gas turbines near Memphis are a matter of “national, economic, and energy security.”

The move puts the Trump administration in court alongside Musk to defend dozens of methane-burning turbines that have been running without air permits in one of the most polluted regions of the country.

Lucid has registered the design of its upcoming Cosmos with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, giving us the clearest look yet at the sub-$50,000 crossover the automaker is betting its future on.

The filing, published last week, shows the production design of Lucid’s first mass-market EV from every angle, inside and out, months before its expected reveal this summer.

Tesla has installed a free car vacuum right next to the charging stalls at a Supercharger station in Germany — believed to be a first for the network.

The setup lets owners clean out their cars while they charge, turning otherwise idle minutes into something useful.

Rivian laid off hundreds of workers on Tuesday, or less than 2% of its workforce, just one week after it began deliveries of its all-important R2 SUV.

The electric automaker confirmed the cuts hit its service and customer teams, which include sales and marketing, as it tries to claw its way to a profit it has yet to ever post.

Tesla didn’t report a single at-fault “Robotaxi” crash in the latest NHTSA autonomous-vehicle data — its only fresh incident was a Model Y getting rear-ended while stopped, clearly the other driver’s fault.

That sounds like good news for Tesla’s safety record. But live fleet data points to the real reason the crashes have dried up: Tesla’s robotaxis are barely running, and the active fleet is shrinking a year into the program.

Drew Baglino spent nearly two decades building Tesla’s batteries, motors, and power electronics. Now the former Tesla SVP is quietly building the one home energy product Tesla talked up for years and never shipped: a residential heat pump.

His startup, Sadi Thermal Machines, is a direct bet on an idea Tesla floated openly in 2022 — before the company reoriented itself around humanoid robots and robotaxis.

Baidu’s Apollo Go has received a Level 4 autonomous driving permit in Switzerland for AmiGo, a robotaxi service it is running with Swiss Post’s PostBus, putting the Chinese tech giant ahead of Waymo and Tesla in deploying driverless vehicles into European public transport.

The Federal Roads Office (FEDRO) special permit covers an 80 km² service area across three eastern cantons, and Baidu says the project is on track to become the largest planned automated public transport operation of its kind in Europe.

A cottage industry has emerged on Chinese e-commerce platforms selling tiny plastic doll heads designed to trick Tesla’s cabin camera into thinking a driver is paying attention. The devices cost as little as $20 to $50.

The products — marketed as “travel companions” and “dashboard decorations” — represent the latest and most absurd escalation in the arms race between Tesla’s driver monitoring safeguards and people determined to defeat them. It’s also incredibly dangerous and irresponsible.

Tesla’s Cybercab EPA certification documents reveal the robotaxi’s full technical specs for the first time — including a 3,113-lb curb weight, a 219 HP motor, and a 48 kWh battery pack. The filing confirms several claims Tesla made about the vehicle while revealing some surprises.

The Certificate Summary Information (CSI) for EPA test group TTSLV00.0L1A, filed on May 21 and certified on May 26, provides the most detailed look yet at the engineering behind the most efficient EV ever produced.

Tesla presented self-published and inflated “Full Self-Driving” safety statistics directly to government regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands as it lobbied for European approval, according to correspondence obtained by Reuters through public records requests.

The data includes a claim that FSD could have “saved 32,000 lives” — a figure that independent researchers say is based on the absurd assumption that every vehicle in the U.S., including freight trucks and motorcycles, would be replaced by an FSD-enabled Tesla.

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss our Rivian R2 first drive, BYD going nuts on flash charging, Donut Lab’s miracle battery being seemingly dead, and more.