Today’s episode of Quick Charge means business – the business of buying up power stations to power up the pet AI that says it would have picked you over Michael Jordan in the 1984 NBA draft and the business of fleecing well-heeled car collectors out of an extra $100,000 on a (mostly) new Tesla Model S Signature sedan.

A new analysis of nearly 10,000 real-world EV battery tests found that the same Tesla Model 3 holds up very differently depending on which battery it was built with — and the cheaper LFP version comes out on top.

The Model 3 with CATL’s lithium iron phosphate (LFP) pack averaged 93.3% battery health among cars that had driven more than 62,000 miles, beating every nickel-based version of the car in the dataset.

A New Jersey dealer is trying to flip a barely-driven Tesla Model S Signature for $259,995 — roughly $100,000 more than what Tesla charged buyers for the collector’s edition.

The car carries VIN #71 and just 297 miles on the odometer, and it’s listed at J&S Autohaus in Ewing, New Jersey, for more than double the price of a standard Model S Plaid.

Elon Musk has quietly bought APR Energy, a Jacksonville-based company that operates a fleet of mobile gas and diesel turbines totaling more than 1 GW of generation capacity.

The self-styled champion of a “solar electric economy” now owns a fossil fuel power company — and he’s buying it to feed the electricity-hungry data centers running xAI’s Grok.

Tesla is launching a new “guaranteed future value” (GFV) program that locks in a pre-set resale price for buyers financing a new Model Y or Model 3.

The move directly targets the depreciation fears that have followed Tesla’s own aggressive price cuts over the last two years.

On today’s totally normal episode of Quick Charge, it seems like EV sales are starting to normalize in the US after the loss of the Federal Tax Credit last September – but they’re taking off everywhere else, and Europe is leading the charge!

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 168 today, creating a new “MyFirstEV” program that gives first-time electric vehicle buyers a $3,500 instant rebate at the dealership starting later this summer.

The point-of-sale discount is backed by $135.5 million in state funding, matched dollar-for-dollar by participating automakers — and a California-headquarters rule makes Rivian and Lucid the biggest winners, while Tesla qualifies only on its cheapest models.

Tesla is building a purpose-built, wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle, a company policy advisor told lawmakers in Washington, DC, on Monday.

But Tesla gave no timeline, no vehicle, and no details, and it’s not clear the “active product” is anything more than the Robovan it unveiled nearly two years ago.

Paper Transport (PTI) announced today that it is evaluating the Tesla Semi Long Range in dedicated operations in the Chicago market, becoming the latest fleet to put Tesla’s electric Class 8 truck to work in daily freight.

The Wisconsin-based carrier, which has logged more than 87 million miles on compressed and renewable natural gas, is adding battery-electric to a sustainability push it has been running for over 15 years.

Samsung has completed its own version of Tesla’s AI5 self-driving chip and is preparing to start production at its foundry in Taylor, Texas, on the company’s latest 2-nanometer process, according to industry officials.

The move confirms Samsung is building AI5 on 2nm — a node that had been expected to debut with Tesla’s next-generation AI6 chip, not this one.

Tesla says “Cybercab employee rides at Giga Texas” are “starting soon” — its first stated step toward putting people inside the wheel-less, pedal-less robotaxi.

But the announcement, spread across two Tesla accounts and roughly 2.9 million combined views, is thinner than it sounds. It’s not clear whether Tesla means Cybercabs running a real ride service in Austin or simply driving employees around a factory parking lot.

Elon Musk told Tesla staff to move to using Grok, the AI model from his own xAI (now folded into SpaceX), according to a memo sent to employees on Friday.

The push comes days after Tesla capped employee spending on third-party AI tools — and it lands even though Musk himself concedes Grok is not as good as its rivals.

Australia just posted its biggest month ever for electric car sales, and for the first time seven different EVs each cleared 1,000 units in a single month.

Every one of them is either Chinese-owned or Chinese-built — and that includes the Tesla Model Y that topped the chart, which rolls off the line in Shanghai.

New Jersey lawmakers are advancing a bill that would require driverless commercial vehicles to carry cameras plus two additional sensor types — a mandate Tesla’s camera-only Robotaxi can’t meet.

The proposed law, S1677, would effectively lock Tesla out of the most densely populated US state unless it adds the radar and lidar hardware that Elon Musk has spent years insisting his cars don’t need.

For many years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sworn up and down that the use of radar and lidar sensors for autonomous driving is a waste of time.

His counterargument has been that cameras and powerful AI-powered hardware are all you need for safe self-driving, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

That decision is now risking a major roadblocks for the company in New Jersey. As The Verge reports, a bill that’s coming up for a vote this year would require fully autonomous vehicles to use both cameras and at least two other sensing technologies — in most cases, lidar and radar.

If the bill were enacted, it would effectively banning Tesla’s fully autonomous fleet of Robotaxis. Other states could soon follow — including New York, which is pondering a similar bill — in a domino effect that could completely derail the automaker’s current trajectory.

“This is not anti-Tesla,” bill sponsor and senator Andrew Zwicker (D-NJ) told The Verge. “I’m pro-New Jersey safety.”

Zwicker argued that there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that a single sensor, plus software “can handle situations that humans can.”

“Can we get there? Maybe,” he told the publication. “But we’re not there yet.”

Relying entirely on cameras that can be blinded by the Sun, fog, or heavy rain is part of Musk’s major bet on AI. He has argued that adding extra sensors may end up being less safe thanks to what he called “sensor contention” in a tweet last year.

“We turned off the radars in Teslas to increase safety,” he wrote. “Cameras [for the win].”

However, Musk is largely alone in that belief. Competitors, most notably Waymo, have made major headway by relying on both cameras and other sensor tech, such as lidar and radar, which perform far better in inclement weather and the dark.

“To run 24/7 across the majority of public roads in New Jersey today, it needs lidar,” Carnegie Mellon professor and autonomous vehicle expert Philip Koopman told The Verge. “It’s pretty clear that today camera-only technology is not up to the challenge.”

Tesla’s current fleet of 42 fully autonomous Robotaxis on public Texas roads is still dwarfed by Waymo’s, which has 577 authorized robotaxis in the state, in addition to several thousand more spread across ten US metropolitan areas.

That’s despite Musk promising Tesla’s fleet would grow to hundreds of thousands by the end of this year, a characteristically brazen prediction with little bearing on reality.

The company’s slow rollout has been mired by setbacks, which Musk has rationalized is the result of Tesla being “paranoid about safety.” The EV maker has gone to great lengths to censor the circumstances surrounding the Robotaxi crashes it has reported to regulators so far.

Unsurprisingly, Tesla is already lobbying to fight the New Jersey bill. Zwicker told The Verge that company representatives are discussing the subject with lawmakers.

The EV maker has also turned to New Jersey residents, telling its customers in the state in a message that they should “contact members of the New Jersey legislature” to oppose the bill.

It’s a precarious situation, especially considering the complete lack of comprehensive federal laws providing oversight over the rollout of autonomous vehicles. Each state has been left to fend for itself, a legal patchwork that’s allowing Tesla to push forward despite safety concerns.

More on Tesla’s robotaxis: Tesla’s Robotaxis Are a Complete Disaster

The post New Jersey Poised to Ban Self-Driving Tesla Robotaxis appeared first on Futurism.

Tesla has launched Tesla Home, a home energy management platform powered by an AI engine called Opticaster that it says makes “hundreds of decisions” a day about when to store and use electricity to lower your bill.

However, it’s not an entirely new product as Electrek has been reporting on Tesla’s Opticaster for 5 years.

Tesla is opening the doors of its Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg to outside startups through a new “Cell Giga Challenge,” inviting them to pilot technologies inside its live battery cell production line.

The program comes as Tesla ramps 4680 cell output at Grünheide toward a planned 18 GWh of annual capacity, one of the largest cell operations in Europe.

A scientist who worked on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot is now building a rival of his own — in Europe, not Silicon Valley.

Rémi Cadène, co-founder and CEO of Paris-based startup UMA, unveiled plans for a lightweight humanoid robot called Northstar and says the company is already talking to 50 potential customers.

The lovefest from Musk’s conservative fans completely overlooks the unscrupulous tactics behind his immense wealth

For 12 glorious days in June, Elon Musk experienced something nobody else in the history of humankind has ever experienced: trillionaire status.

Did all those zeros make Musk happy? Did the army of children he has sired love him more? Did he find inner peace? We’ll never know because Musk was dragged back to being a boring old billionaire last Wednesday, after shares in Tesla and SpaceX plunged amid a broader tech sell-off.