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 Tesla shareholders potentially starting to wake up, Xpeng targeting the European market, VW going cheaper with its EVs, and more.

Tesla opened two new markets in less than 24 hours, launching in Latvia and Uruguay in back-to-back announcements this week.

The dual entry completes Tesla’s expansion across all three Baltic states and gives the automaker its third market in South America — two very different markets that show how the company is chasing growth wherever it can find it.

Tesla fans have spent years begging the company to build an e-bike. Tesla just launched a bike — and it has no motor, no pedals, and it’s for toddlers.

The new “Balance Bike for Kids” sells for $225 on Tesla’s online shop, and it’s aimed at children aged 2 to 5.

Tesla shareholders have flooded the company’s Q2 2026 earnings Q&A portal with questions, and the most-upvoted ones tell a bleak story: retail investors are now demanding that Elon Musk explain why the company keeps missing its own short-term goals.

The tone has shifted from asking about Tesla’s grand vision to asking why almost none of it is showing up on schedule — on robotaxi, “Full Self-Driving,” and Optimus.

Xpeng launched its new L03 electric SUV-coupe in Europe this week with a starting price of €34,990 — undercutting the Tesla Model Y by roughly €3,400 in Germany and by around $10,000 in Norway.

The pricing puts a well-equipped 4.65-meter electric SUV directly under Tesla’s best-seller in its highest-volume segment, and deliveries start in the fourth quarter.

Miami-based startup Chip Motors has unveiled Chip, an electric “life utility vehicle” that starts at $15,000 and tops out at 25 mph.

The boxy, open-air four-seater is a low-speed vehicle aimed at short daily trips, and it lands in one of the fastest-growing corners of the EV market.

XPeng used the global launch of its new L03 in Munich to announce that the electric SUV coupe is the first vehicle from any Asia-Pacific automaker to ship with Google Maps’ Auto SDK built in.

The integration replaces XPeng’s overseas navigation stack with Google Maps data and, more importantly, feeds map data into its NGP and XPILOT ASSIST driver-assistance systems outside China.

CATL has signed a memorandum of understanding with Dutch energy company Alfen to deploy 5 GWh of its Tener Sodium energy storage systems across Europe, one of the largest sodium-ion commitments the region has seen.

The batteries are rated for 15,000 cycles and a 25-to-30-year service life — the pitch that sodium-ion’s longevity, not its energy density, is what wins grid storage.

Lamborghini has doubled down on backing away from electric vehicles. A second executive now confirms the Lanzador will launch as a plug-in hybrid rather than an EV, and that the brand’s first fully electric car won’t arrive until after 2030.

The reason, according to the company, is that its customers “were not willing to buy an electric car” and that the “technology is not mature enough.”

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.

GMC is marking 25 years of the Hummer nameplate with the Hummer EV ICON | 25, a limited-run edition of its all-electric supertruck that revives the yellow paint of the original H2.

The tribute arrives at an awkward moment: Hummer EV sales fell nearly 55% in the first half of 2026 as demand for pricey electric trucks cooled.

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.

Lucid (LCID) stock was hit with multiple volatility halts and crashed more than 40% on Tuesday after a report claimed the EV maker was weighing Chapter 11 bankruptcy or going private.

Lucid quickly denied the report, calling the speculation “completely false” and pointing to its cash position as evidence it can keep operating well into next year.

Pebble has answered its most common customer question — what’s the smallest vehicle that can tow the Flow electric travel trailer — with a MINI Cooper-sized electric pickup.

The company posted photos of TELO’s MT1 electric truck pulling its full-size, 5,800-lb Flow trailer, a pairing made possible by the Flow’s own active propulsion system.

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.

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.

A Bengaluru startup called Vimag Labs just secured its fifth Indian patent for an electric motor that runs without any rare-earth magnets, using software and power electronics to generate its magnetic field instead.

It’s a small, $5-million company taking a swing at a problem that has stumped Tesla, GM, and every major automaker for years: how to build a competitive EV motor that doesn’t depend on China.