The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into roughly 1.2 million Tesla vehicles after receiving 156 complaints of a front suspension component detaching while driving.
The probe covers 2018-2020 Model 3 and 2021-2023 Model Y vehicles, and it centers on the front lower lateral link separating from the car.
Tesla is looking at cutting loose its China business to clear a path toward a merger with SpaceX, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.
If true, it would be a massive deal in the auto industry. Tesla’s Shanghai factory builds more than half of all Tesla vehicles, so any separation would carve out the single biggest piece of Tesla’s car operation.
Update: Elon Musk has denied the WSJ report, but as usual, that should be taken with a grain of salt.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent 2026 turning his X feed into a problem no investor relations team can fix. His posts have escalated from trolling into open white nationalism, and this week his AI company sued the state of Minnesota to block a law targeting nonconsensual sexual deepfakes.
The board of a public company would have fired the CEO for just a fraction of the stuff Musk is posting these days. However, Tesla is not a normal company. Shareholders have given full control to Musk and now, they have to live with it.
Tesla has built its 10 millionth vehicle, the company announced this week. Ten million all-electric cars is a real milestone, and no other automaker has done it.
But it’s arriving later than Tesla once promised, and the company is now building well under the capacity it already has.
Ferrari has already sold every Luce it plans to build in 2026. The automaker’s first electric car hit its full-year sales target — just under 500 units — in less than two months, the Financial Times reported.
That’s despite a brutal wave of design criticism and a €550,000 (~$640,000) starting price that lands the EV near the top of Ferrari’s lineup.
A former Tesla manager who ran the company’s “Full Self-Driving” test fleet in Houston says the operation was so understaffed that its cars became “rolling hazards on public streets,” according to a lawsuit.
The manager, Javier Medrano, filed the wrongful-termination complaint in Houston federal court, and its contents were reported this week. He oversaw the fleet before Tesla launched its driverless “Robotaxi” in the city.
Tesla has signed a long-term deal to buy 90% of the output of Project Sterling, a big solar and battery plant going up in Arizona.
The project pairs 509 MW of solar with a 360 MW battery, and it’s being built by ContourGlobal, the power producer owned by private equity firm KKR. It’s expected online in 2028.
Tesla has signed a long-term power purchase agreement to buy the entire output of a 140-MWac solar farm being built in northeast Texas.
The plant, called Lumen Farm, is being developed by Zelestra, an EQT-backed renewable developer. Construction is expected to start in 2027, with the farm going online in 2029.
Tesla is asking a federal judge for emergency access to a supplier’s plant in Troy, Texas, so it can haul out the tooling it needs to keep building the Cybertruck.
The supplier, Angstrom Automotive Group, is closing the plant and won’t let Tesla in. Tesla says that without those dies, several thousand Cybertrucks already committed to customers don’t get built.
Out of Spec Reviews put a Rivian R2 Performance and a Tesla Model Y Performance on the same roads on the same afternoon. The R2 used 18% to 26% more energy at every single speed they tested.
That’s awkward, because the two SUVs carry identical EPA efficiency ratings, and Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe has been telling media the R2 matches the Model Y.
Tesla has confidentially settled with three of the five named plaintiffs in the racism lawsuit that has been hanging over its Fremont factory since 2017.
That doesn’t end much. Up to 580 Black workers are still suing over conditions at the same plant, and California’s civil rights agency is taking its own case to a jury.
Any claims related to “free energy” and “zero-point energy” developed by Nikola Tesla are a misconception of his actual work on "radiant" and "cosmic" energy. Tesla's patents cannot be retroactively linked to modern concepts of quantum physics which largely developed after his death.
Elon Musk says Tesla plans to “open source” the Model S and Model X, and he’s pointing to the original Roadster as the template.
The problem is Tesla’s Roadster release amounted to eight files on GitHub plus five document packages behind a login, with no open-source license attached to any of it.
Tesla’s latest earnings report was very bad news for the company. In the second quarter, it made $1.1 billion in net profit, less than the $1.2 billion it reported a year earlier. Vehicle sales were up, but profits remain about a quarter billion short of expectations, and the automaker’s cash flow is negative for the first time in over two years.
But the real blow has been the slow rollout of its Robotaxi service. Elon Musk has staked his automaker’s future on fully autonomous vehicles, promising investors it would help push Tesla’s valuation to an eyebrow-raising $30 trillion — approximately the gross domestic product of the United States, for perspective.
And importantly, he promised to get this done quickly. Before launching Tesla’s first Robotaxi service in Austin last summer, Musk estimated that over 1,000 of the self-driving cabs would be roaming the streets “within a few months.”
Now, a year later, Tesla doesn’t even have a hundred Robotaxis in operation. And its efforts seem to actually be regressing. According to a new chart the company released Wednesday, the Robotaxi network racked up fewer miles from paying customers in the second quarter than it did in the first.
The chart, which may be the most dismal single aspect of the entire earnings cycle, misleadingly displays this data as cumulative miles to make it appear like the Robotaxi service is steadily growing.
But TechCrunch broke it down, finding that in the first quarter, Tesla’s driverless cabs carrying paying passengers drove around 1.1 million miles, but fell to just 700,000 miles in the second — cratering by over a third.
The misleading chart isn’t the only way Tesla has tried to dress up its stalling efforts. A day before releasing the earnings report, it announced that it was expanding to two more cities in Florida, Tampa and Orlando — without sharing the size of those fleets, Electrek noted.
It should tell you something that Tesla has gone to great lengths to keep the size of its operation under wraps. In June, Bloomberg reported that its fleet size across all cities was just 59 robotaxis. Only third of those are fully unsupervised; the other vehicles have a human safety monitor sitting in the front seats.
It’s also tried to play up its seemingly spotless safety record. Before the report, the official Tesla account on X bragged that there were “0 notable incidents across over 380,000 miles traveled by Robotaxi.”
But Tesla doesn’t define what a “notable incident” is. Its vehicles have regularly been caught driving erratically and at times dangerously. Only a day after launching in Tampa, one of its Robotaxis was spotted blundering the wrong way down a one way street in the city.
Musk has frequently emphasized that he’s “paranoid about safety” to explain why progress has moved slowly, while at the same time promising to scale things up rapidly. In January he projected that the Robotaxis would cover half the US population by the end of the year.
But investors are running out of patience. Tesla shares plunged by 15 percent on Thursday after the earnings were released, in part due to frustration over the Robotaxis’ laggard progress, and another three percent on Friday.
“More is needed to show that Tesla’s capabilities are inflecting” on robotaxis, Barclays analysts said in a note per Reuters, noting that Tesla didn’t provide new expansion targets and “hasn’t met previously laid out targets.”
Tesla has closed the mysterious ~$2 billion acquisition of an AI hardware company that it first hinted at in April — and it did so, again, without naming the target or issuing a press release.
The deal was confirmed in a single passage buried in Tesla’s Q2 2026 10-Q filing, which for the first time attached a final price: $1.95 billion, paid entirely in Tesla stock and equity awards.
For all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s grandiose claims that the pickup would be an “apocalypse-proof” tank capable of winning its driver style points wherever they go, it’s instead earned a reputation for being incredibly unreliable and just about the opposite of “easy on the eyes” — probably because you can imagine the numerous sharp edges that define its low-poly design poking you in them as soon as you see it.
Most unforgivable in the capitalist society Musk champions, it hasn’t sold well. He once estimated that Tesla would sell up to 500,000 Cybertrucks annually, but it hasn’t even come close to that number in the nearly three years since it first started shipping, and at this point it probably won’t in its entire lifetime.
So, yes. It’s a flop. But could it also be the greatest flop in American automotive history?
A new piece from Bloomberg makes the case, comparing the Tesla vehicle to the misfortunes of Ford’s Edsel, which was first introduced in 1957 and discontinued just two years later. After spending years building up hype for the car, Ford predicted selling 200,000 units in its first year, but ended up selling less than a third of that.
That’s comparable to expectations versus reality of the Cybertruck. In fact, the Cybertruck is actually doing worse in key ways. Tesla’s annual sales target was 250,000 units, but it didn’t even crack 40,000 sales in its first year. And like the Edsel, it’s sold less with each successive year, with barely 7,100 registered in the US in 2026 so far, according to S&P Global Mobility data — despite Musk juicing those figures by selling Cybertrucks to his own companies.
And like the Cybertruck, the Edsel’s unusual design was also widely mocked. The most notorious feature was its vertical grille, which many jokesters compared to a toilet seat. A review in Time magazine sealed its fate by observing that it looked like “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon.”
“For most people it was just downright ugly,” Don Sherman, a journalist and auto historian, told Bloomberg.
The exterior wasn’t the only weird — and doomed — thing about the Edsel. In it, Ford debuted a new “Teletouch” push-button shift placed in the center of the steering wheel — yep, right where most cars have a horn button. It confused drivers and frequently malfunctioned.
(And spiritually, it’s hard to ignore, the Teletouch evokes Tesla’s insistence on hiding features that traditionally have physical buttons in a central touch screen.)
The Edsel is generally cited as the American automotive industry’s biggest disaster. But the projected annual sales target compared to actual sales is actually worse for the Cybertruck. It may be time to put a new car on this ignominious throne.
But will Tesla discontinue the Cybertruck the same way Ford dropped the Edsel? Maybe not. The Cybertruck is a point of pride for Musk and has become synonymous with his vision. Garrett Nelson, an equity analyst at CFRA Research, thinks it’s more likely the truck will “fade away.”
“It’s possible that they try to do some sort of redesign, or come up with a different variant to try to boost sales,” Nelson told Bloomberg, “but we think that would really be a futile effort.”
NHTSA has denied a petition asking it to open a defect investigation into the hidden manual door releases on the Tesla Model 3. But in the same decision, the agency agreed to start writing new door-safety rules for the entire auto industry.
The denial, published today, covers 179,031 model year 2022 Model 3 vehicles. NHTSA said it found exactly one complaint matching the petition’s allegation — and it came from the same owner who filed it.
In interview, billionaire says instead of running ‘Doge’ he should’ve ‘worked on my companies’ and shares extreme predictions
Elon Musk has admitted he became too consumed by politics during his volatile alliance with Donald Trump and his brief appointment as the president’s financial axman, running the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).
The world’s richest person, and briefly its first trillionaire after his SpaceX company floated on the New York stock exchange in June, made the confession in a wide-ranging interview with the Economist published on Thursday. He shared his positions on subjects from foreign wars to AI, and made a number of eye-opening predictions for the future.
Login
