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.”

More on Tesla: It’s Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History

The post This May Be the Most Damning Single Fact in Tesla’s Quarterly Earnings Report appeared first on Futurism.

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.

The Cybertruck is a flop. 

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.”

More on Tesla: Tesla Stock in Freefall After Disastrous Earnings Report

The post It’s Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History appeared first on Futurism.

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.

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© Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

© Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

© Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Shares of Elon Musk’s embattled carmaker Tesla slid over 13 percent Thursday morning after posting dismal second quarter results the night before.

The stock is hovering at around $324 at the time of writing, down over 15 percent over the last five days and about 28 percent year to date.

The company missed Wall Street expectations, despite its core automotive segment generating just over $20 billion in revenue, up 23 percent from a year ago. However, the company’s gross profits dropped as operating expenses climbed far quicker than revenue, in large part thanks to AI-related capital expenses and other research and development — an intimately familiar refrain for the tech world in 2026.

In other words, investors are growing increasingly wary of Musk’s reinvention of his car business. The almost-trillionaire is trying to shift the company’s focus from selling cars to robotaxis, a humanoid robot called Optimus, and AI — a series of major undertakings that’re clearly weighing it down financially after multiple quarters of major losses.

Worse yet, Tesla’s woes are clearly having knock-on effects on his rocket company as well. SpaceX’s stock has had a bruising month since hitting an all-time high after going public in mid-June. An aborted Starship test launch and Musk’s dubious plan for orbital data centers have investors betting against the company in incredible numbers.

During Wednesday’s earnings call, the company claimed that production of its Optimus humanoid robot remains on track, but didn’t elaborate beyond promising that production is starting “soon.”

“This is going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we’ve ever made at Tesla, because everything on the robot is new,” Musk said.

Tesla’s robotaxi service is also being rolled out to six major metropolitan areas across the country, but continues to lag far behind its key competitor, Alphabet’s Waymo.

Despite slightly more optimistic vehicle sales numbers, the company continues to burn through billions of dollars to keep all of those new plates spinning.

The elephant in the room during this week’s call was the long-rumored possibility of Musk merging Tesla and SpaceX — a doubling down on his portfolio that could set up some of the most unbelievable financial drama in economic history.

The mercurial entrepreneur didn’t rule out the possibility, saying that “we can’t talk about combining companies on an earnings call.”

“It’s got to be done with the appropriate process,” he added.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Says His Goal Is for SpaceX to Be Worth More Than the Entire Earth

The post Tesla Stock in Freefall After Disastrous Earnings Report appeared first on Futurism.

Tesla stock is down more than 12% today, wiping out over $140 billion in market value, after the automaker’s Q2 2026 earnings missed on profit and free cash flow turned negative.

The slide got worse during the earnings call, when Elon Musk repeated the same robotaxi and Optimus promises he’s been making for years.

A Tesla solar customer went to pull up their lease agreement in their Tesla account this month and found something other than a contract waiting for them: the Book of Enoch, an ancient apocalyptic text about fallen angels.

Not a scanned copy of their agreement. Not an error page. The full text of a roughly 2,000-year-old religious book, sitting exactly where their legally binding solar lease was supposed to be. Electrek confirmed it.

Elon Musk was asked directly on Tesla’s Q2 2026 earnings call whether the company still plans to upgrade Hardware 3 (HW3) cars so they can run its latest “Full Self-Driving” software. His answer made one thing clear: Tesla still has no concrete plan.

Instead of committing to a fix, Musk floated a grab-bag of options and timelines — none of them firm — for the millions of vehicles Tesla sold with the promise that they had “all the hardware necessary” for self-driving.

Elon Musk hinted at a merger between Tesla and SpaceX on Tesla’s Q2 2026 earnings call, pointing to “more and more overlap” between the two companies he controls.

He stopped short of confirming anything, deferring to Tesla’s general counsel and “the appropriate process” — but the exchange is the closest Musk has come to addressing the merger speculation directly.

Tesla told shareholders this week that its Robotaxi service is expanding. The company’s own chart proves it isn’t.

In its Q2 2026 update, Tesla leaned on a cumulative “paid Robotaxi miles” chart climbing past 2.4 million miles as its headline proof of momentum. But break that curve into quarters and the growth flatlines: Robotaxi added roughly 900,000 paid miles in Q2 2026, the same as it did in Q1.

Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the second quarter (Q2) 2026 after market close today. We are 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.

France’s Transport Minister, Philippe Tabarot, says the country won’t authorize Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (Supervised) “as it currently stands,” pointing to two safety problems: the system lets drivers speed, and it doesn’t keep them attentive enough in cities.

But this isn’t France slamming the door on Tesla. It’s France refusing to rubber-stamp the Netherlands’ national approval and holding out for a proper EU-wide sign-off.

Tesla reported 207 crashes involving its driver-assist systems in a single month — the most it has ever logged. The figure comes from Tesla’s own crash reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

The record month lands as Tesla pushes Full Self-Driving harder than ever, and as the company continues to redact nearly every detail of what actually happened in these crashes.

NHTSA is now demanding a Tesla internal document titled “Radar Saves Us” as part of its investigation into “Full Self-Driving” crashes in low-visibility conditions.

The request is buried in a new 24-part information demand sent to Tesla on July 2, and it points the probe straight at the decision that started all of this: Tesla removing radar from its cars.

Tesla reports its second-quarter 2026 financial results tomorrow, July 22, after the market closes, with the earnings call to follow at 5:30 p.m. ET.

The setup is different this time. Tesla just posted its best-ever second quarter on deliveries, so now Wall Street wants to know whether all those cars actually made money.

Tesla started rolling out its 2026 Summer Update, and the automaker published the full release notes on X.

The headline additions: Grok can finally control more of the car, Caraoke now keeps score, navigation learns your routine, and several features move to the mobile app. Here’s every item in the release notes, with some context on each.

Tesla switched on its “Robotaxi” service in Tampa and Orlando on Monday, adding two Florida cities to a driverless network that still runs on a couple dozen cars. The company’s @robotaxi account announced it in a four-word post: “Robotaxi now in Tampa & Orlando!”

The timing isn’t subtle. Tesla reports second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, and Robotaxi is the story Elon Musk keeps selling to investors. Two new city names the day before make for a nice slide. The fleet behind them tells a different story.

Tesla and Starlink say SpaceX’s satellite internet is now “directly integrated” into the Cybercab, Tesla’s dedicated robotaxi.

The reveal came through a pair of posts on X on Monday, with a cutaway diagram showing a Starlink antenna sitting in the vehicle’s roof. Neither company explained why a car that drives itself on its own computer needs internet from space.