Head Coach Kyle Shanahan of the San Francisco 49ers | Image: Michael Zagaris / San Francisco 49ers / Getty Images
Four weeks ago, San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was involved in an accident near downtown Palo Alto. At the time Shanahan said only that the accident was his fault. But during a recent press conference he shared more details about the incident, including the fact that he had his Tesla's Autopilot engaged at the time. Shanahan was not passing the buck, however, saying it was his fault regardless of whether or not Autopilot was engaged.
"I've had Autopilot for nine years, so I'm pretty comfortable with it and, you know, who knows what happened when I turned around? Whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off? That's somethi …
Two firefighters were rushed to the hospital on Wednesday, after a Tesla parked in a family garage exploded.
According to local station KING5, the incident happened in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, after a massive fire spread from a family’s garage to the rest of their home.
The Tesla explosion set off what ultimately became a two-alarm fire, requiring emergency crews to battle back flames for hours. Thankfully, the two injured firefighters were discharged with non-life threatening injuries, and nobody else was hurt, though the single-family home was pretty much totaled.
The ultimate cause of the fire is still under investigation — whether the Tesla combusted on its own, setting off the blaze, or was the result of a fire which started elsewhere isn’t known.
Still, it’s fair to assume the explosion contributed to the severity of the fire, the latest example of an all-too-common situation plaguing Teslas and other electric vehicles.
Thanks to their massive lithium batteries, Teslas have an unfortunate habit of bursting into flames, often after being involved incollisions, but occasionally entirelyon theirown.
Regardless of what sparks the flames, battery fires are notoriously difficult to put out, requiring specialized hazmat units and thousands of gallons of water to end the battery’s combustion.
Tesla has officially acknowledged that the power conversion system (PCS) in pre-2026 Cybertrucks is defective, and it’s extending the warranty on those trucks to 8 years or 150,000 miles.
The reversal comes after months of owners paying up to $7,200 to replace a part Tesla now admits “does not meet our reliability standards.” The automaker sneakily tried to let the clear manufacturing defect pass warranties.
On today’s brain-addled episode of Quick Charge, President Trump says electric car drivers have a disease, Full Self Driving won’t stop earning Tesla drivers tickets, and Waymo’s CEO spends over forty minutes explaining why Tesla’s tech won’t ever beat a human driver.
Tesla and SpaceX have confirmed where they’ll build Terafab, the semiconductor megafactory Elon Musk first teased in March. It’s going to Grimes County, Texas, about an hour northwest of Houston.
The companies put the initial phase at roughly $16.8 billion and said the finished site will span more than 100 million square feet, which they’re calling the largest chip manufacturing facility on the planet.
A police department in Parker, Colorado, pulled over a Tesla going 64 mph in a 45 mph zone whose driver insisted they weren’t responsible, because the car was running “Full Self-Driving.”
Of course, Tesla will never take responsibility for that incident, but the frustrating part is that Tesla already has the solution and yet it refuses to implement it.
Tesla has started building its next-generation Megapack 3 grid battery, with the first units rolling off the line at the company’s new Megafactory in Brookshire, Texas.
The plant went from groundbreaking to production in 16 months and is designed to build 50 GWh of Megapack 3 a year. That’s the version Tesla says packs roughly 28% more energy into the same footprint as the Megapack it replaces.
Tesla is suing the Canadian province of Manitoba for cutting the automaker out of its electric vehicle rebate program, and the fight has now reached a courtroom.
The province is asking Manitoba’s Court of King’s Bench to throw out the challenge. Tesla says the ban has already cost its Canadian customers at least $560,000 in lost rebates.
SpaceX shares dropped on Wednesday after Elon Musk’s plans for blockbuster spending to position his AI and rocket company as a data center developer spooked investors.
SpaceX surpassed analysts’ expectations in Tuesday’s debut earnings report, posting quarterly revenues of $7.8 billion, well above analysts’ estimates of $6.82 billion and up 92 percent from a year earlier. It posted a net loss of about $541 million, better than estimates of $2.12 billion.
But shares in SpaceX fell 10 percent in early trading after it reported capital expenditure of almost $16 billion on AI, double the previous quarter and well above Wall Street’s expectations. It said spending would persist at current levels for at least two more quarters.
Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that “weak sensing” hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance.
He never said the word Tesla. But camera-only is Tesla’s entire bet, and this was a direct shot at it.
Tesla’s sales inside China fell 19% in the first half of 2026 compared to its peak in 2023, dropping to the lowest level in years, according to new data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).
At the same time, exports out of Giga Shanghai surged 127%. Tesla’s China plant is increasingly building cars to ship somewhere else.
A growing number of Tesla owners running the new Full Self-Driving v14 “Lite” build on Hardware 3 (HW3) vehicles are reporting Autopilot computer overheating alerts — and, in some cases, outright computer failures.
The reports have stacked up in the two weeks since Tesla pushed v14 Lite to wide release, and four owners have contacted Electrek directly about the same problem.
After a gunman opened fire at a Twin Falls, Idaho, In-N-Out with an attached Tesla Supercharger last week, EV owners flooded social media with the same suggestion: buy an EVject.
The breakaway charging connector lets you drive off while still plugged in. It sounds like an obvious fix for a horrifying scenario — but it’s a controversial device that doesn’t actually solve the problem, and it points to something Tesla and every other automaker should be building instead.
In a federal lawsuit reported by The Independent, Javier Medrano accused Tesla of turning its autonomous test fleet in Houston into 24/7 “rolling hazards” by “aggressively” scaling up operations.
The size of the fleet more than doubled to a size that Medrano claims was impossible to oversee on his own,. Despite consistently pleading higher-ups for more help, he alleges his warnings were ignored, and he was later fired.
“It almost feels like these big corporations can get away with anything, and people just kind of put their heads down and say, ‘Well, this is how it is,'” Medrano told The Independent. “And it breeds an environment where people don’t say, ‘This is not okay.'”
Medrano took over as the sole operational manager of Houston’s FSD test fleet eight months after joining the company in 2023. When he joined, the size of its fleet and human operators was just 15. But months later, Tesla increased it to 38 vehicle operators. These employees kept the cars running for 24 hours a day across three shifts, and Medrano, as remote fleet manager, oversaw them all.
This “dangerous 38:1 operator-to-manager ratio,” the suit argues, violated Tesla’s own “mandated 15:1 safety baseline.”
These operators, by the way, were part of Tesla’s controversial “Rodeo Team,” whose existence was first made public in reporting from Business Insider in 2024. The moniker is fitting: these drivers purposely got their autonomous cars into dangerous situations and only intervened at the last possible moment, providing Tesla valuable training data.
The lawsuit claims that in other cities with Rodeo Teams, Tesla had more than one safety lead. Having to oversee this sprawling fleet self-driving daredevils was wearing Medrano down to a nub. In one email to his boss, he confessed he was “trying not to lose my absolute mind, from not sleeping or eating correctly and doing everything I need to do to actually meet the expectations,” per the Independent. A month later, he begged for another safety lead and asked for a week off.
“This is officially my S.O.S signal,” he wrote.
Inevitably, all this foreshadowing came to a head. Just days after sending that message, one of the FSD vehicles was involved in a collision with another car. The test driver, following protocol, called Medrano after the accident, at the late hour of 2:05 AM.
But Medrano was so exhausted that he answered the phone call while “physically asleep,” according to the complaint, causing him to give erroneous advice to the operator. Following his orders, she remained at the scene of the accident, where she was allegedly approached by an impaired stranger.
Medrano told HR the next day he had “no recollection” of the phone call, per The Independent. He then echoed his complaints of “severe understaffing” he’d made to his boss.
The response he apparently got was baffling and callous. An HR rep allegedly told Medrano to set his phone on “Do Not Disturb” mode if he didn’t want to be bothered during active testing shifts. And the Autopilot director said he should’ve “delegated” better.
But, he told The Indepedent, “I didn’t have anybody to delegate to.”
“I was really trying to let them know how serious this was,” Medrano added. “But there was no sense of urgency.”
“It’s baffling to me how this went on so long,” he continued. “In other cities, they had multiple leads per shift. I was the only one who didn’t have that luxury… Our job is to make sure these cars are safe on the road.”
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