A 2021 Tesla Model Y left an Alabama highway, hit two trees, and caught fire, killing its driver, 29-year-old Kayleigh Page. Her 7-month-old daughter was pulled from the burning car by a stranger who saw it happen.
Troopers reported it as a single-vehicle wreck. What they didn’t say, and likely didn’t know, is that Tesla’s own data shows the car’s driver-assist system was engaged. This is part of an ongoing Electrek investigation matching reported crashes to Tesla’s redacted NHTSA data.
An Amazon Prime Air cargo jet ripped right past the landing zone at the Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, struggling to stop itself in time before overrunning the runway and crashing into a cleaning crew and a nearby SUV.
It was a tragic incident, killing five innocent people.
The Boeing 767-300 also barreled right through a chain-link fence that was protecting a highly unusual lot of vehicles: photographs of the scene show the dented nose of the airliner just a few dozen feet away from a kennel of parked Tesla Cybercabs.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has banked the future success of his EV maker on the gold-colored self-driving vehicles, which are too small to fit more than two passengers and lack both steering wheels or pedals. Their sudden appearance in a story about a deadly airliner disaster had the billionaire taken aback. However, instead of offering his condolences after the tragedy, Musk simply tweeted the word “Weird” in response.
The peculiar cameo also led to plenty of questions over Tesla’s plans to roll out the cars outside of Austin. Just last week, the Cybercabs were deployed for the first time in the Texas city, but the company has yet to announce any imminent launches in Miami.
Regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration watched closely following last week’s deployment, which comes just shy of two years after Tesla first showed off its Cybercab. As Bloomberg notes, the light on details event was “uncharacteristically low-key,” offering no livestream or media coverage.
The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”
Indeed, regulatory approval is hazy for vehicles without any traditional driver controls, a topic that’s especially pertinent to Tesla. Musk has bet the company’s entire future on the success of its Cybercabs and its humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus.
With neither showing any signs of a significant public rollout any time soon, Wall Street is bound to keep asking some tough questions.
A Tesla Cybercab rider found something in the robotaxi: a manual driving mode. When he got in, the touchscreen was showing a virtual joystick to drive the car by hand.
Tesla built the Cybercab with no steering wheel and no pedals. But it apparently still has a way to drive it manually, and you do it by dragging a finger across a screen.
XPeng has switched on what it calls the world’s first automated production line for advanced humanoid robots, and its IRON robot walked off that line under its own power. The Chinese automaker says the line runs with more than 80% of its core processes automated.
It’s the clearest signal yet that IRON is headed for real manufacturing and not just stage demos. XPeng is targeting mass production by the end of 2026.
A Tesla Model 3 ran a stop sign in Buena Vista Township, New Jersey, and hit a Honda Civic turning left through the intersection. The Civic’s driver, 82-year-old Stephen Field, was killed.
Police reported it as a car that failed to stop. What no one reported is that Tesla’s own data says the car’s driver-assist system was engaged. This is part of an ongoing Electrek investigation matching reported crashes to Tesla’s redacted NHTSA data.
Tesla is now asking businesses whether they’d like to buy and operate their own fleets of Cybercab robotaxis on its network. It’s the same pitch Elon Musk has been making since 2019: buy the cars, put them to work, and earn money while you sleep.
There’s one problem with it. And it never happened, and you shouldn’t fall for it now. If running a fleet of Cybercabs were actually profitable, Tesla wouldn’t sell you a single one.
For the last few weeks, we’ve been running a sidebar survey about whether our Electrek readers believed the new Cybercab would be a transformative new technology, or – not. After nearly 2,700 responses, here’s what you told us.
Tesla is rolling out a new version of its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software that can take control of your car to avoid a crash, even when you’re driving manually.
The automaker announced the feature, part of FSD Supervised v14.3.9, in a post from its AI team early Friday.
Tesla’s Cybercab is already under federal investigation. NHTSA opened an audit into how Tesla certified the vehicle the same day the company started putting passengers in it in Austin.
The probe targets the exact thing that makes the Cybercab unusual: it has no steering wheel, no pedals, and no mirrors, and Tesla certified it as road-legal anyway.
Xiaomi Auto confirmed it will start selling electric vehicles in Europe, including Germany, in 2027, and it’s already lining up the dealers to sell them.
At IFA Berlin today, the Chinese automaker signed memoranda of understanding with eight of Germany’s largest dealer groups. They’re its first retail partners on the continent.
A Tesla Model X struck and killed a motorcyclist at an intersection in Moraine last year and the crash went mostly unnoticed.
But Tesla’s own report to federal regulators says the vehicle was a Model X with its driver-assist system, Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (Tesla hides which one) engaged. This is part of an ongoing Electrek investigation matching reported crashes to Tesla’s redacted NHTSA data — and it’s the clearest example yet of how completely these crashes can vanish from the public record.
A Tesla running one of its self-driving modes was rear-ended after stopping in the middle of a Arizona highway, Electrek reports, with the driver found dead at the scene. Grimly, it’s not the first accident of its kind.
The crash occurred on October 31, 2025. According to local reports at the time, the 2020 Tesla Model 3 was struck by an F-350 pickup around 3 AM on the eastbound Loop 202 in Mesa, Arizona. None of the contemporaneous reports made note of whether the Tesla had one of its driver-assist systems engaged.
Electrek, however, managed to match the collision to a redacted crash report that Tesla provided in its filings to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These were shared under a Standing General Order that requires automakers to report crashes involving a driver-assist system that’s considered to have an SAE Level 2 of automation or higher, meaning that it can partially drive itself under the right conditions and with constant supervision.
The report states that an automated driving system — either Autopilot or Full Self-Driving — was “verified engaged” during the accident. The vehicle’s “pre-crash movement” is listed as “stopped – 0 mph,” indicating it stopped in the middle of the road. None of these details were shared publicly at the time of the accident.
Electrek says that this is the second time that a Tesla Model 3 with a driver-assist system engaged apparently stopped in a highway before a crash that killed its driver; it also happened in Florida, just weeks before the second one.
What happened is unclear. Tesla’s self-driving software has a well-known “phantom braking” problem that causes the cars to brake unexpectedly, but this is typically to slow the vehicle down, not stop it completely. Going from highway speeds to a grinding halt would be an extraordinary, if not unprecedented, example. It’s also possible that the driver fell asleep behind the wheel or experienced some kind of medical episode that rendered them unable to respond.
The upshot is that we’re more or less being kept in the dark. These details, and whether the car was running the now-obsolete Autopilot or its more advanced successor FSD is impossible to know, because Tesla censored that section of the crash report. It has long redacted crucial information in these reportsreports under the guise of protecting “confidential business information,” a practice that is legal but rarely used to the extent that Tesla does. It has gotten in trouble with regulators for how it reports crashes, though. Last year, the NHTSA launched an investigation into Tesla for repeatedly failing to report crashes in time.
Electric cars outsold petrol cars in Australia for the first time in August. Battery-electric vehicles hit 27,078 sales, or 24.9% of the new-car market, ahead of both petrol (25,824) and diesel (23,608).
The Tesla Model Y topped every model on sale. But look past it, and Australia’s EV record is almost entirely a Chinese one.
Tesla has settled a wrongful death lawsuit over a 2023 crash in which a Model S on Autopilot slammed into a parked fire truck, killing the driver and seriously injuring his brother.
The confidential settlement, filed in California federal court, lets Tesla avoid a jury trial that would have put Elon Musk’s own Autopilot claims in front of jurors.
Tesla’s abrupt decision to kill its Solar Roof has left the third-party contractors who sold and installed the product absorbing the fallout — including some who told Electrek they sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into the program and now have little to show for it.
Tesla stopped supplying the solar tiles in August, notifying its network of certified installers that it would ship only conventional solar panels going forward.
Cameras in airline seatback screens and increasingly sophisticated driver-monitoring systems spark a debate over safety, privacy, data access, and surveillance. The MacVoices Live! panel examines EU vehicle requirements, Tesla interior cameras, dash cams, accident evidence, connected devices, and whether consumers receive enough disclosure and control over technologies designed to watch them. Panel members include: Chuck […]
Rivian’s rejection of CarPlay and physical buttons in favor of voice and AI control sees to question safety, convenience, data control, and long-term car software support. Chuck Joiner, David Ginsburg, Jeff Gamet, Guy Serle, Web Bixby, Eric Bolden, Marty Jencius, and Jim Rea question whether Rivian has other motives, and then dive into Tesla updates, AI voice recreation of Stan Lee, Spider-Man ticket promotions, Dashlane concerns, and Andy Ihnatko’s new site.
At this point, it’s a pretty well known fact that electric vehicles — and, at least in the popular imagination, Teslas especially — have a nagging habit of erupting into flames.
One Tesla owner in Maine evidently has that concern hovering in the back of their mind every time they leave the driveway.
While driving around the town of Tremont in a sleek red Model S, an unnamed driver hit an object on the road which punctured the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery, local station WABI5 reported. As most EV drivers are hopefully aware, any kind of damage to a car’s battery can easily spark a fire fueled by thermal runaway, resulting in a uniquely dangerous inferno that can be difficult to put out.
Luckily, this driver kept their head, driving straight to the Tremont fire station where the high-voltage battery immediately burst into flames, Bangor Daily News reported.
With help from the nearby Southwest Harbor Fire Department, the crew of the Tremont Volunteer Fire Department sprang into action, shutting down the road and dousing the Tesla using an arsenal of firehoses.
Based on photos of the incident, it seems the Tesla was totaled, but the driver is said to be doing alright.
The Tremont fire comes just days after an exploding Tesla in Seattle sent two firefighters to the hospital. That particular EV was parked inside an attached garage at the time, resulting in a two-alarm housefire that displaced an unfortunate family.
All told, if you drive an EV, it’s probably smart to have the address of the nearest fire department drilled into your head — especially if it’s a Tesla.
On today’s super simple episode of Quick Charge, we talk about GM’s new Energy Pass, SpaceX’s big bet on fossil fuels, and Tesla’s long-promised Roadster set to arrive “real soon.” Again. For what is nearly the tenth year in a row.
Tesla’s chief designer says the new Roadster is coming “very soon.” We are talking about the same car Tesla revealed in 2017 and promised to build by 2020.
Franz von Holzhausen said it on the latest episode of Jay Leno’s Garage. When Leno pressed him on it, he doubled down: “very soon.” Leno’s deadpan reply, “10 years… just shy of 10 years,” said the rest.
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