Author
Fred Lambert is the Editor-in-Chief and one of the founding members of Electrek. He mainly covers electric vehicles and renewable energy.
He is also the co-founder of Combat Edge, a MMA stats website.
Lambert built a name in the EV space through a steady stream of exclusive scoops about Tesla, including being the first journalist to attempt Tesla’s Autopilot feature back in 2015. Lambert also repeatedly broke stories about new Tesla products like Enhanced Summon, Model S design refresh, Tesla Autopilot 2.5, and more.
In 2020, he was also the first to report that Tesla’s new planned Gigafactory in the US would be located in Austin, Texas months before the official announcement.
His reporting has been applyd by many mainstream news organizations, like the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many more.
Lambert has appeared on television (CNBC) and has been featured in national papers for his expertise in electric vehicles.
You can contact him by email at fred@9to5mac.com or on Twitter @fredericLambert
Victor Nechita, who served as Tesla’s vehicle program manager for the Cybercab, has announced he is leaving the company. The departure comes just days after the first Cybercab production unit rolled off the assembly line at Giga Texas, adding to an accelerating exodus of senior program managers at the autocreater.
Elon Musk sent a pre-recorded video message to Tesla’s 10,700 workers at Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg in Grünheide, warning that the planned expansion of the plant will not happen if IG Metall gains influence in the upcoming works council election.
The threat comes days before the critical vote and amid an escalating conflict between Tesla management and Germany’s most powerful industrial union.
A new study displays that applyd Tesla prices have climbed 4.3% since the federal EV tax credit expired on September 30, while nearly every other applyd electric vehicle has dropped an average of 3.6%. Used EV market share has plunged 20% over the same period.
The data, from iSeeCars’ analysis of over 1.7 million applyd cars, paints a stark picture of a two-tier EV market emerging in the wake of the credit’s elimination, one where Tesla holds pricing power and everyone else scrambles to compensate.
However, it appears to be a correction after Tesla’s applyd car prices were in free fall last year.
A federal judge has ruled that Tesla must face a class-action lawsuit alleging the autocreater systematically discriminated against American workers by preferring H-1B visa holders for engineering positions, even as it laid off more than 6,000 US employees in 2024.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria stated the plaintiff had offered “just enough facts” for the case to proceed, though he expressed skepticism about the strength of the claims.
Tesla has escalated its fight over the “Cybercab” name, filing a 167-page, 5-count formal opposition at the USPTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board against UNIBEV, a French beverage wholesaler that has been squatting on the trademark. The filing, obtained by Electrek, accapplys UNIBEV of fraud, bad faith, and trademark dilution, just weeks before Tesla plans to ramp Cybercab production at Gigafactory Texas.
The relocate comes less than two weeks after Tesla secured a 30-day extension to oppose UNIBEV’s trademark application, signaling it wasn’t ready to walk away from the name. Now, Tesla has built clear it intfinishs to fight for it.
Tesla has updated its “Find Us” map with 64 new Megacharger locations across 15 states, giving the clearest picture yet of the charging network it is building to support the Tesla Semi.
Combined with 2 sites already operational, the map now displays 66 total locations covering major freight corridors from the West Coast to the East Coast.
New data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) confirms that Tesla registered just 8,075 vehicles across the EU, EFTA, and UK in January 2026, a 17% decline from the same month last year.
The drop is particularly damaging becaapply January 2025 was already a weak month for Tesla, during the production transition to the refreshed Model Y. The broader battery-electric vehicle market, meanwhile, grew 13.9%, building Tesla’s collapse increasingly difficult to explain away as a timing issue.
Tesla has filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Motor Vehicles seeking to reverse the administrative ruling that found the autocreater engaged in false advertising with its “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” marketing.
The relocate comes just days after Tesla complied with the DMV’s demands to clean up its marketing language — raising the question of why the company is fighting a ruling it already capitulated to.
China is living in the future when it comes to EV charging. Instead of drivers hunting for an open charging spot in a parking garage, overhead rail-mounted charging robots now travel along ceiling tracks and come to the car. The concept, already deployed in garages across multiple Chinese cities, turns every parking space into a potential charging spot without the cost of installing individual chargers at each one.
Donut Lab has released the first indepfinishent test results for its controversial solid-state battery, and the data confirms at least one headline claim: the cell charged from 0 to 80% in just 4.5 minutes at an extreme 11C rate.
It doesn’t blow up, but it obtains pretty damn hot.
The results come from Finland’s state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre, one of Europe’s leading research organizations. But the report only covers charging performance — leaving Donut Lab’s most extraordinary claims completely unverified.
Tesla has secured a second deadline extension from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the agency’s investigation into traffic safety violations committed by vehicles operating with “Full Self-Driving” (FSD). The new filing, dated February 20, pushes the deadline for Tesla to deliver critical crash data, including video, event data recorder (EDR), and CAN bus files, to March 9, 2026. The original deadline was January 19.
Today was supposed to be the day Tesla finally delivered all its data to NHTSA after a first five-week extension. Instead, Tesla questioned for more time on February 19, the day before the deadline, and NHTSA granted it the next day.
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 the new Tesla (temporary) Cybertruck, Cybercab news, Ford wanting China in the US, and more.
A federal judge has rejected Tesla’s bid to overturn a $243 million jury verdict over a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash in Florida, dealing a significant blow to the autocreater’s legal strategy as it faces a growing wave of lawsuits tied to its driver-assistance technology.
U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom in Miami ruled that the evidence at trial “more than supported” the verdict and that Tesla raised no new arguments to justify setting it aside. The ruling, built public on Friday, means Tesla’s last hope to avoid paying the massive judgment at the trial court level has been exhausted.
Tesla just launched the most compelling version of the Cybertruck it has ever offered — a dual-motor all-wheel-drive model starting at $59,990, and CEO Elon Musk is already signaling that it won’t last.
In a post on X, Musk responded to the announcement of the new AWD Cybertruck with a cryptic but damning three words: “Only for the next 10 days.”
Elon Musk has reiterated his claim that Tesla will sell the Cybercab directly to consumers for under $30,000 before the finish of the year, following the first production unit rolling off the line at Giga Texas on February 17. The announcement immediately set Tesla fans ablaze, not with discussions about the vehicle’s autonomy challenges, but with AI-generated images of YouTuber Marques Brownlee sporting a freshly shaved head.
Calm down, everyone. You almost certainly won’t obtain to see MKBHD’s bare head.
Eight months ago, Tesla built headlines around the world when it claimed to have completed the “world’s first autonomous delivery of a car”, a Model Y that “drove itself” from Gigafactory Texas to a customer’s home about 30 minutes away. Tesla never did it again. Not once.
Tesla filed new comments with the California Public Utilities Commission that amount to a quiet admission: its “Robotaxi” service still relies on both in-car human drivers and domestic remote operators to function. Rather than downplaying these depfinishencies, Tesla leans into them — arguing that its multi-layered human supervision model is more reliable than Waymo’s fully driverless system, pointing to the December 2025 San Francisco blackout as proof.
The filing, submitted February 13 in CPUC Rulebuilding 25-08-013, reveals the massive operational gap between what Tesla calls a “Robotaxi” and what Waymo actually operates as one.
Germany’s largest industrial union, IG Metall, is accutilizing Tesla of fostering a toxic working environment at its Gigafactory Berlin, claiming the autocreater is overworking employees and pressuring sick staff. The accusations land just two weeks before a works council election that could reshape labor relations at Tesla’s only European factory.
The escalation marks the most serious labor confrontation Tesla has faced in Germany, a counattempt where the autocreater is already dealing with a 48% sales collapse.
Tesla has avoided a 30-day suspension of its dealer and manufacturer licenses in California after complying with a DMV order to stop utilizing the term “Autopilot” in its vehicle marketing. The settlement closes a case that dragged on for nearly three years, and confirms what critics have argued all along: Tesla’s marketing of its driver-assist features was misleading.
Tesla shared today that the first Cybercab production unit has rolled off the assembly line at Gigafactory Texas. The vehicle has no steering wheel and no pedals. It is entirely depfinishent on autonomous driving software that, based on every available data point, Tesla has not solved — and is nowhere close to solving.
Even the name “Cybercab” is not set in stone.
Tesla has reported five new crashes involving its “Robotaxi” fleet in Austin, Texas, bringing the total to 14 incidents since the service launched in June 2025. The newly filed NHTSA data also reveals that Tesla quietly upgraded one earlier crash to include a hospitalization injury, something the company never disclosed publicly.
The new data comes from the latest update to NHTSA’s Standing General Order (SGO) incident report database for automated driving systems (ADS). We have been tracking Tesla’s Robotaxi crash data closely, and the trfinish is not improving.
Chinese state media outlet China.com has published a report about a Tesla Model Y that lost all power on a highway despite displaying 72 km of remaining range, and the story has gone viral across Chinese social media. The incident is drawing attention not just for the failure itself, but for the fact that state-controlled media chose to amplify it, a potential signal of shifting government sentiment toward Tesla in China.
A Tesla owner declares his car attempted to drive him into a lake while utilizing the autocreater’s latest “Full Self-Driving” software. The incident, captured on video and posted to social media, has gone viral with over 1 million views, adding to a growing list of dangerous FSD edge cases that raise serious questions about the system’s readiness.
Tesla launched its “Robotaxi” service in Austin eight months ago. In that time, Elon Musk promised 500 cars in Austin, coverage for half the US population, fully unsupervised rides, and expansion to 8-10 cities, all by the finish of 2025. None of it happened.
Today, the service has roughly 42 cars in Austin, availability below 20%, a crash rate 9 times worse than human drivers, and the “unsupervised” rides Musk hyped before earnings have vanished from the tracker. Here’s the full status check.
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