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When Fisker Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024, it left roughly 11,000 Ocean SUV owners holding the keys to vehicles that cost them anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 — and that were rapidly losing the software brains that made them work. No more over-the-air updates. No more connected services. No more warranty. The manufacturer was dead.

What happened next is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the electric vehicle industry. Instead of accepting that their cars would become rolling paperweights, Fisker Ocean owners organized, reverse-engineered their vehicles’ proprietary software, hacked into CAN bus networks, built open-source tools on GitHub, and effectively stood up a volunteer-run open-sourced car company from the ashes of Fisker.

Tesla has increased Model Y prices in the US by up to $1,000 across its Premium and Performance trims. It marks the first price increase on the Model Y in two years.

The move ends a prolonged period of aggressive price cuts that defined Tesla’s strategy throughout 2024 and 2025, signaling a potential shift in how the company views demand for the world’s best-selling electric vehicle.

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 updates to Tesla Robotaxi, Rivian R2 configurator going live, China taking over EU factories, and more.

Today’s episode is sponsored by GM Energy. If you want to experience more resilience and control over your home energy, the GM Energy Home System adds stationary battery power for always-ready backup energy for your home, and the GM Energy PowerBank takes in energy from the grid and stores it for when you need it most. Learn more at gmenergy.gm.com

Rivian has opened the online configurator for the R2, its critical mid-size electric SUV, giving reservation holders their first chance to spec out the vehicle ahead of deliveries. The Performance trim starts at $57,990 — just under Tesla’s Model Y Performance at $58,880.

The configurator launch comes ahead of Rivian’s previously communicated June timeline, signaling confidence in the R2 production ramp at its Normal, Illinois factory.

Tesla has quietly unredacted all 17 of its autonomous driving crash narratives filed with NHTSA, revealing for the first time what actually happened in each incident. The automaker had been the only ADS operator to fully redact its crash reports, marking every single narrative as “confidential business information.”

The data shows what we always suspected: most of Tesla’s crashes were not the fault of the autonomous system. But there are some genuinely concerning incidents buried in there.

Uber is publicly trashing its robotaxi partner Waymo while simultaneously investing more than $10 billion to build its own autonomous vehicle fleet with Rivian, Lucid, and Nuro.

The ride-hailing giant’s executives have spent the last few months taking direct shots at Waymo’s technology and deployment strategy — even as Waymo vehicles still operate on Uber’s platform in Austin and Atlanta.