tesla

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.

Tesla fans have spent years begging the company to build an e-bike. Tesla just launched a bike — and it has no motor, no pedals, and it’s for toddlers.

The new “Balance Bike for Kids” sells for $225 on Tesla’s online shop, and it’s aimed at children aged 2 to 5.

A New Jersey dealer is trying to flip a barely-driven Tesla Model S Signature for $259,995 — roughly $100,000 more than what Tesla charged buyers for the collector’s edition.

The car carries VIN #71 and just 297 miles on the odometer, and it’s listed at J&S Autohaus in Ewing, New Jersey, for more than double the price of a standard Model S Plaid.

Harris County prosecutors have charged the Tesla driver who crashed into a Katy, Texas, home and killed a 76-year-old woman with manslaughter, alleging he overrode Full Self-Driving to floor the car to 73 mph in a residential cul-de-sac.

The charging document also reveals something new: in the weeks before the crash, the driver had been Googling that FSD wasn’t aggressive enough.

Tesla told staff it will impose a $200-per-week limit on employee AI spending starting July 6, according to an internal memo reported by The Information (paywall).

The cap lands just months after Tesla pushed employees to use AI more aggressively, a sign that even companies betting their future on the technology are struggling to control its costs.

Tesla plans to hire another 1,000 workers at its Gigafactory outside Berlin, the automaker confirmed Thursday, as it moves to ramp production at its only European plant.

The hiring push comes as Tesla targets 7,500 vehicles per week at the Grünheide factory starting in October — a sharp acceleration after more than a year of falling sales in Europe.

Tesla’s Cybercab EPA certification documents reveal the robotaxi’s full technical specs for the first time — including a 3,113-lb curb weight, a 219 HP motor, and a 48 kWh battery pack. The filing confirms several claims Tesla made about the vehicle while revealing some surprises.

The Certificate Summary Information (CSI) for EPA test group TTSLV00.0L1A, filed on May 21 and certified on May 26, provides the most detailed look yet at the engineering behind the most efficient EV ever produced.

Electrek has learned that Tesla (TSLA) is building its massive new solar panel manufacturing operation at its facility in Brookshire, Texas, near Houston. The factory will be co-located with the Megapack Megafactory Tesla is already constructing at the same site.

A source familiar with the plans pointed us to the Houston location, and Electrek was able to independently confirm it. This is the first concrete sign of where Tesla plans to build toward its 100 GW annual solar manufacturing target.

Elon Musk claimed that Tesla’s unsupervised “Full Self-Driving” will be “widespread in the US by the end of this year” during a virtual appearance at the Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv today. Tesla currently operates fewer than 30 unsupervised robotaxis across three Texas cities.

The claim marks the latest in a decade-long pattern of Musk promising imminent autonomous driving breakthroughs that fail to materialize on schedule.

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.

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.

Tesla announced today that it will invest almost $250 million more in battery cell production at its Grünheide factory outside Berlin, more than doubling planned capacity to 18 gigawatt hours per year and creating over 1,500 battery-related jobs.

The investment comes just two months after the automaker successfully scared workers away from IG Metall in a contentious works council election — a vote where CEO Elon Musk explicitly threatened to halt expansion if the union gained control.

A new Reuters investigation documents long wait times, surface-street-only routing, and near-zero vehicle availability across Tesla’s three-city “Robotaxi” service. These all look like convenience problems — but they’re really symptoms of a safety system that can’t scale.

Elon Musk himself told investors at the Q1 2026 earnings call that safety validation is the limiting factor. The “convenience issues” riders are experiencing are the direct result of those safety constraints manifesting as a degraded user experience.

Five years after Tesla (TSLA) unveiled its 4680 battery cell at Battery Day with promises of 5x the energy, 6x the power, and 16% more range, the data tells a very different story. Tesla’s homemade cells consistently deliver worse energy density, worse charging performance, and less range than the supplier cells they are meant to replace.

The problem is getting harder to ignore now that Tesla is quietly swapping supplier batteries for its own 4680 cells in European Model Y vehicles — and owners are noticing the downgrade.

Tesla agreed to acquire an unnamed AI hardware company for up to $2 billion in stock and equity awards, according to a single sentence buried in its Q1 2026 10-Q filing. The company never mentioned the deal in its shareholders’ letter or during last night’s earnings call.

The disclosure appeared in Note 14 — Subsequent Events, the very last note in the financial statements, in what may be the most expensive one-sentence disclosure Tesla has ever made.

During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call today, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that Optimus robot production will begin at Fremont in late July or August — just four months after the last Model S and X roll off the line in early May.

Musk warned, however, that initial output will be “quite slow,” calling it “literally impossible to predict” the production rate this year given Optimus has 10,000 unique parts across an entirely new production line.

Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings beat looks impressive on the surface — 21.1% gross margin, 136% operating income growth, $0.41 non-GAAP EPS. But dig into the shareholders’ letter and a pattern emerges: Tesla pulled every accounting and financial lever available to make a stagnant quarter look like a turnaround.

One-time warranty reserve releases, tariff refund windfalls, stretched supplier payments, and new debt all contributed to headline numbers that mask a fundamental problem — Tesla’s core auto business isn’t growing.