tesla

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.

Tesla (TSLA) released its financial results and shareholders’ letter for the first quarter (Q1) 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. Refresh for the latest information.

Tesla (TSLA) will release its first-quarter 2026 financial results tomorrow (April 22) after the market close, with a conference call to follow. Despite leadership continuing to push the narrative that Tesla is now an “AI and robotics company,” the automotive business still drives the vast majority of Tesla’s financial performance.

Let’s look at what Wall Street and retail investors are expecting.

Tesla announced today that its “Robotaxi” service is now rolling out in Dallas and Houston, marking the company’s first expansion beyond Austin and San Francisco. The company shared maps of the two new service areas, which appear to cover small slices of each city.

The Houston geofence covers approximately 25 square miles, according to early user analysis of the maps, while the Dallas zone appears to center around the Highland Park area. For context, Tesla’s Austin geofence has grown to roughly 245 square miles after months of gradual expansion — but that took nearly a year to reach from an initial 20-square-mile footprint.

A Texas Tesla owner says he punched the accelerator to outrun an oncoming train after his car on “Full Self-Driving” drove itself through a lowered railroad crossing arm as the train closed in on the tracks.

Joshua Brown, who says he has logged more than 40,000 miles using Tesla’s driver assist, described the incident as the first time FSD has ever “let me down.”

New photos of the Rivian R2 parked next to the Tesla Model Y are making the rounds on social media, and they offer a great look at how these two critical electric SUVs actually compare in size. The R2 is shorter in length but noticeably taller, with a boxier, more rugged profile.

We decided to dig into the numbers and put together a full dimension-by-dimension breakdown — and the efficiency comparison is where things get really interesting.

Tesla China has denied a Reuters report claiming the automaker is developing a new compact electric SUV. The denial comes just one day after we reported on the original Reuters exclusive citing four sources.

The denial was reported by Chinese financial wire Cailian Press (财联社), a major and well-established Chinese business news service. Tesla China told the outlet that “market information claiming that Tesla is developing a new, smaller, and cheaper electric SUV is inaccurate.”

Elon Musk claimed this week that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” is so much safer than human drivers that it could save 90% of the roughly one million lives lost in car crashes globally each year — a 10X improvement in safety.

The problem is that Tesla has never released the data that would support anything close to that claim, and Musk is already using it to pre-frame the lawsuits Tesla is facing over FSD crashes as an unavoidable cost of progress.

Tesla released its Q1 2026 production and delivery results today, confirming 358,023 vehicle deliveries — about 7,600 units below the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 vehicles.

More concerning than the miss itself is the gap between production and deliveries. Tesla produced 408,386 vehicles during the quarter but only delivered 358,023, adding over 50,000 vehicles to inventory in a single quarter.

Elon Musk announced that Tesla is coming out with ‘something cooler than a minivan’ when pressed by fans for a vehicle with more passenger capacity.

However, we should temper our expectations as Tesla is greatly limiting new vehicle programs amid its transition into a ‘transportation as a service’ company.

NHTSA has escalated its investigation into Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system’s inability to handle reduced visibility conditions, upgrading the probe to an Engineering Analysis covering an estimated 3,203,754 vehicles — the step that typically precedes a recall.

The agency found that FSD’s degradation detection system fails to warn drivers when cameras are blinded by common road conditions like sun glare and fog, and that Tesla may be under-reporting related crashes.

Tesla has wiped its entire Canadian Model 3 inventory, and according to sources familiar with the matter, the automaker sent the US-built units back to the United States.

The move comes as Canada officially opened its new Chinese EV import program on March 1, allowing up to 49,000 Chinese-built electric vehicles into the country at a drastically reduced 6.1% tariff, down from the 100% surtax that had blocked imports since 2024.

Tesla registered 17,425 vehicles across 15 major European markets in February 2026, a 10% increase compared to February 2025. It’s the first meaningful year-over-year growth Tesla has posted in Europe in over a year.

But let’s put this in context: Tesla is comparing against Q1 2025, which was a total bloodbath for the automaker in Europe. And despite the February bump, Tesla’s year-to-date registrations are essentially flat, 25,451 units in January-February 2026 versus 25,474 in the same period last year.