Tesla

No courtroom updates today, but we have updated our rundown of the evidence with the latest exhibits added in Elon v. Musk, including details of the donated Tesla Model 3s.

Eight months after the iOS app launched, Tesla has released an Android version of its Robotaxi app. The service expanded to Houston and Dallas last week, but still seems to only have a small number of vehicles actually on the road.

Reporting from Bloomberg on how many Cybertrucks Elon’s other companies have been buying:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed its investigation into Tesla’s Actual Smart Summon, or ASS, which allows owners to remotely control their vehicles from a smartphone app. The agency’s Office of Defects Investigation was probing an estimated 2.6 million vehicles with the parking feature after dozens of reports of crashes. But the agency closed the investigation after concluding that the risk of crash severity was low because the speeds were very slow.

A prototype Tesla Cybercab was spotted out and about in Los Angeles recently, complete with a steering wheel and a human driver. The panel gaps, of course, were in full display. But the cab’s apparent misalignment was the thing that really caught this TikTok user’s attention. Also his observation that it looks like “a Pixar Model 3” is going to live rent-free in my brain for the rest of time.

Elon Musk says he’s planning to open a “Terafab” chip plant in Austin, Texas, jointly run by Tesla and SpaceX, as we approach dire risk levels of “tera” ceasing to have all meaning.

Raffi Krikorian, who now serves as Mozilla’s CTO, writes in The Atlantic that he’s rethinking the relationship between humans and machines after a near-death experience in his Tesla.

The EV maker has been granted a license to supply electricity to British households and businesses, mirroring its similar business in Texas. The approval doesn’t include dual gas/electric fuel contracts, however, and local supplier Octopus Energy already allows Powerwall battery owners to sell energy back to the grid.

They joined a new initiative called Utilize that aims to use strategies like battery storage and virtual power plants to make more use of the electrons already available to the grid. It’s a plan that’s supposed to make electricity more affordable as opposition grows to data centers blamed for higher utility bills.

Despite Elon Musk’s public statements that Tesla was close to getting “regulatory permission” to launch a robotaxi service in the Bay Area, the company has yet to apply for any of the required permits, Reuters reports. It also logged zero miles of autonomous test driving on California roads. Seems like a strange position for a company staking its future on robots and self-driving cars.

A federal jury in Florida last year found Tesla partly liable for a deadly 2019 crash involving the company’s Autopilot driver assist software, and ordered the company to pay the families $243 million. Tesla appealed the ruling, but now a judge has dismissed that effort. In her ruling, US District Court Judge Beth Bloom stated that Tesla’s arguments “were already considered and rejected” and that the evidence at trial “more than supports the jury verdict and does not find it committed any error.”

We can’t really tell from the photo whether it has a steering wheel, which was probably a deliberate choice. Elon Musk has said that the fully driverless vehicle will go into volume production in April.

That works out to one crash for every 57,000 miles, according to Electrek, which has been tracking robotaxi crashes reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Tesla also updated a July 2025 crash to include information about someone being hospitalized — but since Tesla heavily redacts its crash reports, we have no more information about who was injured. The lack of transparency from Tesla also means we have no information about the cause or circumstances around any of those 14 crashes.

There are many important safety reasons to support China’s move to ban hidden, electric door handles from EVs, but also a pettier one: they’re just bad, unintuitive, and inconvenient handles.

Four months after launching “Standard” versions of the Model 3 and Model Y, Tesla is dropping the trim description. The move comes as the automaker introduces a more affordable all-wheel drive version of the Model Y in the US.