Tesla is actually starting to make cathodes in house via a dry process, which is why they are no longer buying cathode material from this supplier. Typical sloppy reporting from Electrek.
> Tesla is actually starting to make cathodes in house via a dry process, which is why they are no longer buying cathode material from this supplier.
The latter part of this is speculative. Tesla may have begun shipping dry cathodes but it isn't clear that they're capable of matching the former third-party volume. Tesla would absolutely need the additional 4680 volume if Cybertruck sales were meeting their original projections (as opposed to now when they are ~an order of magnitude lower).
The poster to which I responded and the article are each speculating on the "why" for this contract. That said, we do not need to speculate about Cybertruck sales - Business Insider reported that Tesla sold only 5,400 of them in 2025Q3.
We know from this that they do not need the same level of third-party 4680 capacity, and (call it speculative if you so desire) this is the most parsimonious explanation for the L&F write down.
I agree about those facts that the companies themselves posted. But for journalism to occur my hope would be the author needs to find out what that means for Tesla instead of speculating. Perhaps if it was posted as an opinion piece.
It's 'wild' to this person because it challenges their opinion on Musk and Tesla I have to guess. This is a classic 'it is bad reporting because it does not agree with my worldview' take, aka 'fake news'.
The one comment suggests a valid alternative. It doesn’t suggest that this was ‘wild’ reporting - which was your original point. The article still adds information, analysis, and not much speculation.
The 200,000 unit cap was part of federal legislation, not state legislation. That was repealed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden administration, and replaced with a new system where you qualify for the credit based on the sourcing of your battery materials and other factors.
Here, Newsom is proposing an entirely new incentive that he has designed specifically to exclude Tesla.
The IRA was able to extend the subsidies for Tesla because it had the considerable resources of the Fedetal government behind it. A state is going to have fewer resources, and so it makes sense to go back to the original and less-generous regime. More practically, Tesla has already received a lot of subsidies and now has large sales and economies of scale, so it’s not very practical for California to allocate limited resources to Tesla rather than companies that haven’t yet reached scalable production.
Of course the very best thing here would be for the Federal government to maintain the subsidies of the IRA, and then California wouldn’t have to step in with its more limited capabilities in the first place. If that’s important to Tesla, I’m sure they have someone who can talk to the incoming administration about it.
It makes no sense to subsidize only the players who have low market share. Tesla is the only carmaker that still makes cars in California, why subsidize foreign cars at the expense of California workers… using their own tax dollars?
The only justification for such harmful economic policy is political retaliation against Musk. But it is not the role of the government to use taxpayer funds for political retribution against opponents.
Why? It fosters competition and considering Tesla was heavily subsidized during its early years, it makes sense its competitors should have similar shots
Subsidies should not be used to decide winners and losers. There should be an equal playing field for all companies. When the government starts deciding winners instead of the market, things start falling apart fast.
It makes sense for the same reason that Musk reportedly endorsing Trump's plan to kill federal EV subsidies makes sense.
Tesla is profitable enough that Musk believes that Tesla will do fine without subsidies. Not so for most other EV makers--they are still at the stage where they are figuring it out and not yet reaping economies of scale. Musk believes that removal of subsidies will greatly hurt them.
If a state wants to encourage a healthy multi-company competitive EV market it makes sense to design the state subsidy program so that the benefits go toward making that happen which in the case of the current EV market means not subsidizing any company whose EV market share is about the same as that of everyone else combined.
Funny article, but as someone who has access to Waymo, Cruise, and Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta I have never seen any of the above have trouble differentiating between a green light and a green shirt. Again, very funny but from a technical perspective the challenges he's describing — rain, a dog running into the road, are things that I see many different companies already solving reliably.
So much discussion about whether Cruise slightly delayed the ambulance from leaving the scene. Hardly any discussion of the fact that it was a human driver that ran over the pedestrian, "critically injuring" (brutally crushing parts of their body, so they bled out after the driver fled I assume) them in the first place.
Was the driver charged? Did the street design contribute? Nobody cares, because apparently a few dozen San Franciscans' lives per year are a worthwhile sacrifice to save suburbanites a few minutes on their commute.
I have seen this exact sentiment way too many times. The details of the accident don’t matter. It could be the fire department needing to get by to rescue an old lady’s cat from a tree. Yes, there is irony a human hit someone with a car. No, it is not material to the actual issue at hand.
The real problem is that tech companies are moving faster than infrastructure and governance can keep up. This is a mark of hubris that, if unchecked, will ultimately result in self-inflicted knee jerk regulations that have the potential to all but cripple to the self-driving car industry.
I don’t agree that self-driving cars need to be regulated into the ground because of little mishaps like this. It doesn’t upset me much that there was a mistake. But what is significantly more distressing is the general impression that these companies don’t give a fuck about taking responsibility for this. I don’t think it is unreasonable at all to say “you fucked this up, your fleet is grounded until our investigation is over and you can prove safeguards have been put into place to prevent this from happening again”.
To the above point about treating this like plane crashes etc, the NTSB doesn’t skip out on analysis because of the actual impact, it considers what is the possible impacts of something going wrong. So if your jet engine blows up mid flight but you still manage to safely land, they treat that with the same due process as if it killed a plane full of people. The same applies to these self-driving car companies, and why it’s such s ridiculous distraction to even bring up what business the ambulance had to why. It doesn’t matter. These cars need to yield. And until they can they need to be immediately pulled from the roads.
The NYT, in this article, admits to seeing a video that proves that Cruise did not block that ambulance.
This is a garbage headline meant to garner clicks. The city has been complaining about these cars for a while. They've never had any data and now are trying to complain about "x incidents where an AV interfered with emergency vehicles." They're banking on the headlines, and then they'll bring up whatever number they could passably claim in the next letter/meeting they have with the DMV.
> The NYT, in this article, admits to seeing a video that proves that Cruise did not block that ambulance.
I can't find this admission in the article. The article includes a quote from a Cruise rep saying that the ambulance "was never impeded," but this appears to be in the context of the first responders having to move one of their own vehicles so that the ambulance could leave (second graf).
In other words: Cruise's argument appears to be "we didn't block you because you found another way out." That wouldn't be an acceptable argument from a human driver at an accident scene; it it's an acceptable on from a self-driving car company.
> "we didn't block you because you found another way out."
In other words: the ambulance was not blocked. They (SFFD) recently had a press release where they say Cruise did not block the ambulance. Why? Because they know there's a video now, and that Cruise is more than willing to share it.
Do something of note, something that wows, and you will be excited for the meeting. If there is something else that needed to be done, explain why it was important for it to be done. If there are too many meetings in a row where you don't feel there's much to report, it could be an opportunity to reflect on goals / prioritization.
There are two other companies working on satellite based cellular service. One of them is publicly traded. Starlink costs $500 for the hardware and $99 a month. I think the pricing you are referring to is for a higher tier professional service (I.e. a school vs a single house)
From their own website, also currently the only way to ‘buy it now’ so to speak. Also the only way to get the main benefit of Starlink, internet service independent of geographic location.
The pricing you’re referring to is a waitlist for ? period of time for a vast majority of the US population, at least last I checked.
As someone who has a Starlink dish at this price point, I can assure you that it's a real product. The reason why there is a waitlist is to avoid over-saturating the bandwidth in a small area. If your area does not have a lot of users, you can sign up right away. Similarly if you order Starlink for EVs you do not have to wait.
The Full Self-Driving package on Teslas gives you access to a number of features including autopark, auto lane change, navigate on autopilot, green light chime, traffic light and stop sign control, summon, smart summon, an update to the latest car computer, as well as the city streets Beta. Just not true to say they received no functionality. I paid $7,000 for it on my last car and it's incredible. It can often do entire drives with no human input. And not just simple drives, but some pretty complex scenarios too.
> It can often do entire drives with no human input. And not just simple drives, but some pretty complex scenarios too.
This is just patently false. I have been in the beta for months, and I have yet to have "an entire drive" without having to disengage. FSD behaves like a fifteen-year-old who has just gotten their learner's permit and has zero long-term memory.
Any intersection that has a dedicated right-turn lane, when that lane comes out of a widening right lane (as most of them do), FSD will fail on, and will at the very last moment swerve to make the lane change, endangering human drivers coming up from behind, who are correctly getting into the space on the right. Every single time. I cannot count the number of times that a left turn onto a road with a slightly raised middle divider (planters, whatever) will fail. Every single time. At a four-way stop sign FSD does not know when it has the right-of-way and will always defer to every other car. This often leaves you sitting waiting for the intersection to completely clear before FSD will decide to proceed. It took me exactly 48 hours with FSD to realize that Tesla isn't close.
My 20 year old car also has that feature, and it is seriously useful, it's not a joke at all! It even has 3D spatial audio, as the chime seems to come from somewhere behind the trunk. And it has an incredible number of different melodies, I haven't exhausted them all yet.
There's a nasty bug in it though, and the manufacturer hasn't ever fixed it: when there's no other car waiting behind my car, the feature somehow won't work.
Ah, so if FSD included at least some working item like say a working game on dashboard you can't ask for a refund on a false advertised system? I assume some of the FSD buyers bought it for the FSD part.
