A 147-page internal Volkswagen document obtained by WirtschaftsWoche says management will recommend ending production at Emden and Zwickau in 2031, Hanover in 2032 and Neckarsulm in 2034, with EV output reportedly moving to Czechia, Slovakia and Poland. VW has not confirmed the closures, and a supervisory board vote was scheduled for 3-4 September 2026.

Video from an Austin Supercharger shows a Tesla engineer repositioning a production Cybercab by holding directional buttons on the centre touchscreen, after automated parking left the car too far from the stall for the cable to reach. It is the first public look at how a car with no steering wheel or pedals gets moved by a human.

Chinese Model Y L owners are reporting rear springs sagging after long trips or when fully loaded, with the drop causing abnormal inner-shoulder tyre wear. Tesla's service threshold reportedly authorises a free spring replacement only below 764 mm against a normal 784 plus or minus 20 mm, and owners pay for the ruined tyres themselves. Tesla China has not commented and no regulator has opened a file.

European Model 3 RWD owners are reporting that the Giti Control P10 tread — the low-rolling-resistance tyre behind the car's rise from 534 to 572 km WLTP — deteriorates after a few thousand kilometres, including on the unpowered front axle. Tesla has reportedly told owners to accelerate less hard. There is no recall and no defect investigation, and no controlled wear test has been published.

Elon Musk said over the weekend that FSD pothole avoidance is "coming soon". He said the same in April 2019, and described pothole mini-maps in 2020. The feature is still listed only as an "Upcoming Improvement" in FSD v14 release notes including v14.3.8, with no date and no published specification. No hardware upgrade would be needed. Tesla has not confirmed the capability.

Tesla appears to be preparing in-car integration of Grok Bot, the autonomous agent platform SpaceXAI shipped in beta on 11 August 2026. It is not the Grok already in European dashboards: that one answers when asked, while a Bot is handed a task and works through it alone. Nothing is confirmed, and Europe will be the hard part.

Electrifying, New AutoMotive and BatteryIQ are urging the UK government to require a standardised battery state-of-health certificate on every dealer-sold used EV. Research puts 57% of prospective buyers off a used EV without one, even though average retained battery health across the used fleet is about 95%.

Tesla Motors Australia has told owners that FSD v14 Lite, the Hardware 3 branch, is in active development for Australia and New Zealand — the first right-hand-drive market named for it. No date was given, and Europe's HW3 cars were not mentioned.

Cybercabs have been photographed with purple, red and blue front light bars, and the reported reason is rider matching: the app shows you a colour and your car wears it. Europe's front-lighting rules are the obstacle nobody has addressed.

The Commission is preparing an economic bloc with the UK, Japan and South Korea that would let cars built in those three countries claim the same Buy-European advantages as cars made in the EU, according to the European Parliament's trade committee chair.

Two separate decompiles of Tesla app 4.60.0 surfaced unannounced features: passkey authentication replacing password logins, reworked European delivery documents covering VAT and country-specific lease agreements, end-of-lease settlement handling, and strings describing Cybertruck Powershare coordinating with a Powerwall during a grid outage. None of it has shipped and Tesla has confirmed none of it.

Tesla's factory wrap products have disappeared from the Tesla Shop with no announcement, nearly three years after launching as an $8,000 paint-protection-film service and settling at $4,000 for Model 3 and Model Y. The support page is still up, so the service is gone but not formally cancelled.

Battery-diagnostics firm Generational looked at cell-level voltages in roughly 10,000 used-EV battery tests from UK dealers. The median pack spread just 8 mV between its highest and lowest cell, but one in 85 tests exceeded 50 mV and one in 200 exceeded 100 mV — enough to make range unpredictable, disrupt charging and trigger the battery management system to cap performance. State of Health, the number the used market runs on, measures capacity and does not reveal it.

S&P Global Mobility expects Chinese-brand assembly in Europe to rise from around 90,000 cars this year to one million a year by 2030 and 1.5 million by 2035. The EU's draft Industrial Accelerator Act would attach local-content quotas to that build-out, so a car assembled in Spain or Hungary from imported Chinese parts would not count as European. The test lands on Tesla too, because Grünheide still buys most of its cells abroad.

Two Tesla owners filmed FSD v14.1 Lite on Hardware 3 failing to react to large obstacles in the road on 21 August — a log taken at 32 mph, and a fallen tree missed on four consecutive attempts at the same spot. Tesla has not commented, and the build is not available in Europe, where HW3 owners are litigating to get it.

Xiaomi unveiled the Xring D100 on 24 August: a 3 nm in-house smart-driving chip with a 20-core CPU and 16-core NPU, made by TSMC, validated and slated for cars in 2027. Designing your own inference silicon instead of buying Nvidia's is the strategy Tesla has run since 2019.

A Tesla patent describes building the front camera housing from polypropylene loaded with zeolite-like particles that trap the volatile organic compounds off-gassed by cabin plastics — the film that condenses on the inside of the windshield and triggers camera visibility warnings.

A clause in Germany's draft EEG 2027 would permanently limit new sub-100 kW solar installations to feeding 50% of their rated capacity into the grid. Because the limit is measured at the property's grid connection rather than at the inverter, home batteries and bidirectionally charging cars fall under the same ceiling. The VDA, Volkswagen's Elli, 1Komma5°, Enpal, Octopus Energy and even a grid operator are objecting together.

Shishuang Sun, Tesla's senior director of AI hardware design, has joined DensityAI — the startup founded by former Dojo chief Ganesh Venkataramanan and staffed by around twenty ex-Tesla supercomputer engineers. His specialism, chip packaging, is exactly what AI5 needs between April's tape-out and volume production.

Rivian is telling select R2 owners to pause DC fast charging while it inspects a gap at the DC connector-to-header joint for thermal abnormalities. No vehicle count, VIN list or NHTSA filing has been published — and the Model Y rival reaches Tesla Superchargers on a native NACS port.

A Scientific Reports study of 15 EVs in Guangzhou ties repeated high-current acceleration to about 2.5 times more capacity loss at 1,000 cycles. The mechanism is well supported; the headline figure is modelled, not measured.

Since 22 August, HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Apple TV, Disney+, Plex and Prime Video open in Tesla Theater's chromeless full-screen window. It is a server-side browser change, not native apps, and Tesla has not announced it.

LG Energy Solution's North America president says large-format manufacturing is the unsolved solid-state problem and that phones will get the technology roughly a decade before EVs — a direct counterweight to the 2027 pilot dates BYD, CATL and Geely have all claimed.

A JPMorgan note from a Fremont visit reports Tesla claiming FSD v15 is a step-change built on seven core technologies, that AI4 can run unsupervised driving, that Cybercab targets $0.30 per mile, and that Optimus could go on sale to outside buyers as early as H2 2027. None of it is confirmed, and most of it rhymes with promises already missed.

Geely says solid-state cells at 500 Wh/kg - double its current 250 Wh/kg packs - enter pilot deployment across its brands in 2027, claiming over 1,000 km of range. Volvo and Polestar are on the list, which is what makes it a Tesla problem.

Tesla has confirmed it will publish the European Semi's specifications and launch details at IAA Transportation in Hannover, 15-20 September. The European listing shows a 40-tonne truck charging on MCS at up to 1.2 MW - not the North American configuration.

Edmunds recorded 358 miles for the six-seat Model Y L against Tesla's 320-mile estimate — 11.8% over, and the longest range it has measured for any Model Y. The same day, "Model Y L" appeared in the source code of Tesla's configurators in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, where the car still cannot be ordered. Tesla has confirmed no European launch date, price or specification.

Cybercabs testing in Austin were photographed running an operator interface with split-screen Controls, a 'Rodeo' feedback panel (Short Oops, Long Oops, Win, Voice Note), a 'Roaming' no-rider status, and a 10-star ride-review form asking whether trips were acceptable for an unsupervised car. Tesla has not confirmed any of it.

Permit filings for 405 E. St. Elmo Road in Austin describe a two-phase robotaxi charging depot: 48 V4 Supercharger posts on 12 V3.5 cabinets first, then equipment to support 80 wireless chargers. It would be the largest sign yet that Tesla intends its driverless fleet to charge without anyone plugging anything in.

Tesla has told employees it is preparing a public Cybercab launch in Austin by the end of August, starting with employee rides on public roads before the two-seater joins the Robotaxi fleet. The EU spent the first half of 2026 building a type-approval route for cars with no steering wheel — the obstacle to a European Cybercab is no longer the rulebook, it is that Tesla is still arguing about Supervised.

Tesla is constructing a 64-stall Supercharger in Maspeth, Queens, which would be the largest station on the US East Coast — matching the 68-stall site in Halifax, North Carolina depending on the final count. Two stalls are pull-through for cars with trailers, and it lands in a city where Manhattan itself has only five small Supercharger sites.

A privately converted 2022 Model 3 has been shown driving with an AI4 computer in place of its original HW3 unit, using adapted camera connections rather than a full harness replacement. The builder's verdict is that Tesla "could have done it ages ago". What the demonstration did not show is that Tesla's production AI4 software can be fully provisioned in a converted car, or that the cooling holds up — the two points Tesla's own explanation rests on.

Photographs posted to X show a European Zeekr X drawing 257.2 kW at a Tesla Supercharger, above the roughly 200 kW other brands are normally held to and above the 250 kW peak of Tesla's own European cars. The reading also exceeds Zeekr's own published maximum, and Tesla has confirmed nothing, so treat the number as unverified.

WETOX has put a CCS2 discharge adapter on Kickstarter that turns a European Model 3, Y, S or X into a 230-volt power source, with what it says is the first ISO 15118-20 certification report from SGS. It is 3,680 W on a Schuko socket, and it is still crowdfunding.

Waymo has imported more than 3,200 Zeekr-built Ojai robotaxis into the US, over 2,600 of them in 2026, despite tariffs reported between 102.5% and 127.5% that push a $38,000 chassis to $78,000–86,500 landed. Add the Gen 6 sensor package and Morgan Stanley estimates about $125,000 per vehicle — still roughly $75,000 cheaper than the Jaguar I-PACE it replaces. Tesla's Cybercab targets under $30,000 by designing the sensor stack out rather than buying it in.

The Information reports Tesla will unveil the next-generation Roadster as early as this month at SpaceX's McGregor test site in Texas. The car will lift off under SpaceX cold gas thrusters, but it will be operated remotely with nobody inside, spectators will be held several hundred yards back because the thrusters can damage hearing, and the stunt vehicle is not street legal. A more ambitious routine was cut after Musk reviewed it. Tesla has confirmed none of it.

WirtschaftsWoche reports that Porsche management and its works council have agreed in principle to phase out the Taycan by 2030, with no replacement named and a planned move to Leipzig abandoned. Porsche declined to comment, having said in July that it had no short-term plans to drop the car.

Waymo has registered a German subsidiary and is recruiting test drivers in Berlin and Munich for a 2027 launch, while Pony.ai and Uber plan more than 2,000 robotaxis across five European cities. Both are Level 4 services. Tesla's European offering remains Level 2 FSD (Supervised), approved in five countries with no EU-wide timeline.

The Times reports that ministers will announce an early review of the ZEV Mandate this week, with the 2030 target of 80% zero-emission sales reportedly in play at 70%, 60% or even 50%. Charging operators and EV-sector bodies have gone public against it, and their argument is about investor confidence rather than targets.

CATL has told investors it plans to begin small-scale production of its first solid-state cells in 2027, the same year BYD is aiming for. Both are pilot lines, not factories: CATL's own chief executive puts mass-market use no earlier than 2030, and the technology currently sits at level four of nine on the readiness scale.

Autonomous driving firm Imagry and Spanish bus builder UNVI have integrated a map-free self-driving system into a 10.3-metre electric bus, with the first deployment in Germany scheduled for the third quarter of 2026.

Franz von Holzhausen told Jay Leno the next Roadster is coming "very soon" and repeated it when pressed. The car was revealed in 2017 and promised for 2020. Reporting points to an unveil this month, but that would be a demonstration, not production.

Indian conglomerate JSW Group is reported to be close to taking 51% of Skoda Auto Volkswagen India, in a joint venture meant to fund a dedicated Indian EV platform derived from Volkswagen's China architecture. Neither company has confirmed it, and the money involved has already been cut once.

Pony.ai and truck maker SANY plan 500 to 1,000 fourth-generation autonomous electric heavy trucks by 2027 and 100,000 lighter L4 trucks by 2030. The figure that makes it credible is the one behind it: more than 200 trucks already hauling freight commercially since November 2025.

Elon Musk posted a Terafab concept video showing Optimus units and a Robovan on an elevated roadway through the building, alongside a Semi and a Cybercab. The render is credited to SpaceX. Robovan still has no confirmed production timeline.

The Paris Motor Show organisers have confirmed 12 October 2026 as the reveal date for Citroën's electric 2CV. It is expected as a prototype: the production car is due in 2028 at under €15,000 before incentives.

An independent tester pulled a dummy into the road in front of three Teslas running FSD and timed the response. HW4 on v14.3 reacted 57.8% faster than HW3 on v12.6.4 and 36.6% faster than HW3 on v14 Lite — putting a figure on a gap Tesla has never quantified.

Reporting relayed on 7 August 2026 puts the next-generation Alfa Romeo Stelvio in 2028, two years later than the debut Alfa originally planned, and says it will no longer be electric-only: hybrid versions will join the battery-electric one on the STLA Large platform. Alfa Romeo has not confirmed the new timing.

Ford and Geely announced a European joint venture in July 2026 — Ford 66%, Geely 34%, based at Ford's Valencia plant — and reporting now places an all-new Kuga in 2029, developed with Geely technology and offered with more than one powertrain. Two Geely-derived electric SUVs are due first, from late 2028.

New road photos show Kia's PV7 electric van with most of its camouflage removed. It is expected in 2027 as a substantially larger sibling to the PV5, which already leads Europe's small electric van segment. Kia has not published range, battery or powertrain figures.