Electrek reported on 19 May 2026 that Tesla is building its first solar panel manufacturing operation at Empire West Business Park in Brookshire, Texas, about 35 miles west of Houston and co-located with its Megapack Megafactory. Tesla already leases Buildings 9 and 10 totalling 1.65 million sq ft and is planning a further 600,000 sq ft. It is the first concrete site tied to Musk's January 2026 Davos target of 100 GW per year of US solar manufacturing capacity at Tesla.

Teslarati reported on 18 May 2026 that Tesla's internal Robotaxi app version 26.4.5 introduces a high-security command capable of freezing a vehicle's ability to drive — pulling it from the fleet and preventing it from being put into gear even with valid keys — alongside new remote operations and safety-protocol code. The update lands as Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi fleet has grown from 9 cars at the start of April to 39 by mid-May 2026.

Speaking on Monday 18 May 2026, Elon Musk said Tesla's driverless Robotaxi service will reach roughly a quarter to half of the US population by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval — with no-safety-monitor vehicles becoming widespread later in 2026. Tesla already operates fully unsupervised vehicles in Austin, Dallas, and Houston, and is targeting four more cities in the first half of the year.

An app decompile spotted by Not a Tesla App reveals Tesla is preparing per-profile toggles to block the in-car web browser, Arcade games and Tesla Theater. The new flags — a browser flag, an Arcade flag, a Theater flag — sit alongside the existing Parental Controls system and the recently added rule that disables Track Mode whenever Parental Controls are engaged.

Tesla began rolling out FSD (Supervised) v14.3.3 inside firmware 2026.14.6.6 on 17 May 2026. The release adds a live intervention-free streak counter in the Self-Driving App, unifies the Actually Smart Summon backend with FSD and Robotaxi for a max-speed bump from 6 to 8 mph, and bundles the full 2026 Spring Update payload for both HW3 and HW4 vehicles.

Tesla retroactively unredacted every Robotaxi crash narrative filed with US safety regulators, exposing two low-speed crashes in which human teleoperators — not the self-driving system — were in control of the vehicle.