Lifestyle
After Tesla’s rise, the “Best Worst EV Denial” award in legacy auto goes to…
Tesla is a lot of things to a lot of people, but if you’ve found yourself in the “catch up” position that most legacy auto makers have these days in producing zero-emissions vehicles, the all-electric newcomer is a force that needs to be slowed down by something… Anything, really. What about a diesel revival? What about customer demand? What about a hydrogen revolution?
Well, what about them?
First things first, let’s recognize that unlike most of its petrol brethren, Porsche read the memo early about inevitable vehicle electrification (after a bit of push back, naturally), and its first major step was to dump diesel. CEO Oliver Blume summarized as much in a recent statement to CNN. “We as a sports car manufacturer…have come to the conclusion that we would like our future to be diesel-free,” he commented on the company’s announcement of the decision. The all-electric Taycan is set to be unveiled in September, and from what we’ve seen so far, it looks like it will be a power-packed beauty worthy of the Porsche name. Bravo!
What about diesel and demand?
Moving on, we all know Volkswagen’s original competitive strategy to sell “lower emissions” diesel vehicles was bunk, not to mention highly illegal and very expensive to make amends for, and most of us know they’ve since invested a lot of (forced) money into green energy projects to make up for it. (See: Dieselgate) Some of us may even think they’ve finally come around to agreeing with Elon Musk and company about the direction of the automotive industry with their upcoming Volkswagen ID. family of e-cars and other pretty words put out to that effect.
I have my doubts, but more on that in a bit.
One of the interesting perspectives on electric vehicles (EVs) I’ve read coming from a legacy auto executive was from Ralf Speth, CEO of Jaguar Land Rover. “According to industry forecasters, a global share of 20 percent to 30 percent for electrified vehicles is expected by 2025. When you turn this around, it means that 70 percent to 80 percent of all vehicles around the world will have conventional engines. Let me add that today’s diesels…are absolutely CO2-efficient and clean,” Speth told the publication Automobilwoche in a recent interview. I guess he’s not wrong on current stock, but having a lot of clearance items on a rack is only a selling point for so long. This is both “whataboutism” and a strange variation of the “cup is half full” metaphor. (The cup is 70-80% full of mixer when I ordered a shot? Sorry.)
Speth also claimed electric cars are still too expensive and have poor infrastructure to lure in many customers. It’s almost like he’s never heard of Tesla or his own company’s EV, the award-winning I-PACE. It’s almost like he forgot what his own company’s luxury vehicles cost at the baseline. (Hint: It’s more than $35k) There’s talk that Jaguar might go all-electric in the next 10 years, but walking is much more important than talking.
Speth isn’t alone in this sentiment, either. On one hand, BMW is ramping up its electro-mobility efforts by purchasing cobalt and lithium and preparing battery farms and systems for grid stabilization. On the other hand, the legacy auto maker only seems to be going through the motions because the European Union’s emissions regulations says they must. Imagine being told you have to take 20% less cheese on your pizza (which you love) and then singing the praises of tomato pies the next day. It’s a bit odd, I think.
Although the German auto maker is currently undergoing a changing of the guard in ousting CEO Harald Krüger due to poor performance in electrification efforts, a negative approach to EVs seems to be par for the course for the company’s leadership. Krüger may be leaving, but BMW AG board member and Head of Development Klaus Fröhlich is said to be one of two men in the running to take Krüger’s place. Even if he doesn’t get the top spot, he’s still part of the top leadership.
“I think the discussion about electro-mobility is a little bit irrational,” Fröhlich recently told Australian journalists at the 2018 Paris Motor Show. “The diesel development from BMW perspective is quite dramatic. We have, I think, more or less the best diesels. All tests show that we have the lowest emissions. We have a spiral in Europe where every politician sees only one solution – diesel bashing. From a CO2 and customer perspective, a modern diesel is a very good solution. Especially for heavy, high-performing cars,” he added. Here’s another recent gem from Fröhlich during a roundtable discussion:
“If we have a big offer, a big incentive, we could flood Europe and sell a million cars, but Europeans won’t buy these things. Customers in Europe do not buy EVs. We pressed these cars into the market, and they’re not wanted. We can deliver an electrified vehicle to each person, but they will not buy them.”
It appears both Fröhlich and Krüger have a case of “whataboutism” here in terms of diesel. You know who else has this same affliction? Volkswagen AG CEO Matthias Müller. While the auto giant is investing billions of dollars into electrified transport, Müller is still hoping for a ‘diesel renaissance’ of sorts for whatever reason. “Diesel will see a renaissance in the not-too-distant future because people who drove diesels will realize that it was a very comfortable drive concept. Once the knowledge that diesels are eco-friendly firms up in people’s minds, then for me there’s no reason not to buy one,” he told media groups in September.
Someone should tell him that internal combustion engines (ICE) are in the crosshairs of regulators next, with countries like Norway leading the way on ICE bans.
What about hydrogen?
Then, there’s the hydrogen hope. Elon Musk’s disdain for the inefficiencies of fuel cell vehicles is well known in the Tesla community and beyond, and it’s hard to disagree with his position unless you’re in the business to benefit from his mistakes. In contrast, one auto industry expert predicted that the market would see a shift to hydrogen in the next decade or so.
“The fuel cell is not ready to kick in yet. By 2030, we’ll see that coming, especially in passenger cars that run long distances, or trucks… Fuel cell is not out of reach,” argued Dr. Felix Gress, head of industry consultant firm Continental’s corporate communications and public affairs. “The battery technology, according to our estimations, has its limits,” he continued, adding that “it doesn’t generate enough range” for some people’s needs.
I’m not an expert in physics, merely a fan of the stuff that keeps me attached to the planet, but I have yet to see any layman’s argument in favor of fuel cells that’s more convincing than Musk’s (and others’) arguments against it. In the end, though, how can someone point to infrastructure issues with EVs as an argument for fuel cell cars while hydrogen networks are practically non-existent?
“The Monica” Award for EV Denialism
All of this “whataboutism” sounds like a matter of ego bruising to me. Tesla isn’t just ahead in the game when it comes to electric vehicles. The Elon Musk-led venture has become the main boss level at this point. With that in mind, competitors seem to be scrambling to find some sort of leverage to claim some sort of title for some sort of silly reason.
- Electric vehicle sales are ramping up everywhere they’re sold? What about these diesels we still have on the lot?
- Customers are buying more EVs as the battery tech gets better and the charging infrastructure gets larger? What about the infrastructure that’s still needed? What about the batteries that have yet to be made?
The current state of Tesla’s legacy auto competitors reminds me of an episode of the classic 90s sitcom Friends. One of the main characters, Monica, was a perfectionist who needed to be the best at everything, but she would give her friends these terrible and painful massages throughout the episode. After her boyfriend finally admitted the truth to her, he consoled her by saying if there was an award for the “best bad massages” she’d “get all the votes.”
They agreed the award would be called “The Monica.”
Do you think there are legacy auto makers in the running for “The Monica” of EV denialism? If so, which ones?
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Elon Musk
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.
SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.
The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.
Elon Musk teases crazy outlook for xAI against its competitors
Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.
For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.
The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.
The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.
Tesla is showing us that Cybercab mass production is well underway
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
