Lifestyle
Alta Motors sees electric motorcycle demand soar 18X, hires CRO
After seeing demand for their line of electric motorcycles soar, California-based Alta Motors is adding Matthew Work to their executive team as Chief Revenue Officer. Alta Motors saw its sales increase 18X in 2017 and added 36 new distributors to their dealership network.
Matthew Work joins the company after nearly two decades of experience in the technology industry, ranging from several SaaS companies to guiding Dice.com to a successful IPO. Work also has a strong passion for motorcycles, having owned more than 50 motorcycles in the past. He’s been advising Alta Motors for the past 18 months and his move to the management team speaks to the company’s fast growth in 2017.
Alta Motors raised a $27M Series B round this summer, with a total of ~$44M in funding.
Matthew Work, Alta Motors’ New Chief Revenue Officer
“Work’s combined high-tech and motorcycle expertise will be a boon to Alta,” said Alta Motors CEO, Marc Fenigstein. Work’s combined background in technology and his interest in motorcycles will help Alta Motors scale even faster as they prepare for 2018.
Alta Motors was founded in late 2010 and has a strong management team that has developed the powertrain and battery technology in-house. Alta’s battery system boasts one of the highest energy densities in the industry and provides the bikes with incredible performance, according to the company.
One of Alta’s newest customers, Ben Atkinson, a long-time motorbike rider, describes the bike as his favorite out of all the bikes he owns. After having his interest in riding on trails and parks constrained by noise issues with his other bikes, Atkinson fell in love with Alta’s bike near-silent riding experience combined with the superior performance from the bike’s electric motor.
“I’m becoming a better rider, just because I’m able to ride it a lot more!” Atkinson said in an interview with Teslarati.
“You hear your tires scrubbing the ground… I can focus on other things. I can concentrate on my riding style… hitting different lines, you can hear your rear tire spin and scrub. I think you have just one more indication of how you are hooking up, so I think it’s a better riding experience. You are more in tune with the bike,” Atkinson said.
Alta has seen significant demand from their dealer network and in the midst of working through its order backlog. “We’ve sold more Alta bikes this year than any other single model,” said Scott Bannick, sales manager of Colorado-based Elite Motorsports, a dealership that began carrying Alta’s bikes in November 2016.
Bannick told us about a recent customer that was interested in the Alta Redshift, largely due to all of the action taking place in the electric vehicle segment. “He called me back and knew everything about those two vehicles and he knew everything about Alta and electric vehicles in general. He went from being a lifelong gas dirtbike rider who drives gas cars and rides gas motorcycles to being someone fully bought into the idea (of electric vehicles),” Bannick said.
Bannick also described other potential customers that happened to be Tesla owners and were seeking the electric motorcyles that offered comparable performance and reliability to Teslas.
“The success we’ve seen was unimaginable a year ago, but now not so surprising. The coolest thing to witness after encouraging a customer to try the electric bike, is seeing that customer return at the end of the day with eyes the size of dinner plates. It’s priceless,” Bannick said.
Alta Motors added 36 dealers to their network this year, bringing it to a total of 41 dealers in 18 states. “After demonstrating the Redshift’s ability to compete head to head with combustion, we’re excited to scale our dealership base across the U.S., offering more riders the opportunity to hop on for an initial joy ride,” said Alta Motors CEO, Marc Fenigstein.
I recently spoke with Fenigstein last month on the NextMobility Podcast. The episode was most popular episode in Season 1. You can listen below or subscribe to the podcast here.
Cybertruck
Tesla Cybercab just rolled through Miami inside a glass box
Tesla paraded a Cybercab in a glass display at Miami’s F1 Grand Prix event this week.
Tesla set up an “Autonomy Pop-Up” at Lummus Park in Miami Beach from April 29 through May 3, 2026, embedded within the official F1 Miami Grand Prix Fan Fest. The centerpiece was a Cybertruck towing the Cybercab inside a glass display case marked “Future is Autonomous,” rolling through the beachfront crowd.
Miami is on Tesla’s confirmed list of cities for robotaxi expansion in the first half of 2026, making the promotion a strategic promotion that lays groundwork in a target market.
This was not Tesla’s first time using Miami as a showcase city. In December 2025, Tesla hosted “The Future of Autonomy Visualized” at its Miami Design District showroom, coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach. That event featured the Cybercab prototype and Optimus robots interacting with attendees. The F1 pop-up this week marks Tesla’s return to Miami and follows a pattern Tesla has been running since early 2026. Just two weeks before Miami, Tesla stationed Optimus at the Tesla Boston Boylston Street showroom on April 19 and 20, directly on the final stretch of the Boston Marathon, letting tens of thousands of runners and spectators meet the robot for free, generating massive earned media at zero advertising cost.
Tesla is sending its humanoid Optimus robot to the Boston Marathon
Tesla has confirmed plans to expand its robotaxi service to seven cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas, building on the unsupervised service already running in Austin. Musk has said he expects robotaxis to cover between a quarter and half of the United States by end of year. On the production side, Musk told shareholders that the Cybercab manufacturing process could eventually produce up to 5 million vehicles per year, targeting a cycle time of one unit every ten seconds. Scaling robotaxis to 10 million operational units over the next ten years is a key condition of his compensation package, alongside selling 20 million passenger vehicles.
As for the Cybercab’s price, Musk has said buyers will be able to purchase one for under $30,000, with an average operating cost around $0.20 per mile. Whether those numbers hold through full production remains to be seen.
Cybercab at F1 Fan Fest in Miami
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Lifestyle
California hits Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi driverless cars with new law
California just gave police power to ticket driverless cars, including Tesla’s Cybercab fleet.
California DMV formally adopted new rules on April 29, 2026 that allow law enforcement to issue “notices of noncompliance”, or in other words ticket autonomous vehicle companies when their cars commit moving violations. The rules take effect July 1, 2026 and officially closes a regulatory gap that previously let driverless cars operate on public roads with nearly no traffic enforcement consequences.
Until now, state traffic laws only applied to human “drivers,” which meant that when no person was behind the wheel, police had no mechanism to issue a ticket. Officers were limited to citing driverless vehicles for parking violations only. A well-known example came in September 2025, when a San Bruno officer watched a Waymo robotaxi execute an illegal U-turn and could do nothing but notify the company.
Under the new framework, when an officer observes a violation, the autonomous vehicle company is effectively treated as the driver. Companies must report each incident to the DMV within 72 hours, or 24 hours if a collision is involved. Repeated violations can result in fleet size restrictions, operational suspensions, or full permit revocation. Local officials also gained new authority to geofence driverless vehicles out of active emergency zones within two minutes and require a live emergency response line answered within 30 seconds.
Tesla Cybercab ramps Robotaxi public street testing as vehicle enters mass production queue
California’s new enforcement rules arrive at a pivotal moment for Tesla. The company is ramping Cybercab production at Giga Texas toward hundreds of units per week, targeting at least 2 million units annually at full capacity, while simultaneously pushing to expand its Robotaxi service to dozens of U.S. cities by end of 2026. Unsupervised FSD for consumer vehicles is currently targeted for Q4 2026, and when it arrives, Tesla’s fleet may not have a human to absorb legal accountability, under the July 1 rules.
Tesla has confirmed plans to expand its Robotaxi service to seven new cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas, with the service already running without safety drivers in Austin. Musk has said he expects robotaxis to cover between a quarter and half of the United States by end of year.
Elon Musk
The FCC just said ‘No’ to SpaceX for now
SpaceX is fighting the FCC for spectrum that could put satellites inside every smartphone.
SpaceX was dealt a new setback on April 23, 2006 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after the U.S. government agency dismissed the company’s petition to access a Mobile Satellite Service spectrum that would allow direct-to-device (D2D) capabilities.
The FCC regulates communications by radio, television, wire, and cable, which also includes regulating D2D technology that lets your existing smartphone connect directly to a satellite orbiting Earth, the same way it would connect to a cell tower.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been building toward this through its Starlink Mobile service, formerly called Direct-to-Cell, in partnership with T-Mobile. The service officially launched on July 23, 2025, starting with messaging and expanding to broadband data in October of that year.
T-Mobile Starlink Pricing Announced – Early Adopters Get Exclusive Discount
It’s worth noting that SpaceX is not alone in this race. AT&T and Verizon have their own satellite texting deals with AST SpaceMobile, while Verizon separately offers free satellite texting through Skylo on newer phones.
The regulatory foundation for all of this dates to March 14, 2024, when the FCC adopted the world’s first framework for what it called Supplemental Coverage from Space, allowing satellite operators to lease spectrum from terrestrial carriers and fill gaps in their coverage. On November 26, 2024, the FCC granted SpaceX the first-ever authorization under that framework, approving its partnership with T-Mobile to provide service in specific frequency bands. SpaceX then went further, completing a roughly $17 billion acquisition of wireless spectrum from EchoStar, which gave it the ability to negotiate with global carriers more independently.
Starlink’s EchoStar spectrum deal could bring 5G coverage anywhere
This recent ruling by the FCC blocked SpaceX from going further, protecting incumbent spectrum holders like Globalstar and Iridium. But the market momentum is already in motion. As Teslarati reported, SpaceX is targeting peak speeds of 150 Mbps per user for its next generation Direct-to-Cell service, compared to roughly 4 Mbps today, which would bring satellite connectivity close to standard carrier performance.
With a reported IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation on the horizon, each spectrum fight, carrier deal, and regulatory win or loss now carries weight beyond just connectivity. SpaceX is quietly becoming the infrastructure layer underneath the phones of millions of people, and the FCC’s next move will help determine how much further that reach extends.
FCC Satellite Rule Makings can be found here.
Tesla Robotaxi service in Austin achieves monumental new accomplishment
Tesla Cybercab just rolled through Miami inside a glass box
