Investor's Corner
Big Oil fights back against electric vehicle revolution, “EVs are not the silver bullet everyone is looking for”
The purveyors of old technologies have always done what they could to impede the adoption of new ones, not only by pointing out the drawbacks of the new products, but also by making their old products better. In the last days of the Age of Sail, shipbuilders crafted super-fast clipper ships, which shared the seas with steamships for many years. Typewriters steadily added high-tech features, evolving into stand-alone word processors before they were superseded by computers.
However, never in history has there been an industry as profitable, powerful and all-pervasive as the oil industry – an industry whose lifeblood is a soon-to-be-obsolete technology. Big Oil, supported by its allies in the auto industry and numerous national governments, is fighting the nascent electromobility revolution on several fronts. Its decades-long campaign to discredit the science of climate change, and its financial support of backwards-looking political figures, are well known. Now that EVs are emerging as an existential threat, industry players are also working to sow doubts about their viability in the public mind – the media churns out “EVs are a bust” articles on a daily basis, often employing quotes helpfully provided by auto industry trade groups and oil-friendly think tanks.
On a somewhat more constructive front, oil producers and automakers are working together to make legacy vehicles ever more fuel-efficient, hoping to delay demand for electric alternatives.
Oil giants including Exxon, BP and Shell are working with automakers such as Ford and Fiat Chrysler to create a new generation of super-slick engine lubricants in a quest to squeeze even more efficiency out of traditional engines. “It’s really important that we are able to squeeze the lemon,” Shell VP Andrew Hepher told the Wall Street Journal. “The combustion engine has still got a long way to run…Car makers are very, very heavily motivated to improve the economy of their fleet.” BP’s CEO Bob Dudley adds, “EVs are not the silver bullet everyone is looking for.”
Governments of petroleum-producing countries are also getting proactive about prolonging the reign of the ICE. The Persian Gulf state of Qatar, which has the world’s third-largest reserves of oil and natural gas, acquired 17 percent of Volkswagen’s voting rights in 2009, becoming the third-biggest investor in VW. “We are really committed to VW,” said VW supervisory board member Hessa Al Jaber. “They are taking steps to mitigate any future risks on emissions.”
A recent article in the Detroit Free Press reports that the Saudi national oil company, Aramco, came to the Detroit auto show for the first time ever this year, to spread the word about its cutting-edge research to improve legacy gas engines.
Above: Aramco cranks up the PR machine with a booth at the Detroit Auto Show (Youtube: aramcoservices)
“In an era of climate change concerns, battery electric vehicles have become a symbol of innovation, promising to disrupt the automotive industry,” said Ahmad Al Khowaiter, Aramco’s Chief Technology Officer. “Yet hidden in plain sight are some of the most disruptive technologies the industry has ever seen; and they happen to be new and improved internal combustion engines.”
“Ironically, as countries announce plans to phase out gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles in favor of battery electric vehicles, new fuels and engine designs are making internal combustion engines greener than ever, and far more efficient,” Al Khowaiter said.
Aramco has invested hundreds of millions in global R&D – it is the third-largest holder of oil industry patents, behind Exxon and Chevron. It has research facilities all over the world, including in Detroit and Houston, and works with researchers at Stanford, MIT and the University of Michigan.
“Public policy should be technology-agnostic,” Al Khowaiter said. “Neither the battery electric vehicle nor the internal combustion engine is the perfect solution in all scenarios; both are needed for a sustainable and affordable mobility future.”
Donald Runkle, a mechanical engineer who ran product engineering at GM, told the Free Press that fuel economy is increasing every day. “The combustion engine is not going away in the foreseeable future, not for 15 or 20 or 30 years. It has proven, and continues to prove, to be the low-cost approach to moving things. Yes, there will be electrification, adding batteries and all that. It just improves the overall efficiency of the internal combustion engine.”
Obviously, the oil and electricity camps disagree about the timeline for electrification. However, all seem to agree that any technology that reduces emissions is a good thing. Don Anair, Research Director for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Vehicles Program, acknowledged the conflicting/complementary goals. “We need an 80% or more reduction in oil use,” he told the Free Press. “No matter how you look at it, to address climate change, we can’t continue to power our transportation system with oil. We need to continue to improve emissions from conventional vehicles while we accelerate the transition toward electric vehicles powered by clean energy.”
===
Note: Article originally published on evannex.com by Charles Morris
Featured
Tesla Cybercab is coming to Asia this month as US service officially begins
Tesla Asia says Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai this month.
Tesla’s Cybercab is heading to Asia. The official Tesla Asia account posted on X Thursday, inviting Cybercab fans to “Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai.” The post went up within hours of Tesla’s own Cybercab milestone in Texas, where the company said Thursday it had begun offering rides in across Austin.
Exact dates and venues for the Asia tour haven’t been released yet, though Tesla Hong Kong replied to the announcement with “Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong soon,” while Tesla Japan’s response pointed fans to a sign up page for updates. Neither post mentions test rides or a service area, and nothing so far suggests Tesla is launching Robotaxi operations in any of the four cities. Based on how Tesla has run past Cybercab tours, in Europe in late 2024 and at US shopping centers that same December, the Asia stops are almost certainly static displays at Tesla stores or public venues as a means to stimulate buzz for its future driverless ride-hailing service in the big cities.
Cybercab will be on display in Asia this month!
Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai. pic.twitter.com/wGmmEastfX— Tesla Asia (@Tesla_Asia) September 4, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s only prior Cybercab appearance in the region, a booth at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai last November, which Teslarati covered at the time. At that event, Tesla’s regional general manager for Shanghai framed the car as evidence of the company’s broader mission, a message Tesla has since formalized in its Master Plan Part IV, which states that “autonomous vehicles have the capacity to dramatically improve the affordability, availability and safety of transportation while reducing pollution, particularly in our increasingly dense global cities.” The same document is where Tesla lays out its “sustainable abundance” framing for Cybercab and Optimus alike, describing the two as the hardware behind an AI driven push to cut the cost of transportation and labor at scale.
Whether Cybercab actually operates as a robotaxi anywhere in Asia remains an open question, considering China has already pushed an autonomous ride-hailing market that’s run on homegrown players like Baidu’s Apollo Go and Pony AI. For now, the four city tour reads as a marketing push timed to Austin’s momentum.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Tesla Robotaxi will be a 24/7 service: here’s when
Tesla Full Self-Driving will now overtake manual driving to avoid disaster
