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Ford ousts CEO Mark Fields, promotes chief of mobility division to Global CEO

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This post first appeared on NextMobility

Ford is planning to announce a massive change in company direction and culture – the company is now committing to the future of mobility. According to the New York Times, Former CEO Mark Fields has been ousted from the company and Jim Hackett is the company’s new CEO. Hackett was appointed to lead a Ford subsidiary last spring called Ford Smart Mobility.

“Jim Hackett is the right CEO to lead Ford during this transformative period for the auto industry and the broader mobility space. He’s a true visionary who brings a unique, human-centered leadership approach to our culture, products, and services that will unlock the potential of our people and our business.” – Bill Ford, Executive Chairman of Ford

Early last year, GM took massive steps towards becoming a mobility company, while Ford has largely stayed quiet on the topic. When the company launched this new division last year, it was unclear what specifically the division would develop. Now, Ford’s new change in management clearly signals that mobility is the company’s main focus. “Ford is aggressively pursuing emerging opportunities through Ford Smart Mobility, the company’s plan to be a leader in connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, the customer experience and data and analytics,” Ford says on their website. By appointing Hackett as CEO, the company has now decided to follow GM’s steps and enter the mobility business.

Former Ford CEO, Mark Fields

The ousted Ford CEO, Mark Fields had just announced new cost-cutting measures at the company, including laying off 1,400 workers last week. Unlike Fields, Hackett should be expected to invest heavily into autonomous driving technology and car-sharing operations. It’s unclear whether Ford will stick with its new strategy to shift investments towards SUVs and trucks. While Hackett has a focus on transforming the auto manufacturer into a mobility company, his lack of background in either the tech or automotive sector raises questions. Hackett was previously CEO of furniture company Steelcase for nearly 20 years, before joining Ford’s board of directors in 2013. Fields has recently been under attack from investors, as Ford’s stock has plummeted 40% during his short tenure.

This change in management comes just before Tesla puts the highly-anticipated Model 3 into production this July. Tesla also plans to deploy an autonomous ride-sharing network with the Model S, X and 3 within the next few years, allowing for the company to become a dominate vertically-integrated player in the mobility industry. Additionally, traditional automakers looking to enter the ride-sharing sector were in for a shock after Lyft and Waymo announced a major partnership last week.

Hackett will concentrate on 3 main focuses for the company as it transforms into a mobility company:

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  • Sharpening operational execution across the global business to further enhance quality, go-to-market strategy; product launch, while decisively addressing underperforming parts of the business
  • Modernizing Ford’s business, using new tools and techniques to unleash innovation, speed decision making and improve efficiency. This includes increasingly leveraging big data, artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, 3D printing and more
  • Transforming the company to meet future challenges, ensuring the company has the right culture, talent, strategic processes and nimbleness to succeed as society’s needs and consumer behavior change over time

Dissimilar to Ford’s Fields, GM’s Mary Barra hasn’t been sitting on the sidelines this past year, Barra has made significant investments in the Mobility sector as she attempts to pivot the $53B behemoth. GM partnered and invested $500M into ride-share provider Lyft, launched the car-sharing company Maven, and purchased autonomous car startup, Cruise. All awhile, Ford’s Fields has been focused on cutting costs as Ford’s sales have been encroached by GM’s nearly all-new lineup.

Only time will tell if Hackett is cut out to battle the likes of Mary Barra, Elon Musk, John Krafcik, and Travis Kalanick, as the Mobility sector disrupts the massive automotive industry.

Source: New York TimesFord

Christian Prenzler is currently the VP of Business Development at Teslarati, leading strategic partnerships, content development, email newsletters, and subscription programs. Additionally, Christian thoroughly enjoys investigating pivotal moments in the emerging mobility sector and sharing these stories with Teslarati's readers. He has been closely following and writing on Tesla and disruptive technology for over seven years. You can contact Christian here: christian@teslarati.com

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Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”

Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.

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Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.

While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure

The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.

Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet

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Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.

Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.

As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.

Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.

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SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app

SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.

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SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.

Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.

Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.


Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.

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Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”

Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO

The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.

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Tesla saves its passengers again – This time after a 300-foot cliff fall in Malibu

A Tesla Model 3 fell 300 feet off a Malibu cliff and both passengers survived.

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A Tesla Model 3 plunged roughly 300 feet off a cliff on Mulholland Highway in Malibu on Friday morning, May 29, 2026, and both occupants survived. The crash was reported at approximately 7:30 a.m. near the 2500 block of Mulholland Highway, triggering a multi-agency rescue operation involving Malibu Search and Rescue, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the California Highway Patrol, and McCormick Ambulance.

When first responders arrived, the male driver was outside the vehicle shouting for help while the female passenger remained pinned inside the Tesla. Rescue crews rappelled down the cliffside on ropes to reach the wreckage. A flight medic was lowered by helicopter to begin treating both victims, and the driver was hoisted up to the roadway before crews used the Jaws of Life to free the trapped passenger. Both were airlifted to a local trauma center with moderate injuries despite a remarkable result for a fall that steep.

The outcome is not surprising, considering Model 3 earned an overall 5-star rating from NHTSA in every category and sub-category, and recorded the lowest probability of injury of any car ever evaluated by the U.S. New Car Assessment Program. The absence of a traditional engine in the front of the vehicle creates a longer crumple zone that absorbs impact energy before it reaches occupants, and the battery pack running along the floor gives the car an unusually low center of gravity that reinforces structural rigidity.

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This is not the first time a Tesla has kept passengers alive after going off a cliff. A Tesla Model Y carrying a family of four survived a plunge off a cliff at Devil’s Slide near San Francisco in January 2023, with two adults and two children walking away from a 250-foot fall. That incident drew widespread attention to how the structural integrity of Tesla’s electric platform performs in extreme crash scenarios that most vehicles would not survive.

Tesla Model Y driver who drove off cliff with family attempts to avoid criminal conviction

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