Hyundai is committing to fulfilling its electrification strategy, refusing to divest and putting effort toward other, potentially more in-demand powertrains as it continues to find its footing in the world of electric vehicles.
It is getting to the point where consumers are more prone to hybrid powertrains because they worry about the dependability, growth, and availability of the EV charging infrastructure.
This has put pressure on both pure and partial EV manufacturers. Companies that only build EVs, like Tesla, and companies that mix both, like Ford, are still working out ways to navigate this strange time in the EV story.
While some companies have chosen to put more focus on hybrids due to consumer demand, which is not totally far-fetched considering they need to cater to what customers want, others are drawing a line in the sand and sticking with a more aggressive EV sales strategy.
Hyundai is one of these companies.
In a recent interview with The Verge, Randy Parker, Hyundai Motor America’s CEO, reaffirmed the company’s commitment to electric vehicles as it narrows in on its long-term strategy for the transition to electrification.
Doubling Down
Parker is committed to making Hyundai a driving force in the EV sector. With robust competition from industry leaders like Tesla setting the pace, there are many other companies fighting to claim what is likely second place. Pure EV makers like Rivian and Lucid are still attempting to bolster their business by working toward profitability.
Meanwhile, large automakers that have been producing gas-powered cars for decades are keeping their EV businesses afloat by using profits from ICE sales to keep electrification efforts going. They’re even revising investment strategies and pulling back EV efforts in favor of hybrids.
Hyundai is not one of those companies, Parker said:
“While other manufacturers are pulling back on their electrification strategy, we continue to be focused on our products. And our products have done extremely well in the marketplace.”
Of course, companies have to shift strategies because of how their balance sheets look. Parker said that the U.S. market is encouraging and that Hyundai is “doing okay in the United States.”
The Priority is Affordability
Along with making highly competitive electric vehicles, they need to be at a price point where consumers can justify the purchase.
Hyundai is going a step further by ensuring that the ownership experience and driving an EV are also affordable.
Parker said the company’s priority is keeping the EV driving experience affordable.
“We’re trying to make driving an EV affordable, but at the same time removing some of those objections when it comes to range and charging.”
Additionally, some concerns have been raised by those who adopted Tesla’s NACS last year and are due to gain access to the widespread Supercharger Network this year. After Tesla offloaded some of its Supercharger team as a part of its layoff strategy, CEO Elon Musk said the automaker would focus on keeping uptime as high as possible and would work to expand already-built locations.
None of this has Parker concerned. He said Hyundai still plans to work with Tesla on using its Supercharger Network, and he has no reason to believe any other way:
“I haven’t been given any reason to doubt our strategy moving forward.”
Hyundai already has a strong business that ranked third in the world behind only Toyota and Volkswagen. Hedging that strength into its EV side is all it needs to do, and it’s on the right path, considering it is going all-in on EVs.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.
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Tesla’s surprise Roadster video hints the 2017 design is gone
Tesla ended its Semi event with a Roadster teaser revealing a new front light bar.
Tesla closed out its Semi event in Nevada on Thursday night with a nod to its own history, dropping a short Roadster teaser that suggests the production car will look noticeably different from the prototype first shown in 2017.
“We can’t have a Semi event without the Roadster,” Tesla engineering executive Lars Moravy told the crowd before the clip played. The line was a deliberate callback. Tesla first revealed the next generation Roadster in November 2017 by driving it out of the back of a Semi trailer at the truck’s original unveiling in Hawthorne, California.
The new video opens on trailer doors swinging apart in the dark. A thin white light bar glows across what appears to be the nose of the car, Tesla and SpaceX logos flash over the frame, and the Roadster name appears before the clip ends on “See you next week.” Tesla posted the nine second clip on X after the livestream wrapped.
See you next week pic.twitter.com/BT52bGVxFu
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 25, 2026
The light bar is the most concrete design detail so far. The 2017 prototype used two separate curved headlamp pods, while a connected front light strip would bring the Roadster in line with the Cybertruck, Cybercab, Semi, and refreshed Model Y. Sawyer Merritt was among the first to point out what looked like part of a SpaceX logo in the video, something Tesla has not addressed.
That logo fits the buildup around the optional SpaceX Package, which Elon Musk has long said would use cold gas thrusters to improve acceleration and possibly allow the car to briefly leave the ground. Tesla’s “Go for launch” post on September 12 set the October 1 date, and invitations sent to reservation holders place the event in Waco, Texas, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Waco sits roughly 20 minutes from SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test site, where the FAA has put a temporary flight restriction in place from September 18 through October 2, covering a 1.5 nautical mile radius from the surface up to 10,000 feet.
Tesla is also taking money ahead of the reveal. The company reopened Roadster reservations earlier this week with a $5,000 refundable card payment, followed by a $45,000 wire transfer due within 10 days. That puts buyers at $50,000 committed before Tesla has published a price.
The original pitch set a high bar: 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds before any upgrades, 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, and production in 2020. That timeline has slipped repeatedly, and Tesla has since pointed to production at Gigafactory Texas no earlier than 2027. The company has said next Thursday’s event will include pricing, specifications, and production targets, the three details original reservation holders have been waiting on for nearly nine years.
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s release in Europe is set to be delayed by at least a few months.
The European Union will not vote on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on October 6. The draft agenda for the 119th meeting of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only a 25-minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request, not a decision. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest date a bloc-wide vote could occur.
Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10.
That approval, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858, is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. The same committee has already discussed the request twice without voting.
Elon Musk’s reply to the delay was a single word: “Sigh.”
Sigh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2026
Seven EU countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia. Those seven states represent about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population. An EU-wide authorization still needs a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people.
Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets. France has already rejected the current system; several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point.
The safety case Tesla is putting in front of those governments is now public. On September 1, Tesla Europe said FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometers a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on EU public roads.
An earlier mid-year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometers in five approved countries, put the collision advantage at 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometers. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations, and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is taking over Europe: fourth country gets FSD approval
The public-health backdrop is harder to dispute. European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most of them attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. But the software is already legal and in daily use across seven member states.
Until TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: available in Prague and Amsterdam, locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap.
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SpaceX readies Starship Flight 14 for a historic journey into uncharted territory
SpaceX finished Starship’s Flight 14 rehearsal, clearing the way for its first orbital flight Monday.
SpaceX has cleared one of the last hurdles before Starship’s first trip to orbit. The company posted on X Thursday afternoon that its launch rehearsal for Flight 14 was complete, keeping the mission on track for Monday, September 28. The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. CT at Starbase, Texas, and runs for 75 minutes.
A wet dress rehearsal is essentially launch day without the launch. Crews fill Booster 21 and Ship 41 with thousands of tons of extremely cold propellant, run the countdown nearly to ignition, then drain everything back out. It lets engineers catch leaks or equipment problems before anything leaves the pad. SpaceX still needs a launch license from the FAA before the stack, which stands 407 feet tall, can fly.
Flight 14 matters because of where it is going. All 13 previous Starship flights followed a suborbital path, which works like throwing a ball extremely high and far: the vehicle reaches space, but it is always on a course that brings it back down within about an hour. This time, Ship 41 will perform a short engine firing called an orbital insertion burn roughly 25 minutes after liftoff, giving it enough speed to keep falling around Earth instead of back into it. SpaceX plans about six laps at an altitude near 275 kilometers (171 miles) over nearly 10 hours, as Teslarati detailed when the mission was first announced.
Launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14 pic.twitter.com/h5LBYyBqi4
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 24, 2026
Getting into orbit also means Starship has to prove it can get back out. The ship must relight a single Raptor engine in space to slow down for reentry. SpaceX says it will only attempt the orbital insertion burn after flight controllers confirm the hardware needed for that return burn has enough backup, and its flight plan includes health checks that could shorten the mission to two or five orbits.
Flight 14 is also the first to put working satellites into service. Flight 13 carried 20 Starlink V3 satellites in July, but they came back down with the ship because that mission never reached orbit. This time, 26 V3 satellites are meant to stay up and join the constellation within a few weeks. Together they add about 26 terabits per second of network capacity, which SpaceX says is roughly 10 times what a single Falcon 9 launch of older V2 Mini satellites adds. Three of them carry cameras that will photograph Starship’s heat shield in orbit to check for tile damage before reentry.
The hardware has changed too. Ship 41 flies with extra fasteners on tiles in the most vulnerable areas, fixes for gaps where superheated plasma slipped behind tiles, and curved tiles designed to reduce heating between them. Two tiles recovered from Ship 40 will fly again, the first reuse of any part of a Starship heat shield. Booster 21 carries better engine filtering and new relight software after ice clogged three center engines on the previous booster, leaving only eight of 13 engines to restart for its landing burn.
Ship 41 is targeting a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a new recovery zone after several Indian Ocean landings, while Booster 21 aims for the Gulf. Neither will be caught by the tower on this flight. Elon Musk said in August that a ship catch was likely “in a few months.”
Tesla’s surprise Roadster video hints the 2017 design is gone
Tesla Full Self-Driving release in the EU gets delayed
