News
Porsche halts new vehicle sales in Europe to adjust to new emissions standards
Porsche has temporarily suspended the sale of new vehicles in Europe, due to the company’s current offerings not meeting the region’s new emissions standards. Buyers using Porsche’s online vehicle configurator for Europe were prompted with a message informing visitors that due to a “pending model revision,” vehicles under the company’s lineup are not available as freely configurable cars.
The reason behind the surprising halt to Porsche’s sales lies in Europe’s new Euro 6 emissions regulations, which are scheduled to be fully enforced come September. The new standards, consisting of the Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTP) and Real Driving Emissions (RDE), were imposed by the EU last September, according to a report from German news agency Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
After the announcement of the new standards last September, regulators allowed manufacturers such as Porsche to sell cars that were certified with the 1997-era New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) for another year. These are the vehicles that Porsche is currently rushing to deliver before the September deadline. Porsche vehicles that are fully compliant with the new emissions standards, such as the Cayenne and the Panamera, are expected to be unavailable until around March 2019.
It’s not just Porsche that has been hit with Europe’s new emissions standards. According to the German publication, legacy automakers BMW and Volkswagen have also halted the sale of some of their offerings. BMW, for one, has stopped the sale of the BMW 7-Series, BMW X5, and the BMW M3. While Porsche has halted the sale of new vehicles in Europe, however, the company continues to allow buyers in North America and Asia to order and configure new cars.
Porsche has arguably begun an earnest embrace of electric car technology. Its highly anticipated Mission E sedan — a vehicle seen as a potential rival to the best-selling Tesla Model S — is expected to hit the market sometime next year. The Mission E has Tesla Model S-rivaling specs, including a 0-60 mph time of 3.5 seconds, a range of 310 miles, and a maximum speed of 155 mph.
Just recently, a prototype of the Mission E sedan was taken around the track by former Formula One driver Mark Webber. During his brief test drive of the electric car, Webber noted that the Mission E had noticeable similarities to the Porsche 919 Hybrid, a hybrid sports-prototype racing car that he drove to compete in endurance races such as the FIA World Endurance Championship and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The Porsche Mission E Cross Turismo.
Porsche is not just developing one electric car, however. Earlier this year at the Geneva Motor Show, the German legacy automaker also unveiled the Mission E Cross Turismo, a more rugged variant of its four-door sedan. During its unveiling, Porsche noted that the Mission E Cross Turismo would hit the market early next decade.
The German automaker is also laying the foundations of a charging network for its electric cars. Dubbed the IONITY Network, Porsche’s ultra-fast chargers are designed to have an output of 350 kW, far beyond the ~140 kW max output of Tesla’s Superchargers.
During Tesla’s Q1 2018 earnings call, however, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and CTO JB Straubel noted that Porsche’s 350 kW electric car chargers would likely “frag” the battery and not be beneficial to drivers. Thus, according to Musk, Tesla’s Supercharger V3 network would feature an output of around 200-250 kW.
News
Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’
“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026.”
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s newest model is coming very soon, and from what it sounds like, it could be “the last big piece of the puzzle,” as CEO Elon Musk said in late November.
During the xAI Hackathon on Tuesday, Musk was available for a Q&A session, where he revealed some details about Robotaxi and Tesla’s plans for removing Robotaxi Safety Monitors, and some information on a future FSD model.
While he said Full Self-Driving’s unsupervised capability is “pretty much solved,” and confirmed it will remove Safety Monitors in the next three weeks, questions about the company’s ability to give this FSD version to current owners came to mind.
Musk said a new FSD model is coming in about a month or two that will be an order-of-magnitude larger and will include more reasoning and reinforcement learning.
He said:
“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026. We’re gonna add a lot of reasoning and RL (reinforcement learning). To get to serious scale, Tesla will probably need to build a giant chip fab. To have a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year, I don’t see that capability coming online fast enough, so we will probably have to build a fab.”
NEWS: Elon Musk says FSD Unsupervised is “pretty much solved at this point” and that @Tesla will be launching Robotaxis with no safety monitors in about 3 weeks in Austin, Texas. He also teased a new FSD model is coming in about 1-2 months.
“We’re just going through validation… https://t.co/Msne72cgMB pic.twitter.com/i3wfKX3Z0r
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) December 10, 2025
It rings back to late November when Musk said that v14.3 “is where the last big piece of the puzzle finally lands.”
With the advancements made through Full Self-Driving v14 and v14.2, there seems to be a greater confidence in solving self-driving completely. Musk has also personally said that driver monitoring has been more relaxed, and looking at your phone won’t prompt as many alerts in the latest v14.2.1.
This is another indication that Tesla is getting closer to allowing people to take their eyes off the road completely.
Along with the Robotaxi program’s success, there is evidence that Tesla could be close to solving FSD. However, it is not perfect. We’ve had our own complaints with FSD, and although we feel it is the best ADAS on the market, it is not, in its current form, able to perform everything needed on roads.
But it is close.
That’s why there is some legitimate belief that Tesla could be releasing a version capable of no supervision in the coming months.
All we can say is, we’ll see.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX IPO is coming, CEO Elon Musk confirms
However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon. Musk replied, basically confirming it.
Elon Musk confirmed through a post on X that a SpaceX initial public offering (IPO) is on the way after hinting at it several times earlier this year.
It also comes one day after Bloomberg reported that SpaceX was aiming for a valuation of $1.5 trillion, adding that it wanted to raise $30 billion.
Musk has been transparent for most of the year that he wanted to try to figure out a way to get Tesla shareholders to invest in SpaceX, giving them access to the stock.
He has also recognized the issues of having a public stock, like litigation exposure, quarterly reporting pressures, and other inconveniences.
However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon.
Musk replied, basically confirming it:
As usual, Eric is accurate
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2025
Berger believes the IPO would help support the need for $30 billion or more in capital needed to fund AI integration projects, such as space-based data centers and lunar satellite factories. Musk confirmed recently that SpaceX “will be doing” data centers in orbit.
AI appears to be a “key part” of SpaceX getting to Musk, Berger also wrote. When writing about whether or not Optimus is a viable project and product for the company, he says that none of that matters. Musk thinks it is, and that’s all that matters.
It seems like Musk has certainly mulled something this big for a very long time, and the idea of taking SpaceX public is not just likely; it is necessary for the company to get to Mars.
The details of when SpaceX will finally hit that public status are not known. Many of the reports that came out over the past few days indicate it would happen in 2026, so sooner rather than later.
But there are a lot of things on Musk’s plate early next year, especially with Cybercab production, the potential launch of Unsupervised Full Self-Driving, and the Roadster unveiling, all planned for Q1.
Tesla has added the 15th automaker to the growing list of companies whose EVs can utilize the Supercharger Network this year, as BMW is the latest company to gain access to the largest charging infrastructure in the world.
BMW became the 15th company in 2025 to gain Tesla Supercharger access, after the company confirmed to its EV owners that they could use any of the more than 25,000 Supercharging stalls in North America.
Welcome @BMW owners.
Download the Tesla app to charge → https://t.co/vnu0NHA7Ab
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) December 10, 2025
Newer BMW all-electric cars, like the i4, i5, i7, and iX, are able to utilize Tesla’s V3 and V4 Superchargers. These are the exact model years, via the BMW Blog:
- i4: 2022-2026 model years
- i5: 2024-2025 model years
- 2026 i5 (eDrive40 and xDrive40) after software update in Spring 2026
- i7: 2023-2026 model years
- iX: 2022-2025 model years
- 2026 iX (all versions) after software update in Spring 2026
With the expansion of the companies that gained access in 2025 to the Tesla Supercharger Network, a vast majority of non-Tesla EVs are able to use the charging stalls to gain range in their cars.
So far in 2025, Tesla has enabled Supercharger access to:
- Audi
- BMW
- Genesis
- Honda
- Hyundai
- Jaguar Land Rover
- Kia
- Lucid
- Mercedes-Benz
- Nissan
- Polestar
- Subaru
- Toyota
- Volkswagen
- Volvo
Drivers with BMW EVs who wish to charge at Tesla Superchargers must use an NACS-to-CCS1 adapter. In Q2 2026, BMW plans to release its official adapter, but there are third-party options available in the meantime.
They will also have to use the Tesla App to enable Supercharging access to determine rates and availability. It is a relatively seamless process.
Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’
SpaceX IPO is coming, CEO Elon Musk confirms
