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How Tesla Challenges Other Car Makers
Tesla challenges other car makers to build better cars says Diarmuid O’Connell, Telsa’s vice president of business development at an industry conference.
Tesla Motor service center. (Source: Tesla Motors)
Diarmuid O’Connell, Tesla’s VP of business development, had harsh words for competitors last week at the CAR management briefing seminars in Michigan. He told the group that Tesla challenges other car makers to build better cars.
“You can split the market of EVs into two programs,” he said. “Many are compliance programs. Exceptions are Nissan, ourselves and BMW. Most are focused on minimum compliance, lowest common denominator behavior, and the vehicles reflect that. In some respect, they are appliances, in terms of the way they look.”
CARB And The EPA
His remarks come at a time when two important regulatory programs are up for review. The California Air Resources Board is taking a look at its zero emissions vehicle policies and the Environmental Protection Agency is considering changes to its CAFE standards.
Traditional car makers are trying to get both agencies to relax those standards, but O’Connell says they should stop trying to “slow walk” the rate of progress toward a emissions free future and get busy building better cars. He says his company wants California and the EPA to raise their standards, not relax them.
“From an empirical standpoint, the [regulations] are very weak, eminently achievable and the only thing missing is the will to put compelling products on the road,” he said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
This week, Mary Nichols, CARB chairwoman since 2007, announced that she isn’t satisfied with having just a few electric cars on California roads. The current standard calls for 2.7% of all cars sold in California to be electric. Nichols wants to set the bar higher. In fact, she would like it if all the cars sold in California were electric by 2030.
For its part, the automotive industry is busy telling the EPA that the current CAFE standards are too high. Any further tightening would be bad for business. “We need consumers to buy them in high volumes to meet the steep climb in fuel economy standards ahead,” the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an industry lobbying group, told the conference. The implication is that higher standards will kill the automotive business, cause massive layoffs, and have a negative impact on the economy.
This is precisely the same argument the automobile industry made about safety related changes in the ’50’s, seat belts in the 60’s, exhaust emission in the 70’s, airbags in the 90’s and better crash test performance at the beginning of the 21st century. Its complaints today are just more of the same.
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CAFE Olay
The furor over EPA standards is actually a tempest in a teapot. On the surface of it, the 54.5 mpg requirement by 2025 seems like a huge increase above present day performance. But in reality, that standard is based on the old EPA mileage testing protocol, which was amended several years ago because it resulted in numbers that were wildly optimistic.
When the EPA adopted a new standard designed to better reflect real world expectations, it did not apply the new standard to the computation of the 2025 goal. If it did, that 54.5 mpg number would convert to around 37 mpg — which many of today’s cars are already capable of achieving.
To suggest that car companies cannot achieve a CAFE of 37 mpg using the current EPA protocol is patently absurd. In fact, a representative of Johnson Controls, one of the largest suppliers of components to the automobile manufacturing , said last year that car makers can easily meet the new standard and, in fact, many are already doing so today with internal combustion cars.
Charging Technology
One area where other manufacturers need to step up involves recharging technology for EVs and plug-in cars. At present, the best any of those other cars can handle is 50 kW. Tesla already has Superchargers with more than double that capacity. It’s new liquid cooled charging cables indicate the company has even higher power chargers in mind for the future.
O’Connell told the conference that drivers of competitors’ cars would be welcome to use the Supercharger network if only their cars were capable of handling the higher current. Tesla made its Supercharger patents public last year, but no other manufacturer has expressed any interest in them. Instead, the industry seems content to live with 50 kW “fast chargers” that really aren’t all that fast.
The Week In Review
Tesla has had a rough week. The stock market was disappointed with what Elon Musk had to say during the 2nd quarter conference call and punished the company’s stock, which closed down nearly 9% for the week.
The real question on people’s minds is whether Tesla will bring electric cars to the masses the way the Model T put the world on wheels almost a century ago, or whether it is a company that caters only to the wealthy and will flame out the way the Concorde SST did? If you are reading this, chances are we know how you would answer that question.
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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
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Elon Musk
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
SpaceX released new footage of Starship in space captured by the Starlink satellites it deployed.
SpaceX released a new video Friday evening showing Starship from an angle showcased by its own Starlink satellites, watching the rocket drift away in orbit.
The 65 second clip, posted on X, stitches together footage from four cameras mounted on a single Starlink V3 satellite. It opens with a close view of Starship’s 171 foot upper stage, still catching sunlight, then pulls back as the two spacecraft separate.
The footage comes from Starship’s 13th flight test, which launched July 24 from Starbase after a scrubbed attempt and an abort caused by an engine issue the week before. When Flight 13 finally flew, it carried the first batch of functional Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever deployed, twenty of them, with six equipped with cameras meant to scan the ship’s heat shield during reentry.
View of Starship in space from a Starlink V3 satellite on Flight 13.
This composite is made of imagery from four separate cameras on a single satellite. Six of the satellites were equipped with cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to… pic.twitter.com/sNTHHz5vLr
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 31, 2026
Flight 13 checked most of its boxes. Starship deployed all 20 satellites, relit a Raptor engine in space, and splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Musk’s longer term plan calls for a Starlink V3 constellation of 100,000 satellites, according to a recent FCC filing, with Starship as the only vehicle capable of launching them at the volume that requires. Each Starship flight is designed to carry up to 60 V3 satellites once the vehicle reaches routine service, well beyond what Falcon 9 can carry in a single mission.
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Starship is next expected to fly with an attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, a maneuver SpaceX has so far reserved for the Super Heavy booster.
Tesla flexed the new features of the Model Y L with a dedicated media event at the company’s Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The Model Y L is the extended-wheelbase version of the all-electric crossover, which has been voted the best-selling car in the world on three occasions. The vehicle is already rolling off production lines at Gigafactory Texas, and first deliveries are slated to take place later this year.
Tesla brings Model Y L ‘Launch Series’ to the U.S. at $61,990
Teslarati was invited to the event, but due to some scheduling conflicts, we could not make it to Los Angeles. Instead, we will have our hands on a media unit sometime in August, so we’ll be able to spend some more extended time with the Model Y L.
However, plenty of those who made it to LA shared some cool features that set the Model Y L apart from the Model Y.
Multi-Row Climate Control
Tesla fitted the Model Y L with full climate control on all three rows on the front screen. It can be adjusted by selecting which row you’d like to modify on the right-hand side of the touch screen:
The Model Y L has a little row of icons on the right side of the climate screen so the front passenger can more quickly jump to whatever row they want to control. pic.twitter.com/uJS44mgCvk
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 30, 2026
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Better Rear Window Visibility
One of the strangest things about the Model Y, especially the Juniper iteration, is the rear window has extremely limited visibility when looking into the rearview mirror.
Tesla has improved upon this with the Model Y L:
This is a drastic difference. https://t.co/wTdhitD5aA pic.twitter.com/z6hFs0Jkss
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 30, 2026
PowerShare will be included
Model Y L will come with PowerShare in North America, with an 11.5kW output to your home. Tesla said it would require Powerwall 3 for operation.
Wireless Charging Pad
There has been some speculation that Tesla would upgrade the wireless charging pads in the United States, but this is not the case.
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Tesla owner fixes common feature complaint with crafty DIY retrofit
Tesla confirmed that it does not come with the cooled pads as the Y L in China does. This is because North America has not adopted Qi charging yet.
Thermal Management Improvements
These improvements in the Model Y L were seen with thermal management:
- Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
- +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather, 7 miles of real-world range gained
- 8x more solar energy reflection off of glass roof
- 30% reduction in solar energy entering the cabin
Some of the thermal management improvements in the new Model Y L Premium:
• Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
• Up to 15 min faster cabin cooling in sunny conditions
• +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather +7 miles of real-world range gained
• +10 miles recovered after… pic.twitter.com/jZirFWFdtO— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 31, 2026
Demand
Tesla said the Model Y L is almost sold out in the U.S. It comes with
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- 1 year of FSD Supervised
- 1 year of Supercharging
- 1 year of Premium Connectivity
- Free exterior paint color, interior, and wheel option at no additional cost
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
