Tesla’s battle with the FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) campaign in China continues after a Model X owner claims the brakes on his all-electric SUV are faulty. The man was caught admitting that the story is fabricated, telling local media that “I know my car has nothing wrong with it.”
Over the past several months, Tesla has been sparring with owners in China who appear to be a part of an effort to derail the company’s momentum in the country. It all started a couple of months ago at the Shanghai Auto Show when a woman invaded Tesla’s booth at the event by jumping on top of a Model 3 and claiming that her brakes had failed during a drive with her father. The drive ended in an accident, and she blames it on Tesla’s “faulty brakes.”
She was sentenced to serve a few days in jail and has made every attempt to make her case as public as possible. She has gone as far as spraypainting the car as it sat outside of a Tesla showroom in China and has also denied any attempt that Tesla has made to resolve the issue. The automaker published a lengthy statement in May, indicating that it had offered to pay for a third-party company to assess the potential of a brake issue while paying for the study. She denied this and also said that data released by the automaker, which proved that the owner’s father, who was driving the vehicle at the time, traveled at excessive speeds during the journey and also had utilized the brakes successfully many times in the moments leading up to the accident, could have been fabricated or tampered with by Tesla.
The Tesla Model Y is leading China’s electric SUV segment by a wide margin
This hasn’t been the only instance, and those who have decided to turn against the automaker have made it abundantly clear that there will be more attempts in the future to claim that Tesla’s vehicles are faulty and dangerous.
Model X Owner claims faulty brakes, Tesla responds
Now, a Model X owner in China named Mr. Wen is claiming that his vehicle has faulty brakes and is demanding that Tesla provide him with a newly refreshed Model X.
According to a statement on Tesla’s Weibo page, Wen suffered an accident in his vehicle, and Tesla reached out to him to figure out the issue. “At present, the initial remote diagnosis of the cause of the vehicle alarm is the right front wheel speed sensor, and the vehicle used by Mr. Wen at the time of failure…may be due to contamination of the wheel speed sensor or damage to the sensor line,” Tesla said (via @Ray4Tesla). “Mr. Wen’s vehicle has traveled more than 175,000 kilometers, which has exceeded the vehicle warranty.”
Tesla then suggested that the vehicle be towed to a Service Center in China so that it could be examined to determine the reason for failure and fixed properly. However, Wen has continued to drive the car over 800 kilometers, Tesla says, and has gone as far as claiming on the internet “that the vehicle has failed and it was dangerous.”
Tesla says it hopes that Mr. Wen will allow the company to conduct inspections and repair the car so it can be used normally as soon as possible.
Mr. Wen admits to media that “I know my car has nothing wrong with it”
According to Tesla, the blog Teslabot broke a recording of Mr. Wen admitting that the car has no issues. In a series of statements, he said, “I know my car has nothing wrong with it,” and “The coil is aging, or it is worn during the car wash. This is suspected to be the problem, my car will not have any major problems.”
Wen said that he didn’t have money to find media exposure and that “If you don’t make trouble, you can defend your rights normally, our police station will not participate.”
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- Credit: Tesla Weibo via @Ray4Tesla
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- Credit: Tesla Weibo via @Ray4Tesla
According to the post on Weibo, the media outlet Henan Guan Lei TV has deleted all of the reports of Tesla vehicle issues in China.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that those who have claimed that Tesla’s vehicles have issues have admitted that their story was fabricated. It’s actually happened on several occasions, with many of the perpetrators admitting that their issues were made up for media attention.
Tesla has also battled falsified and non-verified reports of lackluster sales figures. Most recently, a claim that indicated Tesla’s registrations in China in May had reduced by 50% was shrugged off by the Secretary General of the Chinese Passenger Car Association.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below, or be sure to email me at joey@teslarati.com or on Twitter @KlenderJoey.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
