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Tesla won’t be ‘king of the hill’ forever, but it will be for the foreseeable future
Tesla is the “king of the hill” in the electric vehicle sector, former company board member Steve Westly said on CNBC’s Power Lunch yesterday. However, Westly, who joined Tesla in 2007 and left several years later, doesn’t believe the automaker will remain at the helm of the EV industry forever. Driven by growing competition from both low-end and high-end automakers, Westly says Tesla’s time at the top is dependent on its competition, because other markets, like Europe, have pushed Tesla to the wayside in favor of other companies.
While it is safe to say Tesla won’t be at the top of the EV industry “forever,” it is certainly also safe to say that they will lead the sector for a considerable amount of time. With legacy automakers dragging their feet and releasing electric vehicle models for the first time in 2021 and beyond, they sit years behind Tesla, whose only focus is building sustainable, high-performance battery electric vehicles. Meanwhile, companies like Ford and GM continue to drag their feet in the mission of developing a lineup of EVs, and European car companies face issues related to production, transitioning away from ICE, and software. Volkswagen is the automaker that comes to mind with the latter issue.
Westly cited GM going all-electric by 2035, Volkswagen indicating that they’re “all in” on EVs, and Volvo, who announced an all-EV lineup by 2030, as indicators that Tesla won’t be the king forever.
But what have any of these car companies done to prove that Tesla won’t be on the top in 2030? 2035? 2050, even?
It is true that Tesla has fallen a tad in terms of European EV sales figures, but it’s not for no reason. Tesla has not yet started the operation of Giga Berlin, its introductory European production facility that could bring at least 500,000 cars to the market every year. Refusing to export Model Y variants from the United States or China, Europe is stuck with the Model S, Model X, and the Model 3, but only for a few months as Giga Berlin is set to begin production during Summer 2021.
While it is true that Tesla is facing competition from both economical EV brands and luxury manufacturers, this fact alone is a testament to the wide range of EVs that the company is able to offer. Not only is Tesla manufacturing the Model 3 and Model Y, which are more than affordable to many families across the world, but it is also making a point to continue the production and sale of its two, more luxurious models: the Model S and Model X. Not necessarily a huge contributor to the company’s yearly production and delivery targets, both of the vehicles were put off as “sentimental” projects by Elon Musk several years ago. However, a recent refresh to both of these cars seems to indicate that the flagship Tesla vehicles are not going anywhere anytime soon.
In the United States, Tesla reigns supreme with the Model 3 and Model Y. In China, the only car to dethrone the Model 3 is an inexpensive, low-range GM project known as the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV that boasts between 80 and 110 miles of range per charge. In Europe, Tesla was once the “King of the Hill.” But, the lack of a production facility ultimately dethroned the company’s title as the highest-selling EV brand on the continent most thirsty for electric powertrains. When Giga Berlin begins production, this will likely change, and Tesla will reopen its potential to compete with the brands that have ruled the European EV sector for the last few years.
Tesla has continued to grow and expand its footprint through a few challenging years, which indicates that, despite the proven adversity that will likely always exist, the company is robust enough to deflect most of the challenges that come its way. Despite production bottlenecks in 2017 with the Model 3, continued issues in 2018, and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Tesla has sustained a growth pattern that most automotive startups can only dream about. The point that Westly made about Tesla not being “King of the Hill” forever is true, but the foreseeable future belongs to Tesla. Until a company comes along and proves otherwise, Elon Musk’s EV company will remain at the helm, as long as it continues to develop a series of mind-blowing EV products that offer range, performance, and aesthetics that are unmatched by any car company within the last decade.
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Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Tesla will resolve its massive recall of nearly three million vehicles in China with stickers and a software update.
On Friday, Chinese regulators filed recall plans against Tesla, Xiaomi, Leapmotor, Xpeng, Chery, Geely, Dongfeng, Arcfox, and FAW to resolve what is essentially a carbon-copy issue throughout each of the companies’ vehicle models: emergency door release latches are simply not visible enough.
Tesla door handle saga gets its latest chapter and a big change is coming
The companies will be required to add things that will make these latches, which will open the door in the event of an emergency, more visible. Of the 7 million vehicles impacted, Tesla accounts for 2,975,910 units. More than 1.9 million of those are Model Y vehicles, with the rest, just over 970,000, being Model 3s.
To resolve the issue, Tesla is going to add warning labels to the emergency latches free of charge, and then utilize an Over-the-Air update to add a post-crash window-lowering strategy, according to CNEVpost.
This massive effort to fix the all-electric Model Y and Model 3’s emergency latch system comes just months after several probes across various markets identified the trouble some had identifying this latch. Those who had gotten involved in car accidents that stripped the vehicle of its power were not aware that every Tesla has emergency door latches.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said that severe crashes that disable a vehicle’s low-voltage system could not only hinder occupants from getting out, but also make it more difficult for emergency response workers to gain entry.
SAMR is starting to tighten the regulations it has on door handles on vehicles. A new mandatory national standard will take effect for all models starting January 1, 2027, and will require all doors to be equipped with mechanical release mechanisms. This will effectively end purely electronic door handles. Models already on sale with type approval have been granted a two-year transition period, which will enable things to change until January 2029.
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
