There is a storm brewing in Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg plant, and it can very well make or break the career of CEO Herbert Diess, a strong proponent for the company’s transition to electric mobility. As problems continue to pile up for Volkswagen’s electric car program, the ID.3, a vehicle considered to be a rival to the Tesla Model 3, is starting to turn into a cautionary tale.
An extensive report from German news outlet Manager Magazin provided an in-depth look at the current state of Volkswagen’s electric vehicle initiative. According to the esteemed magazine, experts and top managers from the automaker are now meeting every working day in a massive push to get the ID.3 ready for consumer deliveries. But despite their disciplined efforts, the affordable EV is proving stubborn, causing notable delays in its release.
The Volkswagen ID.3 is an essential car for the German automaker, being a personal project for Diess, who has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in the auto industry pushing for electrification. More than a vehicle that can potentially beat the Tesla Model 3 in terms of pricing, the ID.3 is also the automaker’s key in avoiding €10 billion worth of emissions fines this year. Without the ID.3, the penalties cannot be avoided. Even with the vehicle on the market, VW would have to sell about 100,000 in 2020 to meet the company’s CO2 targets.
But the Volkswagen ID.3 ramp has been rife with issues. While the vehicles can be produced efficiently using the company’s extensive experience in car manufacturing, the ID.3’s software has proven troublesome. Simply put, the software of the vehicle does not work as it should, and VW experts have pointed the finger at the company’s haste in rolling out the all-electric car for production. Volkswagen experts have noted that the ID.3’s underlying architecture was developed too hastily, as the car’s system parts often don’t understand each other, resulting in errors.
Thus, every day, those involved with the ID.3 project meet and try to solve the car’s underlying issues. Manager Magazin‘s sources note that Volkswagen is now operating at an almost military level in its efforts to fix the ID.3’s software issues, but still, hundreds of test drivers report new faults in the vehicle nearly every day. One of the magazine’s sources, who claimed to be present in these meetings, noted that up to 300 faults could be reported in one day.
Amidst these issues, Volkswagen has adjusted the ID.3’s target from 100,000 in 2020 to just 80,000. Fortunately for the German automaker, it is a big company, and it includes carmakers such as Audi and Porsche, both of whom have already released their respective electric cars. But even these two companies’ EVs are not exactly rolling out smoothly either. The e-tron recently halted its production due to battery constraints from LG Chem, prompting Audi to lower the premium SUV’s forecast from 70,000 to 40,000 this year. The Porsche Taycan, despite excellent reviews from car enthusiasts, is also getting its deliveries in Germany delayed.
Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess has stated that the shift to electric mobility will be difficult, noting at a top management conference last month that the compliance with the limits for supplying, building, and selling battery electric vehicles was “perhaps the most difficult task Volkswagen has ever had to face.” Considering the ID.3 program’s progress so far, as well as reports that the Porsches and Piëchs, VW’s major owners, are growing restless, it appears that the company’s EV challenges may just be beginning.
Ultimately, the ID.3’s issues are an unfortunate roadblock to the EV movement as a whole. The vehicle, after all, is a mass-market car, and it has the potential to be the second coming of the ubiquitous Beetle. The company just has to get its software settled and refined first–something that a small carmaker from Silicon Valley seems to have predicted when it started developing its first vehicles less than two decades ago.
H/T to JPR007.
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Elon Musk is, in many respects, one of the biggest and most influential figures in modern-day artificial intelligence.
Given that Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI are all looked at in their respective fields as leaders to an extent, each of them has a heavy influence on the future of AI, even though two of them are not thought of, at face value, as AI companies.
Musk has grand expectations for what is to come with AI, not only as a form of assistance to make human lives easier, but to make humans multiplanetary and solve some of the biggest issues that face us today. But even he is astounded by AI’s pace of progress.
He believes that in two years, AI will be so mind-blowing it might be unrecognizable.
Given that AI from 2 years ago feels so old that it should be in a museum, then obviously AI 2 years from now will be mind-blowing https://t.co/TcsKZ8o8OE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2026
This progress can be seen in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most popular way people have shown AI’s progress, especially on social media, is through an incredibly arbitrary way of watching Will Smith eat spaghetti:
The progression in AI of Will Smith eating spaghetti (2023 – 2026) pic.twitter.com/VDv82mB5gs
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) February 10, 2026
This is a great way to show people how AI is improving, especially from a perspective that examines how it can manufacture images and video from prompts. AI is an incredibly complex concept, however, and it goes much deeper than Will Smith eating Italian food.
Musk’s most widely adopted method of AI is likely Tesla Full Self-Driving, which impacts millions of people as they utilize it to increase safety with their travel. Musk has routinely pushed incredibly aggressive timelines for self-driving, especially unsupervised.
Perhaps this perspective is why he feels that things will be solved in a timeframe that is much more aggressive than most of us would think. Regardless, the progress of AI is moving fast, and it seems that Musk’s expectations for it could be high.
But if it can actually achieve full-length motion pictures and even more realistic production value, it will be hard to distinguish between reality and AI very soon.
Tesla just officially confirmed it has built its 10 millionth car, a major milestone for the company that started producing sustainable electric powertrains less than two decades ago.
In that time, Tesla has truly revolutionized the automotive industry, disrupting the idea of what a car should be, how it should be fueled, and how it truly impacts day-to-day life.
10 million vehicles produced globally.
Congrats to all Tesla teams! pic.twitter.com/JkcraR63bs— Tesla Manufacturing (@gigafactories) July 30, 2026
Tesla achieved this feat across four production facilities: the Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, Gigafactory Shanghai in China, Gigafactory Berlin in Germany, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin, Texas.
The 10 millionth vehicle was a Diamond Black Model Y.
Over the course of the past roughly 18 years, Tesla has evolved its lineup from a sporty sedan built on a Lotus body to a lineup of various body styles, performance metrics, and other characteristics that make each one unique.
This is an incredible achievement for a company that is young compared to what it goes up against. When Tesla entered the automotive market, Ford, GM, and Stellantis widely dominated the playing field. Since then, Tesla has caused such a disruption that these three massive brands had to scramble to create EV projects of their own.
Despite their best efforts, they have not been able to match the prowess or the effectiveness of Tesla. They are all reliant on Tesla’s charging infrastructure, their software is inferior, and their self-driving projects are elementary in comparison.
Tesla felt its fair share of growing pains over the years as well. As recent at 2019, there were complaints about build quality, paint quality, and overall luxuriousness. These things have all been improved upon through the company’s maturity, and these strides in quality have led to this 10 million vehicle production achievement, something that other small-and-scrappy EV makers will hope to accomplish one day.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
Elon Musk has a crazy prediction about AI in two years
Tesla just built it 10 millionth car
