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Tesla Model Y keeps its place as China’s top-selling premium SUV in January — despite heavy exports

Credit: Tesla Greater China/Twitter

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Despite Tesla China focusing heavily on exports in January 2022, the Model Y managed to retain its place as one of the country’s best-selling vehicles. As per data from the China Automotive Technology and Research Center (CATARC), Tesla sold a total of 16,496 Model Y domestically in January, making it the country’s top premium SUV. 

With such results, the Model Y effectively dominated competitors from both international and local rivals. The gap between Tesla’s crossover and its competition is quite notable as well, as the second-best-selling premium SUV in China, the Lixiang ONE, sold 12,426 units over the month. Other premium SUVs sold far less, such as the NIO ES6, which sold 5,525 units, and the BMW iX3, which sold 1,914 units in January. 

There is something quite impressive about the Model Y’s performance in China last month. Tesla China, after all, adopts a strategy where the first half of every quarter is heavily allotted for exports. This meant that in January, the Model Y’s domestic sales in China were throttled by a substantial degree. Despite this, the vehicle still finished the month as the country’s best-selling premium SUV. 

As per data from the China Passenger Car Association, Tesla China’s wholesale figures for January 2022 reached 59,845 vehicles, a 286.5% increase year-over-year. From this number, 40,499 vehicles were exported to foreign territories, while 19,346 were sold domestically. Considering that the Model Y accounted for 16,496 of the company’s domestic sales, it appears that the crossover SUV is gaining some considerable traction in the local auto market. 

While Tesla China is already increasing its vehicle production output at an impressive rate, the company plans to accelerate its growth even more in the coming years. Tesla CFO Zachary Kirkhorn outlined this during the Q4 and FY 2021 earnings call, when he stated that the company’s goals of achieving 50% growth year-over-year should be possible with just the Fremont Factory and Giga Shanghai. 

“We continue to drive for vehicle volume growth at or above 50%, as Elon mentioned, and our plans show that this is actually achievable with just our Fremont and Shanghai factories. For quite some time now, these factories have been running below capacity due to macro challenges with supply and logistics… From what we’re seeing, the pace of growth in 2022 will again be determined by supply chain and logistics, which is quite difficult for us to forecast,” Kirkhorn said. 

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Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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Elon Musk

Tesla is fixing Full Self-Driving’s pothole problem

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Tesla Model Y L in a field
Credit: Tesla

Tesla Full Self-Driving is set to get a major fix with pothole avoidance, a feature that CEO Elon Musk said recently was “coming soon.” The feature has been included within the FSD v14 release notes for some time as an upcoming improvement.

Potholes come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing is universal about them, and that is the fact that every driver wants to avoid them. Driving into or over a pothole can cause tire and wheel damage, alignment issues, and even, in some more severe instances, injury to occupants or major damage to a vehicle in despair.

Tesla Cybercab uses a unique strategy for picking up the right rider

Musk said late last night in a post that pothole avoidance while utilizing the Full Self-Driving suite is “coming soon.”

Full Self-Driving, even in its most recent and robust forms, still has its shortcomings. While the suite has performed exceptionally well with avoiding on-road obstacles like cardboard boxes, horse droppings, car parts, and other debris, it still seems to struggle with recognizing certain things.

Potholes and other abrupt changes in a road’s layout are things that FSD still tends to struggle with. Perhaps the suite’s 3D modeling is still in need of some additional data or some sort of script that will help it to avoid a potentially destructive pothole or bump in the road that would be easily recognizable by the human eye.

Musk has mentioned pothole avoidance for some time, with the initial idea coming in April 2019 when an owner first requested the feature. Musk said that Tesla would “definitely” develop pothole avoidance.

In August 2020, Musk said Tesla was in the process of labeling bumps and potholes so cars can either slow down or steer around them altogether.

Tesla to utilize micro maps for pothole-detection in future update

Avoiding major disturbances in the road is a necessary feature for Full Self-Driving to have, especially as Tesla is working toward a fully autonomous program that will eventually allow every occupant in the vehicle to sleep, work, or enjoy leisure time while traveling.

That truly begins this week with the launch of Cybercab on Thursday.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years

Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.

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Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.

In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.

The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.

Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.

This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.

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Elon Musk

OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership

OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.

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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.

In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.

That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.

Elon Musk breaks silence on OpenAI trial decision

SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.

Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.

Elon Musk admits he was ‘clearly wrong’ about Anthropic

Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.

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