News
Tesla says ‘brake failure’ protestor vandalized Model 3, refused third-party testing
Tesla is navigating through a difficult bout with an owner in Shanghai, China, named Zhang Yazhou, who appeared at the Shanghai Auto Show last week in protest of what she claimed was a faulty Model 3 braking system. Tesla has now issued a more lengthy and detailed description of their encounters with Mrs. Zhang, revealing that she not only vandalized her own car with red spray paint, but she also denied any requests made by Tesla to have an independent, third-party company investigate whether the Model 3 had braking issues.
On April 19th, Zhang climbed on top of a Model 3 that was positioned at the Tesla booth at the Shanghai Auto Show. Wearing a shirt that said “Tesla Brake Failure,” Zhang yelled “Tesla brakes failed me” to a crowd of spectators who surrounded the all-electric sedan. As a result, Tesla has released several responses, including data from the accident that showed the driver, who was actually Zhang’s father, was driving at a speed that was above the posted speed limit and engaged the braking system successfully on more than 40 occasions in the half-hour leading up to the accident.
Now, Tesla is making more attempts to reveal the story to the public and is revealing its interactions with Zhang.
The Tesla Model Y is leading China’s electric SUV segment by a wide margin
On Tesla’s official Weibo page, the company stated that Zhang talked to Tesla on April 27th, and the automaker was willing to continue communicating and try to come to a solution. After a five-day stint with the Police following the protest, Zhang returned home and told Tesla reps, “I just came back. I need to adjust. I hope you can show an attitude that really solves the problem. When you have this attitude, we will communicate.”
Tesla revealed that Zhang was in the passenger’s seat during the accident and that traffic police came to the conclusion that the driver, Zhang’s father, was “fully responsible for the accident because he did not maintain a safe distance from the vehicle in front.” After the vehicle arrived at a local service shop for repairs on February 22, Tesla says Ms. Zhang put a seal on the vehicle three days after its arrival so nobody could enter the car. Tesla says that Zhang believed the vehicle’s data could be tampered with, and this was the reason for the seal being placed on the doors. Zhang had the still-wrecked vehicle towed to Tesla’s Zhengzhou Fotamen showroom on March 5th, where it would be sitting in the public for everyone to see.
Zhang’s door seals (Credit: Tesla | Weibo)
The following day, Zhang placed a banner that read “Brake Failure” on the car, and Tesla began offering Zhang the option of having third-party inspectors take a look at the car on their dime. Zhang refused, saying that she was not interested in having the car looked at by “non-accredited third-party testing agencies,” and warned that Tesla should “look for pressure from the media” if the car wasn’t returned.
Zhang placed a banner on the car that said “Brake Failure” as the Model 3 sat in front of its Zhengzhou Fotamen showroom. (Credit: Tesla | Weibo)
Zhang then came back to the showroom where her car was located and spraypainted the exterior of her wrecked Model 3 with red paint. The words once again said, “Brake Failure.”
“The Tesla staff are still actively communicating with Ms. Zhang, trying to find a solution, and negotiating with her husband, Mr. Li, hoping to minimize the impact and help her maximize the benefits within a reasonable range. Mr. Li made it clear that he still has a “team” from Beijing assisting him, and being helped by others in “cooperating” with others can only be obedient,” Tesla added. Zhang resealed her vehicle on March 21st.
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Zhang spraypainted her wrecked Model 3 with red paint, with the words “Brake Failure” present on the driver’s side of the car. (Credit: Tesla | Weibo)
According to Tesla, Zhang then had the car towed to the Zhengzhou Dahe Auto Show, where two hired models stood beside the car. Zhang then made her appearance at the Shanghai Auto Show on April 19th. Tesla says that it is still working to iron out the situation and work with Zhang and her husband, who is identified as Mr. Li. Tesla sent a sealed version of the vehicle data that was available 30 minutes before the accident occurred to Zhang’s house.
“Since February, we have been doing our best to actively communicate with Ms. Zhang and her family. We sincerely hope that we can promote vehicle inspection as soon as possible and give a result to the friends who care about Tesla,” the company concluded.
You can read Tesla’s full response here.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
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Elon Musk
Tesla’s mysterious Robovan makes a sneak peek with Optimus in Terafab video
Elon Musk shared a new Terafab video showing Optimus, Robovans, and a stunningly futuristic campus.
Elon Musk posted a new video of Terafab on X Thursday morning, and the most eye-catching details in it were not the building itself, but two products still awaiting production: Optimus and the Robovan.
The concept render, credited to SpaceX, shows Optimus robots working the grounds of the roughly 2.5-mile-long facility planned for the Gibbons Creek site in Grimes County, while a Robovan glides along an elevated roadway cutting through the building itself, sharing the frame with a Tesla Semi and a Cybercab.
Robovan is the boxy, driverless people and cargo mover Musk unveiled alongside Cybercab at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024. He pitched it as a way to move up to 20 passengers at once, or handle freight instead, at a target cost he claimed could fall under a dollar a mile, with no steering wheel or pedals, the same layout as Cybercab. Nearly two years later, Robovan still has no confirmed production timeline and has not shown up in any factory footage, which makes Thursday’s render one of the only recent looks at the vehicle in any form.
Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.
And it will be stunningly beautiful. pic.twitter.com/4NweOqTL7y
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2026
Optimus has moved further along. Tesla began converting Fremont’s old Model S and Model X assembly line into a Gen 3 Optimus production line earlier this year, and Musk visited the site on July 1 to mark the changeover. A second, larger Optimus plant is under construction at Giga Texas, targeting volume production in summer 2027 and eventual capacity of 10 million units a year. Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy said this month the robot has “big shoes to fill” in replacing the S and X line, while Musk has repeatedly called Optimus the company’s biggest product of any kind, with a long-term price he has pegged between $20,000 and $30,000.
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Check out the “Robovan” from @Tesla
📸: @Teslarati pic.twitter.com/D4es2i9NUe
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 11, 2024
“Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far,” Musk wrote alongside the clip. “And it will be stunningly beautiful.”
One quote post summed up the reaction: “Futuristic scene with RoboVan + Cybercab + Tesla Semi + Optimus.”
Beyond the vehicles, the architecture wrapped around them stands out too. The building’s facade is canted at sharp angles, with illuminated horizontal bands running through what appears to be a multi level interior visible from outside. Below the elevated roadway, pedestrians walk along a plaza next to a reflecting pool, and the skyline behind the campus is dotted with angular spires that read more like sculpture than infrastructure, a departure from the strictly utilitarian look of Gigafactory Texas or Starbase.
The timing tracks with what Terafab representative Riley Trennell told Grimes County residents on Wednesday, when he said renderings of the facility would be released “within days.” Musk’s post followed less than 24 hours later, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office sent out its own release Thursday confirming the project. As Teslarati reported this morning, Terafab’s tax abatement agreements with Grimes County are now signed and active, and SpaceX has sent the county its first $10 million payment under that deal. The dollar figure tied to this phase of construction, per Reuters, is $16.8 billion, one of the first hard capital expenditure numbers attached to Terafab since Musk unveiled the joint Tesla-SpaceX-xAI venture in March.Reaction on X ranged from enthusiastic to skeptical. “God Bless Texas! Everything is bigger and better in Texas!” one reply read. Another was more measured: “Terafab in a decade…..”
Whether the finished building matches the render is a separate question from whether Musk wanted people talking about the render itself. Less than a day after posting, the video had already crossed 5.5 million views.
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Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
