News
Tesla Sweden vs IF Metall Strike Recap: sympathy strikes, lawsuits & more [Editorial]
Tesla Sweden and IF Metall conflict is hitting its third month, and a lot has happened since it began.
Tesla’s Lawsuits
IF Metall has gained a lot of support within Sweden from other trade unions, including Seko, which brought Postnord into the strike. Through Postnord, IF Metall struck Tesla with a big blow as the courier refused to deliver new license plates to the automaker. Postnord’s blockade on Tesla has affected the new vehicle deliveries.
In response, Tesla filed lawsuits against Postnord and the Swedish Transport Agency, which refuses to switch courier services. The automaker claims at least 1,000 new license plates are still not within its possession. Tesla and its customers recently found a loophole to Postnord’s blockade, enabling deliveries to continue.
However, IF Metall’s strike against Tesla continues. It has also gained support from other Nordic countries, leading Tesla to seek a government affairs specialist.
Tesla seeks Government Affairs Specialist for Nordic countries
Tesla Sweden posted a job position for a government affairs specialist amid the ongoing IF Metall Strike.
Tesla Sweden’s Job post reads:
“Tesla is seeking an all-round Stockholm- or Oslo-based Nordics public policy and business development manager to join its growing EMEA team. The role is to help ensure that the political, regulatory, and fiscal frameworks in the ‘Nordics’ (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland) support Tesla’s mission, especially by promoting a rapid transition to zero-emission surface transport and a safe and secure transition to assisted automated driving.”
-
Sympathy Strikes Against Tesla
IF Metall’s strike against Tesla, which started in October, has reached other Nordic countries like Denmark and Norway. The Swedish union has gained support through sympathy strikes by other trade unions and countries as opposed to Tesla employees working in Sweden.
Norway’s governing Labor Party summoned Tesla to parliament last week. The Texas-based automaker was called to parliament to answer questions about IF Metall’s ongoing strike. Tesla’s Norwegian boss, Axel Tangen, stated that the company follows Norwegian laws, including those related to the labor market.
Denmark and Norway have agreed to block Tesla shipments passing through their countries and heading to Sweden. A few Nordic pension funds have also put Tesla on its watchlist, closely observing how the situation with IF Metall will play out. One Danish pension fund, Pension Danmark, has put TSLA on its exclusion list. Other Nordic pension funds are approaching the conflict between Tesla Sweden and IF Metall with more caution.
Background
IF Metall’s strike against Tesla aims to push the automaker to sign a collective agreement, a standard contract between employers and unions in Sweden. Even if it is common in Sweden, collective agreements do not appear compulsory for a company. Tesla has refused to sign a collective agreement with IF Metall, clarifying that its payment scheme and treatment of workers are on par with, if not better than, those described in any contract with a union.
Opinion
If Tesla were to sign a collective agreement with IF Metall, it would only cover employees “within its contractual area” or those who are members of the Swedish union. Based on previous reports, IF Metall members usually exclude white-collar workers. Most IF Metall members at Tesla appear to be mechanics working at the automaker’s service centers.
Tesla Club Sweden recently conducted a count on how many mechanics actually supported IF Metall’s strike and came out with a total number of 13 workers. The Swedish union claims Tesla Club Sweden’s numbers are drastically underestimated.
The Teslarati team would appreciate hearing from you. If you have any tips, contact me at maria@teslarati.com or via X @Writer_01001101.
-
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
