News
VW’s “Dirty Diesels” gives life to Rivian’s future EV manufacturing plant
Nothing normal is happening at the newly acquired Rivian Automotive Factory in Normal, IL. Teslarati has discovered a massive stockpile of Volkswagen’s “dirty diesels” being stored on the aspiring electric car startup’s vast factory parking lot. The VWs on site were produced over the course of 6 years between 2009-2015, and are vehicles equipped with an emissions cheating device that became the subject of the global “VW Dieselgate scandal” which took place last year.
The owner of the plant, Rivian Automotive, is looking to make moves in the central Illinois town by developing their first production electric vehicle from the newly acquired ex-Mitsubishi factory. The company is leasing an onsite storage lot to a logistics company that’s responsible for transporting the thousands of affected vehicles to an unknown final destination.
Aerial inspections obtained via drone video by Teslarati, show an estimated 14,000 VWs being stored on the facility lots adjoining Rivian’s main factory. The plant was owned by Mitsubishi Motors until June 2016, before Rivian Automotive purchased the entire facility in January 2017 for $2 million. The facility was built in 1988 and boasts 1.9 million square feet of space, before expanding to 2.4 million square feet in 2003. Mitsubishi’s sales of the Outlander Sport (the sole vehicle produced at the factory) slumped when the Russian recession began in 2014; the vehicle was a massive hit in the country. The plant once employed 3,400 employees and ended production with 1,280 in late 2015.
“We know that the TDI emissions issue has understandably eroded the trust that we have worked so hard to build with you, our customers.” – VW in a pamphlet to affected customers
- VW Diesel vehicles being loaded off of a transport truck (Photo: Christian Prenzler for Teslarati)
- A variety of VW Diesels are being stored at the facility, some from as far as Montana [Credit: Christian Prenzler/Teslarati]
- The VWs are lined up very neatly as Vascor logistics makes use of the large lots [Credit: Christian Prenzler/Teslarati]
- Hundreds of VW 2.0 TDI’s parked awaiting their unknown future [Credit: Christian Prenzler/Teslarati]
- Hundreds of VW 2.0 TDI’s parked awaiting their unknown future [Credit: Christian Prenzler/Teslarati]
- Drone flies closely over the thousands of VW Diesel vehicles being stored at the Rivian Factory. [Photo: Jim Finch]
Images showing thousands of VW diesels on site paint a clear picture of the German automaker’s failure to come up with a real fix for vehicles equipped with emission cheating devices. VW has also been storing affected vehicles at the Pontiac Silverdome but based on our estimates, Rivian’s factory storage lots are approximately two and a half times larger than the Silverdome’s lots.
“These vehicles will be held and routinely maintained until it is determined whether an approved emissions modification becomes available. If approved, the settlement allows Volkswagen to modify affected 2.0L TDI vehicles so they can be returned to commerce or exported. Vehicles that are not modified must be responsibly recycled.” – Jeannine Ginivan, Volkswagen Group of America, Inc.
Uncertain effects from possible fixes
The vehicles stored at the site are expected to be pulled for parts and scrapped, but the company has not released official plans for all of 475,000 vehicles affected in the US as part of “Dieselgate”. VW is in the process of buying some vehicles and working towards solutions for vehicles that have been less affected by the emission devices. The 67,000 2015 3rd generation VW diesels were the first to receive an approved fix earlier this year. The fix does not bring the cars within federal compliance, but the vehicles emit significantly less NOx pollutant. VW is expected to release a phase 2 fix for the 3rd generation vehicles in 2018, which will bring the vehicles into federal compliance.
A spokesperson for Volkswagen Group of America told Teslarati that they have removed or modified more than 25% of the affected vehicles in the US, insinuating that the firm has bought back over 50,000 diesel cars since beginning the program four months ago (~67,000 were modified).
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Software fixes to the 3rd generation vehicles will cause the following changes to the cars:
- Reduced performance in sport mode
- Engine sound variation
- 1-14 percent higher diesel exhaust fluid use
Owners of affected vehicles that have been given an approved fix also received two-thirds of the restitution cash that the company is issuing to customers. The last third will be distributed to owners after the phase 2 hardware update is completed. The phase 2 modifications are not designed to cause major differences in consumption or acceleration, but the cars efficiency and driving characteristics may change. Recently, The Daily Mail has reported that fixes to UK cars have resulted in “poor fuel consumption, weak acceleration, and mysterious rattles”.
Aerial Imagery of the Rivian Automotive Plant
While the terms of the deal between Rivian and Vascor Logistics are confidential, we know that revenue from the contract is contributing to the development of Rivian’s electric vehicle lineup. The global logistics company provides significant logistical services to automotive companies, one of which is VW. Rivian took ownership of the factory in January and has received incentive deals from both the State of Illinois and local municipalities.
“We are working hard to utilize the factory leading up to our production launch.” Rivian CEO, RJ Scaringe said in a comment to Teslarati.
The factory has direct access to several nearby interstate routes and has a rail car station directly on the property. Mitsubishi shipped a large portion of its vehicles around the globe from the facility, and to this day still has an operations warehouse near their old plant that’s being used for vehicle parts storage and logistics.
As Rivian continues developing their electric vehicle lineup, the company can make use of the factory by leasing out the vehicle storage lots and generate revenue. It is unclear how many more vehicles will be stored in Normal, IL or how long the vehicles will be retained on site, but Vascor’s operations at the factory appeared to be very active. VW’s polluting diesels are now giving way to the future of the automotive industry.
Vascor Logistics & Wheelan Security did not respond to our request for comment.
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Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
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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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
