Tesla's Roadster 2 Is Late--and Entering a Different EV World Nine years after its reveal, the overdue Roadster is set to debut on Thursday to an EV market that has grown skeptical of electric hypercars. Almost nine years ago, a tanned, relatively well-rested-looking CEO named Elon Musk announced that his electric car company would make a new sports car, the Tesla Roadster 2. It would be "the fastest sports car ever made, period," Musk said on stage in 2017. "The point of doing this is to give a hardcore smackdown to gasoline cars." Lights flashed, and the red prototype did a few speedy laps behind him. Musk is the leading donor to a political party that last year nixed buying incentives for electric vehicles and last month adjusted fuel-economy standards to make it easier for automakers to skip making EVs altogether.

The automaker has been criticized for misleading drivers with the feature's name. Tesla's most advanced driver-assistance feature is named Full Self-Driving (Supervised), but it can't actually drive itself. While the feature can handle tasks like accelerating, braking, steering, and parking, the automaker requires drivers to stay alert and intervene at all times. Now, the company has officially renamed it to Tesla Assisted Driving (TAD) in Europe as it works to convince regulators to allow its use on public roads. Tesla offered to change the name, according to a statement by the German Transport Ministry.

Self-driving cars from Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla are studded with cameras and sensors. Some of them are pointing at riders. One afternoon this past summer, a self-driving Waymo pulled into a parking lot in San Mateo County, California, and stayed there until the police arrived. Local cops had gotten a 911 call from Waymo staffers--humans, it should be said --who were viewing the car's passengers through cameras installed inside the vehicle. It looked like two teens were shooting a black handgun out the window of the vehicle, playing with it and drinking between shots, a police report said.

He's an assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and has spent more than a decade researching AI-driven interactions between humans and robots. But he found himself typing " public transport " into the search bar of a very specific website's "amateur section." "People are hard to predict," Bazilinskyy says. It's why he researches what he does. So his prurient pursuit had a point.

Tesla's Door Handles Lead to Its Biggest Recall Yet A Chinese agency says the two recalls affecting some 3 million vehicles can mostly be fixed by over-the-air updates--but they will also require physical warning stickers and camera-related updates. Government regulators have spent the last year asking serious questions about Tesla's electronic, retractable door handles, a cool-looking automotive design flourish that has since been imitated by plenty of competitors. The handles have been blamed, in the US and in China, for making it difficult for passengers to quickly exit vehicles, and for impeding rescue efforts. A handful of crash victims' families have even filed lawsuits against Tesla, alleging the door handle designs played roles in their loved ones' deaths. Now the door handles have led to Tesla's largest recall ever--and China's.

Self-Driving Cars Are Interfering With First Responders. NHTSA administrator Jonathan Morris called reports that self-driving cars had driven into emergency scenes and blocked ambulances and firefighters "unacceptable." The head of the top US road safety agency cautioned autonomous vehicle developers in a letter Wednesday about what he called an "unacceptable" pattern of driverless cars interfering with the work of law enforcement and other first responders. "To state it bluntly: An AV that cannot safely interact with first responders is a danger to the general public," Jonathan Morrison, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), wrote in a letter that he described as a "call to action" for technology developers. Morrison wrote that NHTSA has documented a " clear pattern" of interference over the last few months, including incidents in which the vehicles drove into active emergency scenes, blocked ambulances and firefighters, and didn't respond in situations involving flashing lights, fire, and traffic cones.

Did Full Self-Driving (Supervised), Tesla's driver assistance feature, play a role in a woman's death? On a Texas evening last week, a 76-year-old grandmother named Martha Avila was standing in the front room of her suburban home when a Tesla Model 3 hurtled into her brick home at a reported speed of over 70 miles per hour, killing her. The car's driver, 44-year-old Michael Butler, later told police that he had Tesla's driver assistance features --which the automaker argues make driving safer and less stressful--engaged during the crash. Butler exhibited "no signs of intoxication," the Harris County Sheriff's Office, which responded to the crash, noted in a report. Now Avila's family is suing not only Butler but also Tesla, alleging that the electric-auto maker's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver assistance feature, also called FSD, played a role in her death.

RJ Scaringe, the CEO of Rivian Automotive, joined us for a wide-ranging interview about how his company's new electric SUV fits into the current EV industry, and what comes next. RJ Scaringe got his PhD from MIT studying internal combustion engines. Then he founded a company to make them obsolete. In 2009, fresh out of grad school, he launched what would become Rivian. The company spent nearly a decade in stealth mode before arriving at the 2018 LA Auto Show with two electric rides nobody had seen coming. The road, however, hasn't been easy. Rivian lost $3.6 billion in 2025, and has burned through nearly $25 billion in the past eight years. It has spent more money over the same period than almost every other pure EV maker. Rivian's IPO was the largest worldwide in 2021, and one of the largest in US history, within days valuing the company at over $100 billion. Its stock has dropped from a high of $130 to around $16. Since the R1 went on sale in 2021, Rivian has sold 175,000 cars.

It might not feel all that different from older World Cups--for better or worse. Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary offering robotaxi rides in 11 US metros right now, says it's ready for the FIFA World Cup . Match attendees can catch driverless rides to six of the 16 North American venues: stadiums in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The sprawling football event, expected to attract some 6.5 million visitors to the continent over more than a month, could prove an exciting close-up for Waymo . The company says it's serving half-a-million paid rides a week--paltry stuff compared to the likes of ride-hail giants Uber and Lyft, but more impressive once you remember that the things don't have drivers.

The pale-blue Ojai vehicles will start picking up members of the public in California and Arizona today. Starting today, Alphabet self-driving vehicle developer Waymo will start picking up members of the public in its new Ojai vehicles (pronounced "oh hai")--pale blue boxy minivans studded with sensors and complete with steering wheels, even though they're designed to travel without drivers. For now, the rides in these new cars, which can be summoned through Waymo's app, will be free. It's been a long road for the vehicle, first announced by Waymo in 2021 and tested on public streets since 2024. It's also a weird time for Waymo: The self-driving-vehicle company, which is trying to expand quickly across the US and the world, shut down service in six US cities last week due to issues with how its vehicles react to flooding.