Stories by Sarah Lee-Jones

[caption id="attachment_75243" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: Tesla[/caption] Tesla has opened its Berlin Tesla Engineering Center, a new campus in the city's Köpenick district about 30 minutes from Giga Berlin. The site pulls four engineering sites and 30 labs onto one campus. Tesla Europe announced the opening on Wednesday, saying it went from permit to operational in...

[caption id="attachment_74985" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: Tesla Korea[/caption] A South Korean consumer group plans to ask regulators on Thursday to stop Tesla from marketing Full Self-Driving (Supervised) to buyers whose cars cannot legally use it. Citizens United for Consumer Sovereignty (소비자주권시민회의) intends to file a complaint with the Korea Fair Trade Commission, according to a draft...

[caption id="attachment_75234" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: Grok Bot[/caption] Grok Bot can now place phone calls for its users. The feature Elon Musk previewed in October went live on Wednesday, according to the official Grok Bot account on X, which shared a short demo video. https://twitter.com/bot/status/2118043939592942052 In the 42-second clip, the bot notices an internet contract renews...

[caption id="attachment_67329" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: Tesla[/caption] Tesla's comeback in Germany picked up speed in October. New registrations jumped 290.9% year over year to 2,932 vehicles, according to Germany's Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA), following a 268% surge in September. From January through October, Tesla registered 47,742 vehicles in Germany, up 206.1% from the same period...

[caption id="attachment_75225" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: Qualcomm[/caption] SpaceX has picked Qualcomm to power the ground network behind Starlink Mobile. The Starlink carrier plans to start its US nationwide 5G rollout in 2027, with tens of thousands of cell sites covered over a multiyear agreement, according to a Qualcomm press release on Wednesday. Qualcomm will supply its...

[caption id="attachment_75218" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: Air Tahiti Nui[/caption] Air Tahiti Nui has signed a deal with SpaceX to equip its entire fleet with free Starlink Wi-Fi, the French Polynesian airline said Tuesday. It expects to bring the service onboard in 2027. It joins carriers such as United Airlines that are putting SpaceX's cabin internet on...

[caption id="attachment_75074" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: Tesla[/caption] Tesla and SpaceX have objected to third-party tokenized versions of their shares trading on OKXICE, a planned crypto stock venue backed by the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. The venue's November 2 public notice brings its list of issuer objections to 56. Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) and Space...

Tesla's Giga Shanghai wholesaled 67,829 vehicles in October, according to preliminary figures released Tuesday by the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA). That's down 28.9% from September's 95,366, which was the factory's best month of 2026. Compared with a year earlier, October was up about 10.3%. In October 2025, Tesla China moved 26,006 vehicles domestically and...

[caption id="attachment_74856" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: Starlink[/caption] The Starlink mobile app's monthly active users rose 332% between September 2023 and September 2026, according to app data posted by Similarweb. Monthly downloads climbed 316% over the same span, the firm said in a post on X. Similarweb did not publish absolute download or user totals in that...

[caption id="attachment_75191" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: Tesla[/caption] The U.S. Foreign-Trade Zones Board has authorized battery storage production at Tesla's Brookshire, Texas Megapack factory inside Foreign-Trade Zone 84 on a limited basis for 14 months. A Federal Register notice published Monday confirms the October 28 decision. Tesla filed the production request on May 20. Foreign-trade zones let...

[caption id="attachment_75184" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: SpaceX[/caption] SpaceX opened a commercial page for Starfall, pitching routine microgravity access on Starship with up to 1,000 kg of payload mass, 1 kW of payload power and continuous Starlink connectivity for missions lasting weeks. The company first posted the Starfall pitch on October 20, the same day its third...

[caption id="attachment_75176" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: SpaceXSI[/caption] Grok Bot now has an internal Team Bot that acts like an on-demand data scientist. SpaceXSI said the bot handled about 70 hours of work last week that would otherwise have landed on its data science team. Details came Monday in a post on x.ai by Sally Xu, and...

[caption id="attachment_75168" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: Matic Robots[/caption] Neuralink patient #22 Zach McManus, who lives with ALS, is steering a Matic home robot vacuum around his house with his thoughts, according to a verified Monday post from Matic Robots. It comes a day after another ALS patient steered his wheelchair outdoors with the same kind of...

[caption id="attachment_75165" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Image: SpaceX[/caption] Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Potter now says a Tesla-SpaceX merger proposal is "likelier than not," in a client note summarized by Investing.com, arguing that in most scenarios Elon Musk would keep more than 70% voting control of any combined company. Client interest deepened after Musk confirmed on October 20...

[caption id="attachment_75159" align="aligncenter" width="970"] Credit: SpaceX[/caption] SpaceX is reportedly in talks to buy EchoStar's Boost Mobile or use its network, a path that could speed its push to turn Starlink Mobile into a full U.S. wireless player after its $17 billion EchoStar spectrum deal. According to The Washington Post, the rocket company has held talks...