Tesla is recalling more than 1.6m Model S, X, 3 and Y electric vehicles exported to China for problems with their automatic assisted steering and door latch controls. The recall, Tesla’s largest ever in China, affects the majority of the cars it has sold in the country, according to Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. China’s state administration for market regulation announced the recall on Friday. The agency said Tesla in Beijing and Shanghai would use remote upgrades to fix the problems, so in most cases car owners would not…
Tag: Tesla
China’s BYD overtakes Tesla as top-selling electric car seller
Elon Musk’s Tesla has been overtaken by its Chinese rival, BYD, as the world’s top selling electric carmaker. BYD, which has been backed by the US investment billionaire Warren Buffett since 2008, has beaten Tesla’s production for a second consecutive year. BYD, which stands for Build Your Dreams, said it produced 3.02m new energy vehicles in 2023. The American multinational Tesla announced on Tuesday that it made 1.84m cars. However, BYD’s sales figures include 1.6m battery-only cars, and 1.4m hybrids, which means Tesla is still the leader in the production…
When Elon Musk’s ‘flying sofas’ give Ukraine internet access, we can’t sit comfortably | John Naughton
In February 2022, as Russian tanks rumbled into Ukraine, a cyber-attack took down the satellite system run by Viasat that was providing high-speed communications for Ukrainian military forces, rendering them instantly blind, deaf and dumb. With his forces knocked offline, the Ukrainian digital minister sent a plea to an American billionaire, one Elon Musk, for help. Within hours, Musk responded that his Starlink system had been activated in Ukraine. Days later Starlink terminals began to arrive. Pause for context update. Musk is the founder and Supreme Leader of SpaceX, an…
Battery power: how China could take charge of the electric vehicle market
If you bought an electric vehicle in the UK this year, there’s a good chance it was an MG4. The fully electric hatchback, which launched in 2022, sold 5,200 units in the first three months of this year, the second-best selling EV behind Tesla’s Model Y. With prices starting at about £27,000, it is also substantially cheaper than the Tesla at £45,000. And while MG is one of Britain’s most famous car brands – with a century of carmaking in Birmingham until MG Rover’s 2005 collapse – the secret to…
Twitter and Tesla’s interests at odds in Elon Musk’s quiet China visit
Followers of Elon Musk didn’t know what to expect from his trip to China. Would he speak about Tesla, a company with a large market and manufacturing footprint there? Or SpaceX, with its symbiotic relationship with the American state? Or even Twitter, the social network he bought because “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy”? The one thing no one expected: silence. Musk sent his last tweet late on Monday night. The uncharacteristic hiatus was broken only on Thursday morning when he returned to the US and wrote…
Job cuts and falling shares: how did it all go so wrong for the US tech sector?
Amazon announced 18,000 job cuts, Apple’s share price fell below $2tn (£1.7tn) and there was more bad news from Tesla: it has been another tough week for big US tech firms. But this has not been a one-off. The ongoing drama at Twitter since its takeover by Elon Musk in October has taken place against a backdrop of global economic uncertainty, retrenchment from aggressive expansion plans and China’s disruptive transition from Covid lockdowns to rocketing case numbers as restrictions ease. In fact this week’s events have been a continuation of…
Elon Musk praises Chinese workers for ‘burning the 3am oil’ – here’s what that really looks like
How do you become the richest man in the world? In Elon Musk’s case, part of it involves making workers in China put in hours that would be unacceptable according to labor norms elsewhere. On Tuesday, the Tesla boss praised Chinese factory workers for pulling extreme hours while taking a shot at American workers. “There is just a lot of super talented hardworking people in China who strongly believe in manufacturing,” the billionaire said. “They won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they will be burning the 3am oil, they…
Elon, Twitter is not the town square – it’s just a private shop. The square belongs to us all | John Naughton
On Friday 8 January 2021, Twitter kicked Donald Trump off its platform and an eerie calm enveloped parts of our global public sphere. Depriving him of his online megaphone was a compelling demonstration of how a tech platform had acquired an awesome power – the ability effectively to silence an elected president. But what kind of power is it really? Many years ago, in a landmark book, Power: A Radical View, the sociologist Steven Lukes wrote that power comes in three varieties: the ability to stop people doing what they…