Not long after Tesla began renting out its cars from two California locations, the EV maker is reportedly exploring another shift in strategy, one aimed at sparking fresh demand: bringing Apple CarPlay to its vehicles.

If that turns out to be true, it would mark a surprisingly pragmatic turn for Elon Musk, who’s spent years brushing off the idea of letting Apple CarPlay or Android Auto anywhere near Tesla’s carefully walled software garden. Maybe the wall’s starting to crack.

Read: Tesla Can’t Sell Its EVs So It’s Renting Them Out From $60 A Day

While Tesla hasn’t commented on the report from Bloomberg, unnamed insiders say the automaker has started internal testing of the system and could be ready to roll it out in the coming months.

Bloomberg’s report suggests Tesla plans to offer the standard version of Apple CarPlay rather than the new CarPlay Ultra, which can take over the entire infotainment system and extend across multiple displays, including the digital gauge cluster.

Instead, Tesla appears to be preparing to include CarPlay as an optional feature within its own software, much like most mainstream carmakers do.

The addition would give Tesla drivers access to well-known Apple services such as iMessage, Apple Music, and Apple Maps. According to the report, Tesla aims to implement the wireless version of CarPlay, allowing users to connect without plugging in their phones.

The Importance of CarPlay

Elon Musk has spent years criticizing Apple and rejecting the notion of CarPlay integration. Rivian holds a similar stance, and GM recently decided to phase out both CarPlay and Android Auto from its upcoming models. Still, surveys consistently show that for many buyers, these features are far from trivial extras.

A study from McKinsey & Co. last year revealed that 30 percent of those in the market for an EV and 35 percent of prospective buyers of a new combustion car said that not having Apple CarPlay or Android Auto is a deal-breaker. This means that Tesla could be losing thousands of sales every month.

Source: Bloomberg

Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting was absolutely full of news. More than 75 percent of the company’s shareholders voted to approve Elon Musk’s one-trillion-dollar compensation plan, split into 12 tranches of shares that unlock only if Tesla meets a series of milestones over the next decade. Musk also confirmed that series production of the long-awaited CyberCab will begin in April next year.

Also: Elon Musk’s Trillion Dollar Pay Hinges On A Bet That Could Break Tesla

The Roadster 2 demo is now slated for the same month, and in classic Musk style, the timing isn’t without a joke. He says it’s happening on April Fools’ Day, partly because it “affords some deniability.” If the demo slips, he quipped, “I could say I was just kidding.”

What’s New With the Semi?

And then there’s the Semi, which is heading for a redesign and full-scale production next year, following its unveiling all the way back in 2017 The redesigned Class 8 hauler gets meaningful efficiency gains, higher payload capacity, and a package clearly engineered around Tesla’s autonomy ambitions.

While the original Semi entered limited production back in 2022, this is a full-scale update with big aspirations and changes.

Efficiency is the biggest news. Tesla claims energy consumption drops to 1.7 kWh per mile, a 15 percent improvement over the current Semi. Paired with a 500-mile range rating, the update positions the new truck more competitively against rivals from Daimler and Volvo.

Drive power holds at 800 kW, but Tesla says that internal improvements under the skin, such as cooling, software, and thermal routing, provide more consistent performance under load.

Fast Charge Future

Another major upgrade is charging. The new Semi supports a peak rate of 1.2 MW (1,200 kW). That eclipses the current Megacharger output and allows for significantly shorter high-volume charging stops when paired with compatible infrastructure. Payload capacity also increases, though Tesla didn’t reveal by how much.

Visually, the Tesla truck looks a lot more like the rest of the family now. It gets a new Model Y-style front light bar, cleaner body surfacing, and a reshaped roof to improve aerodynamic flow. The black glass side panel is narrower, the bumper is reworked, and that continues to the wheel openings.

Read: Tesla’s Cybercab Might Become The Affordable Model 2 After All

Tesla frames all of this as groundwork for a future autonomous freight platform. Amazingly, the brand and its CEO avoided reaffirming any specific Level 5 self-driving timelines.

How Fast Can It Build the Cybercab?

Elon Musk didn’t stop at teasing the Cybercab itself; he also boasted about how it would be built. According to him, the dedicated production line will operate on an astonishing sub-10-second cycle time, compared with the roughly one-minute rhythm it currently takes to assemble a Model Y.

If that target holds, Musk suggested, it could translate to an annual output up to five million Cybercabs, a figure that would eclipse the production pace of nearly any vehicle on the road today. Still, as with most of Musk’s projections, take everything said with a grain of salt.

Either way, it’s going to be a wild year for Tesla. From Semi production ramp-up to the launch of the Cybercab and the potential demo of the Roadster, there’s a lot to live up to and lots that could go wrong.

Feeling smug about that 2 percent pay rise you just squeezed out of your boss? You won’t be when you hear that Tesla shareholders have voted to pay CEO Elon Musk up to $1 trillion over the next decade if the company hits a series of extremely ambitious market-value and performance milestones.

Around 75 percent of investors voted in favor of the award, which ties Musk’s payout to Tesla hitting long-term valuation goals rather than fixed salary or bonuses.

To access the full $1 trillion, Musk will need to boost the automaker’s market value from $1.4 trillion to $8.5 trillion and push it to make 20 million cars, a big jump from the 8.5 million it has produced in its lifetime.

Related: Yale Economists Quantify Exactly How Many Sales Musk’s Politics Cost Tesla

Other stipulations include achieving 10 million FSD subscriptions, putting 1 million Robotaxis on the street and delivering 1 million Optimus robots, CNBC reports.

The payout will happen in stages and won’t come in the form of giant check or pile of bills. Instead Musk will be awarded “hundreds of millions” of additional Tesla shares, which could lift his stake in the firm form 13 percent today – already making him the biggest single shareholder – to as much as 29 percent in a decade’s time.

The vote comes after senior Tesla’s board members publicly warned that without the deal, Musk might shift his focus elsewhere. This is a man, after all, with plenty of other gigs on the go, including SpaceX, Neuralink, and xAI, an OpenAI rival some Tesla shareholders want the automaker to invest in.

A controversial CEO

But the approval arrives at a delicate time for Tesla. Sales have been weaker than expected in key markets, despite the company recently giving the Model Y and Model 3 major updates meant to boost demand.

Prices have been cut repeatedly, margins have thinned, and both legacy Western brands and younger Chinese ones are now producing their own EVs and eating into Tesla’s pie.

And then there’s the Cybertruck. The stainless steel truck generated a ton of media coverage, but demand has failed to live up to the hype.

On top of that Tesla has been hit by multiple lawsuits about crashes allegedly related to its cars’ driver assistance tech, US regulators are also investigating the safety of those same systems and a recent study showed Musk’s right-wing affiliations have cost the company billions of dollars in lost sales.

Banking on AI

So why are shareholders still willing to back a jaw-dropping compensation deal? Two words: Robotaxi and AI. Musk has repeatedly said Tesla is on the brink of full self-driving automation and many investors believe only Elon Musk can lead that transformation.

If Musk can turn that vision into reality, the trillion-dollar pay plan suddenly stops sounding theoretical. But that’s a big if, and here’s another slightly smaller one: if you were a shareholder, would you have voted to approve Musk’s mega-pay package? Leave a comment and let us know.

Once hailed as a maverick genius we could all get behind, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has earned plenty of haters over the last few years as a result of his controversial political stances and affiliations.

Moreover, a new study has just confirmed what we all suspected all along: that those politics have cost Tesla billions of dollars in lost sales revenue.

How Bad Is the Damage?

Tesla US vehicle sales dropped by between 1 million and 1.26 million between October 2022 and April 2025, according to The National Bureau of Economic Research, a group of economists based at Yale University.

Related: Musk’s Tesla Payday Is So Absurd Even The Pope Had Something To Say

The authors estimate Teslas sales during that period should have been 67-83 percent higher. Some of those disaffected would-be buyers were pushed into the arms of rival carmakers, whose electric and hybrid vehicle sales grew by roughly 17-22 percent as a result, the study claims.

Among the actions that Tesla’s traditionally Democrat-voting customer base found offensive were his donation of $300 million to Republican candidates in the run up to the 2024 presidential election. The move marked a clear political shift that unsettled parts of his core audience.

Further controversy followed when Musk accepted a position with Donald Trump’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and voiced support for far-right political parties abroad, including Germany’s AfD.

Together, these choices reshaped his public image and deepened the divide between his business ventures and their once-loyal fan base.

The study suggests Musk’s behavior and its effect on sales negatively impacted California’s work towards achieving net zero emissions, derailing its plans to meet 2026 targets.

A Partial Rebound?

Even so, the researchers note that public sentiment toward the Tesla CEO had improved since Musk shifted his attention away from Donald Trump and back toward technology, namely robotaxis, self-driving cars and its fledgling robot business.

Tesla’s global sales are still projected to fall by about 10 percent this year, but that hasn’t slowed Musk’s ambitions. He’s now pushing for a $1 trillion pay package, which shareholders are set to vote on next month.

If approved, it would be by far the largest compensation deal ever granted to a corporate executive. Tesla chairman Robyn Denholm has written to shareholders warning that Musk could walk away if the cash doesn’t come through.

Tesla helped pioneer over-the-air software updates, introducing new features without owners ever having to visit a dealership or service center. It was a move that set the brand apart, positioning its cars as tech products that could evolve long after leaving the factory floor.

Of course, there’s always a “but” with progress, and Tesla’s latest update is no exception.

Read: Elon Musk Tells Companies That Pulled Ads From X To “Go (Explicit) Yourself”

And this time, Tesla’s latest software update has landed with a thud among owners, as it’s essentially an advertisement for the upcoming film Tron: Ares. Welcome to 2025, where your car can double as a mobile billboard.

The update transforms the on-board visualizations found on the central display of the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck. Normally, one of Tesla’s vehicles is displayed here, but after installing the update, that image is replaced with an Tron bike, just like the ones featured in the film.

Owners can access the new animations by heading into the App Launcher, opening Toybox, and enabling it. Admittedly, the Tron bike does look quite cool, particularly since it leaves a trail of red light behind it.

However, it somewhat reeks of desperation for the company to add a feature like this, and has raised questions whether Disney is compensating Tesla for featuring its latest blockbuster so prominently inside customer vehicles.

The grid has expanded to your Tesla — Tron: Ares update rolling out now pic.twitter.com/oQvYSAFuLM

— Tesla (@Tesla) October 10, 2025

Tesla vs Disney

Tesla boss Elon Musk has had a strained relationship with Disney over the past few years. In late 2023, he decried Disney’s decision to stop advertising on X after he supported an antisemitic post. He also called for Disney chief executive Bob Iger to be fired, and soon after, had Tesla remove the Disney+ app from its infotainment system.

Evidently, Tesla’s relationship with Disney has improved over the past couple of years, or else this wouldn’t be happening.

Had someone asked Musk in late 2023 whether Tesla cars would one day promote a Disney movie, he likely would have laughed off the idea. Yet here we are, two years later, watching the worlds of Silicon Valley and Hollywood collide once again, this time on your dashboard.

The hype that once surrounded the Tesla Cybertruck has well and truly died down. It wasn’t long ago that Elon Musk was boasting about more than a million reservations for the angular electric pickup, confidently claiming Tesla would be churning out and selling 250,000 units each year.

Through the first nine months of 2025, though, the numbers tell a very different story. Tesla has sold just 16,097 Cybertrucks so far, a steep 38 percent decline compared with the same January to September period in 2024, when 25,974 were delivered, according to data from Cox Automotive.

Sales Slide Continues

In the first quarter of this year, Tesla delivered 6,406 Cybertrucks, followed by 4,306 in the second quarter. Deliveries climbed slightly to 5,385 in the third quarter, likely spurred by the expiring federal EV tax credit.

While that Q3 bump might look positive at first glance, it’s actually a 62.6 percent decline from Q3 2024, when 14,416 trucks found buyers.

At this pace, the company is expected to finish the year with around 20,000 deliveries, well below the roughly 50,000 units sold in 2024.

Read: Tesla’s Latest Solution To Range Loss Is Full Of Hot Air And That’s Not A Joke

For most car manufacturers, this would be absolutely devastating news. However, Tesla boss Elon Musk also happens to run two other large companies, SpaceX and xAI, and both have started taking deliveries of hundreds of Cybertrucks.

A Convenient Customer Base

Apparently, Tesla now has more Cybertrucks in inventory than it knows what to do with. Reports indicate that hundreds were recently shipped to SpaceX’s Starbase facility, with expectations that hundreds, if not thousands, more could follow to replace the site’s gas-powered work trucks.

Over the weekend, multiple truckloads were also spotted arriving at xAI’s offices, shared widely on X by several users, including Cybertruck lead engineer Wes Morrill, who wrote:

“Love to see the ICE support fleets from Tesla and SpaceX get replaced with Cybertruck. When we were engineering it, this was always part of the dream. Never imagined how hard the fleet photos at starbase would go. Looking forward to more of this.”

Interest Running on Empty

Stopping short of making major price cuts, likely needing to be in the tens of thousands of dollars, it’s hard to envision how Tesla can reinvigorate interest in the Cybertruck. It is no longer the must-have EV in the United States.

Its radical styling, once its greatest talking point, now seems too polarizing for most pickup buyers. Practicality also remains a sticking point, as it lacks some of the everyday utility of traditional gas-powered trucks.

Add to that Musk’s divisive role in American politics, and the Cybertruck’s appeal appears to be narrowing faster than

Love to see the ICE support fleets from Tesla and SpaceX get replaced with Cybertruck. When we were engineering it, this was always part of the dream. Never imagined how hard the fleet photos at starbase would go. Looking forward to more of this https://t.co/M69ImCpamk pic.twitter.com/p1lf4FytY9

— Wes (@wmorrill3) October 7, 2025

The Lucid Air may already be known as one of the most advanced electric cars on the road, boasting the longest range of any EV sold in the United States, but the brand itself is still fighting an uphill financial battle. Each vehicle sold continues to come at a steep loss, so its recent tie-up with Uber, along with efforts to lure drivers away from rival brands, could prove critical to securing a stable future.

Read: Lucid’s Next EV Isn’t A Sedan, It’s An Affordable Off-Roader Made In Saudi Arabia

Through its tie-up with Uber, Lucid will receive $300 million in investments, making Uber its second-largest shareholder after the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Uber will purchase 20,000 Gravity SUVs from Lucid and use them as part of an expansive robotaxi fleet that’ll be introduced across the States starting next year.

Big Backer, Big Bet

This deal could not have come at a more crucial time for Lucid. Following the Trump administration’s decision to axe the EV tax credit and eliminate fines for carmakers who don’t comply with emissions regulations, electric vehicle manufacturers face the prospect of falling sales. Even so, Lucid chief executive Marc Winteroff is confident the Uber deal will serve as the start of an important new era for the brand.

“The largest ride-hailing business in the world does a strategic deal and invests,” Winteroff said. “It tells you something… 20,000 is a starting point. The sky’s the limit.”

Lucid is also thinking of innovative ways to make the most of its Uber deal. According to the firm’s leader, it will sell vehicles to fleet managers on the Uber platform, and wants to source revenue from charging on a per-mile basis. Winteroff added that the removal of the tax credit is “a big number of pure profit that we know have to live without,” so it’s understandable why the firm wants to make the most out of the Uber deal.

Taking Aim at Tesla

During the same interview, Winteroff moved beyond the Uber deal and took a thinly veiled swipe at Elon Musk’s company. He said Lucid has noticed a rising number of Tesla owners making the switch, pointing to the brand’s aging lineup and Musk’s political involvement, which has turned off many buyers.

“We have seen an uptick, that’s definitely the case, in Europe and also here in the US,” Lucid’s CEO revealed. “The Model S, nothing has changed in 12 years now… [customers] are actively looking for other options.” However, Lucid has a long way to go before it can truly threaten Tesla when it comes to sales numbers.

Key to Lucid’s future plans is a mid-size SUV. This new model will start at under $50,000 and may be named the Earth. It will take styling cues from the brand’s existing models, and its production is scheduled to start by the end of 2026. It will also spawn a rugged version inspired by the recent Gravity X Concept and be followed up by an additional model, set to launch in 2028.