Tesla News

The on-again, off-again Tesla Cybertruck launch in Australia appears to at last be approaching on again, with a version of the electrified horror show doing the rounds at our EV conferences, and the brand's chief confirming a slightly modified version of the vehicle is under review

The first-quarter results for Tesla are in, and they're abysmal, with the now-controversial electric vehicle brand shaving sales and profit over the first three months of 2025.

You might not have heard of CATL, but you’ll have heard of the brands its electric car batteries are used in: Toyota, Hyundai, Tesla and plenty of others.

Production plans for Tesla’s low-cost Model Y have been delayed again, according to industry sources, with a start date now slated for as late as early 2026.According to Reuters, three sources with knowledge of the matter said production had been pushed back by at least a few months from Tesla’s most recently publicised production date of the first half of this year.The brand is now reportedly offering a range of revised targets from the third quarter to early next year. The reason for the delay is not clear.Two of the sources confirmed that Tesla is aiming to produce 250,000 of the cheaper Model Ys in the United States by next year. Production is also planned for Europe and China, the latter of which being where Australia-bound Teslas are built.Questions around plans for the affordable models, which will also eventually include a stripped-back Model 3, is set to be a key line of inquiry following Tesla’s first quarter earning results on Wednesday.Low-cost Teslas have long been anticipated by customers and investors alike, with plans dating back as far as 2020 when CEO Elon Musk first floated a price tag of $25,000 (A$40,000) for future budget models.The same price tag has since been floated for the incoming, fully-autonomous Cybercab, which is now also delayed.Reuters reported that the new stripped-back Model Y will cost 20 per cent less to produce than the current version, presumably by losing some standard features and carrying a smaller, short-range battery pack. Tesla has previously said a 53kWh unit would replace the current Model Y's 60kWh battery.An updated version of the current Model Y will land in Australian showrooms from next month with a starting price of $58,900 before on-road costs.Positive news couldn’t come any sooner for Tesla, whose stock has fallen by 44 per cent in the US off the back of Musk’s controversial role in the Trump Administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).Rising competition from Chinese EV brands, such as BYD, has also seen the brand’s small and aging line-up undercut in key overseas markets such as China, Europe and Australia, with Tesla recording its first-ever decline in annual deliveries in the fourth quarter of last year.U.S. President Donald Trump’s huge 145 per cent tariffs on Chinese imports, including vehicle components, are also set to hit a quarter of vehicles Tesla produces in the US, according to Fortune.In Australia, Tesla’s sales to March 2025 were down by nearly 60 per cent compared to the same period last year, with sales of the brand’s best-selling model in Australia (and globally), the Model Y, falling by 54.4 per cent.BYD, meanwhile, has seen its sales in Australia grow by 95.6 per cent over the same period, though largely off the back of its plug-in hybrid Shark 6 ute.Chinese electric car conglomerate Geely has emerged as another threat, with sales of its EX5 electric SUV – which is the cheapest model in its class in Australia – clocking 188 sales in just its first month.

It’s started again - the talk about how autonomous cars are just around the corner.But are self-driving cars really going to be with us any time soon? Because it feels as though carmakers have been promising autonomous vehicles for a long time now, yet it seems like we’re still no closer to owning a vehicle that can drive us home or to work.Despite this, many car brands think autonomous vehicles are on our doorstep. Is that true? And if so, do we really want to let them in?Volkswagen’s global CEO of Commercial Vehicles Professor Dr Carsten Intra believes they are indeed imminent. “You think that going from combustion to electrification is a big change?” Dr Carsten asked Australia’s auto media last week at the Volkswagen Multivan launch. “And it is, but going autonomous will change our business. This is coming, it's in front of the door. Not just in 10 or 15 years, it will be sometime tomorrow. We are going through the world and testing our fleets in different cities.”Dr Carsten is referring to the fleet of self-driving ID. Buzz electric vans being tested by Volkswagen through its special autonomous company MOIA.Fitted with autonomous tech for full-self driving (but with a human babysitter on board) VW is testing the ID. Buzzes in the United States and Europe. The fleet has just been to Oslo, Norway for winter testing in snow and ice. The self-driving ID. Buzz has a high level of autonomous ability, level 4 actually, a level down from the fully autonomous Level 5 which doesn’t need a human chaperon. This is the level Volkswagen hopes to reach by 2030. These levels from 1 to 5 are just increasingly sophisticated forms of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Most new cars are at Level 2 and have systems that can take over steering, braking and acceleration.But Level 5, which can handle any situation without driver input, is much more complicated. While it may work in theory or on a closed circuit, what about on the Pacific Highway in Sydney at 8:30am on a Monday?So with 2030 less than five years away and as a journalist who has written story after story as car company after car company has made promise after promise of autonomous vehicles, I can tell you that the chances of fully autonomous cars driving on Australian roads by 2030 are close to zero.Forgive me for being jaded, but the autonomous car dream is and probably will always remain a dream. I wasn’t always so pessimistic about this. Back in 2016 I was very excited to write a story for CarsGuide about Ford’s bold claim that it was so far advanced into mastering autonomous tech that they’d have self-driving cars everywhere by 2021.“Ford will be mass producing vehicles with full autonomy within five years and that means there will be no steering wheels, no gas pedals and no brake pedals - a driver is not going to be required," Ford’s then global chief Mark Fields announced.Well it’s 2025 and these pedal-less, steering wheel-less driverless cars are nowhere to be seen.Ford isn’t the only one. Most car companies in the past 10 years have said they are on the cusp of autonomous breakthroughs from Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and Audi to Volvo and Hyundai.Well they used to say that and many companies made bold claims, just like Ford’s, that they, too, would have autonomous cars in just a matter of years. But most of the car manufacturers have gone quiet on the topic of self-driving cars. All except Tesla with its so-called full self-driving function which is very likely just advanced driver assistance and not full self-driving. Actually in recent weeks Tesla has had to re-think what it calls its driving system due to regulatory issues in China.Tesla’s claims of having full-self driving modes 10 years ago probably caused the rest of the industry to suddenly work harder and faster on their own autonomous projects only for all of us to reach this point where we’ve discovered that you can absolutely teach a car to drive, but setting it loose on public roads is going to create a multitude of problems from safety and legal to ethical dilemmas. Besides, Volkswagen isn't the first to have fleets testing in cities. Ride-hailing companies such as Waymo have been working on autonomous tech for years only to run into operational difficulties with cars getting lost or even attacked.Until recently Waymo's fleet of autonomous taxis has operated in just the United States with San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin being the main cities where the service can be found. Now Waymo is going further afield to Japan and is using Tokyo as its first location outsided the US to test the autonomous tech.Waymo will have been testing and operating its fleet of autonomous cars for 10 years in 2026. An achievement in itself and while the technology has come far it hasn't been without inicident. There have been cases where Waymo vehicles have malfunctioned or become confused. Two years ago in Phoenix 12 Waymos all turned up in the same street at the same time and caused a traffic jam, while last year in San Francisco a car park being used to hold dozens of Waymo vehicles erupted into chaos as the empty cars began honking at each other for no apparant reason.Hiccups aside it's truly amazing how well Waymo's fleet of electric Jaguar iPace SUVs can navigate through complicated terrain such as hilly San Francisco with its myriad of streets. Waymo has also recently signed a new deal with Chinese carmaker Zeekr to use its electric Mix people mover in 2025.Volkswagen's own testing with its ID. Buzz fleets will indeed add to the advancement of autonomous tech, too.Progress is slow, however, and for good reason - safety, regulations, ethics and the unpredicatability of other road users present huge challenges for a technology that's expected to be as good, if not better, than humans. Volvo is a safety tech pioneer in the auto industry and one of the first to start developing autonomous systems. But in 2023 Volvo Cars CEO and President Jim Rowan made a startling admission: self-driving cars won’t happen anytime soon.  "So first of all, this big myth that there's five different levels of autonomy is nonsense, in my opinion," he said. "You've got two levels of autonomy. One is your hands on the steering wheel. One is your hands off the steering wheel."Can we drive a car fully autonomous? Yes. Does regulation allow that? No. So I think regulation will be the barrier towards full adoption of full AD more than technology," he said.“Driving inside the city when there's schools and roadworks, and there's a lot of change every day, I think that's a long, long way off.”So if the boss of the company which was so far ahead in developing fully autonomous cars has declared the mission more or less over for now, what’s caused Volkswagen to make its autonomous claims? Well, we’ll have to wait and see but I think we’ll be waiting a lot longer before we start seeing.

Tesla has underperformed most analysts worst-case scenario, with the EV company reporting a total 323,800 units sold globally in the first three months of 2025.

BYD’s local distributor EVDirect says it has notched up 40,000 sales less than three years after the brand arrived in Australia and is projecting a further 40,000 sales this year alone.Although the figures are yet to be officially verified in March’s national vehicle sales data, set to be released by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries later this week, the announcement indicates that BYD has flown past Tesla to achieve the feat.Tesla is understood to have recorded 40,000 total sales in the second half of 2022, nearly eight years after the brand officially opened its first showrooms Down Under with the Model S sedan and later the Model X. Both models have now been discontinued for Australia.Sales for Tesla in Australia didn’t take off until 2019 when it debuted its popular Model 3, followed by the Model Y in 2022, the latter remaining Australia’s most popular EV.Last year, Tesla sales dipped to 38,347 cars following a record 46,116 in 2023. As of February this year it has sold 2331 cars, a 65.6 per cent decline on the previous year.Since arriving locally in 2022 with the electric Atto 3 SUV, BYD expanded its model range more aggressively than Tesla, now including plug-in hybrids in its line-up. It's a strategy EVDirect CEO David Smitherman said is responsible for BYD’s swift rise.“What we’re providing Australian customers is a choice they haven’t previously been able to enjoy. With the Shark 6, Sealion 7, and soon the Essentials range, we’re introducing new vehicles in segments and at price points never seen before,” said Smitherman.The Essentials range, which includes new entry-level grades for the Dolphin and Atto 3, are stripped-back versions of their respective models, with less standard features but a considerably lower entry price.For example, the Dolphin Essential is the first EV in Australia to be offered at less than $30,000, before on-road costs.Sales are only expected to climb for BYD as it continues its product assault on Australia with its Denza sub-brand later this year, which includes the B9, a plug-in hybrid Toyota Prado-rivalling SUV.The future is a little less clear for Tesla, with its polarising CEO Elon Musk turning many prospective buyers in Australia, the US and Europe off the brand with his controversial role as an advisor to the Trump administration.In the US, Tesla shares have lost 50 per cent of their value since they peaked at US$479 a share on the Nasdaq last December, while this month, BYD announced it officially exceeded Tesla in revenue last year at $170 billion, approximately $15.5 billion more than Tesla.The updated Model Y, which is set to arrive in Australian showrooms by May, could add some life to the embattled brand, with Tesla Australia confirming the Launch Edition allocation for Australia has already been exhausted. Exactly how many units that entails, though, remains unclear.BYD has been nipping at the heels of Tesla on the global market since the end of 2023, when it briefly usurped it as the world’s best-selling EV brand before Tesla reclaimed the title in the first quarter of 2024.2025 could officially be the year that Tesla loses its EV crown, with the brand going all out on alternative markets as it finds itself locked out of the US due to a blanket 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese cars.

Tesla has been forced into an embarrassing backdown over a trial of its Full Self-Driving tech in China, with owners of Tesla vehicles reportedly accruing fines for disregarding certain road rules, before the much-hyped – but misleadingly titled – technology was rebranded as Intelligent Assisted Driving.

Why tough new emissions laws face a reckoning the world over.

Tesla has announced pricing and features for its post-launch mainstream variants of the updated Model Y.