Happy Friday, and welcome to Critical Materials, your source for the biggest stories shaping the future of the auto industry.

Every Friday, we break down the week’s biggest EV news, keep you up to speed on the cars we’re testing, and recap must-read stories from around the web on driverless cars, batteries, charging, and more.

– Today’s email was written by Rob Stumpf and Tim Levin.

Tesla’s steering wheel-free, scissor door-having Cybercab is apparently ready for primetime.

The two-seat robotaxi is getting an official launch event next Thursday in Austin, the carmaker announced this week. How quickly Cybercabs will actually hit streets—and whether you’ll be able to buy one for $30,000 anytime soon—are just some of the questions hanging over this rollout. 

A big one centers around software. Specifically: Is Tesla’s good enough? Famously, Elon Musk is betting that he can make Tesla an autonomous-vehicle juggernaut using cameras alone. The Cybercab was built from the ground up around that gamble. But how reliable Tesla’s system is at scale is still an open question. Many experts argue that sensor redundancy through lidar and radar is key for safety. Industry leader Waymo took a not-so-subtle shot at Tesla’s strategy this week by saying in a blog post that cameras are “not enough” for safe autonomous driving at scale.

To Tesla’s credit, its Robotaxi service does now offer driverless Model Y rides in Austin and some other markets, and that part of the business seems to be growing. On X this week, Tesla said its “unsupervised fleet is a lot bigger” and that it had extended its operating hours. Ethan McKanna of the crowdsourced Robotaxi Tracker website has detected a significant uptick in unsupervised rides, The Verge reported. 

But the Robotaxi rollout has also been far more sluggish than Musk once promised. Last year, it was supposed to be “hyper exponential” and cover half the U.S. population by the end of 2025. On recent earnings calls, Musk has struck an uncharacteristically reserved tone, noting that the company is moving slowly to ensure safety. Tesla’s robotic taxi business remains far behind Waymo, which has thousands of vehicles in U.S. cities and is doing more than 500,000 autonomous rides per week. To date, the Alphabet subsidiary has logged over 200 million driverless miles, while Tesla has done in the neighborhood of 380,000, per its last earnings call. 

The Cybercab rollout may not actually be that fast, either. Data is part of the reason. “Because it is a new vehicle chassis,” Musk said on Tesla’s latest earnings call, “we need to accumulate driving data that is specific to the Cybercab before we can put a lot of them on the road.” Hence why human-driven Cybercabs have been spotted all over the country, with retrofitted steering wheels and brakes. We’ll have to see how long that project takes. There’s another reason for caution: The flashy, instantly recognizable cars will put any missteps by Tesla’s autonomous system on full display. 

I’d also like to know: What’s going on with those wireless chargers? Tesla has said the cabs would charge wirelessly, much like a phone does, presumably so they could operate with as little human intervention (and cost) as possible. It also showed off a video of a robotic vacuum cleaning out a cab. But lately we’ve heard little about the infrastructure or logistics required to operate Cybercabs, and what exactly is being built. Cybercabs have also been spotted testing with a conventional charging port, so perhaps the plans have changed. 

Remember, though, that operating an Uber-like robotaxi network has always been just part of the Tesla pitch. Musk’s core promise—the reason Tesla’s market cap is over 10 times that of General Motors—is that this is the company that will make your car drive itself. In 2024, Musk said anyone would be able to buy a Cybercab for $30,000 and add it to the Tesla network to earn side income. Right now, there is no vehicle you can buy with Level 4 capability.

It’s not clear if next week’s event will include anything about public sales or bring Tesla closer to fulfilling its years-long promise of making personally-owned autonomous cars. While consumer-grade Full Self-Driving has clearly gotten better over the years, it still carries the (Supervised) caveat and sometimes botches the basics of driving in frightening ways—like failing to brake for a giant tree in the road or a railroad crossing. 

There’s also the question of legally selling or deploying a vehicle without features typically required by federal motor vehicle safety standards, like brakes, side mirrors, and a steering wheel. Amazon-owned Zoox recently got an exemption from the U.S. government to commercially deploy up to 5,000 of its toaster-shaped pods, which also lack such accoutrement, over two years. So it isn’t impossible. But it’s not clear whether Tesla is also looking into this kind of carveout or going another route, like self-certifying that its vehicle complies with relevant regulations, to make the Cybercab street legal.

So the Cybercab is coming soon, in some form or fashion. How much of Musk’s grand vision is coming with it—sheer robotaxi dominance and self-driving cars in every garage—may take a while longer to figure out.

-Tim Levin

Hats off to BMW for selling 2 million EVs. Its biggest winner of the year is the new iX3 which is absolutely carrying the brand's electrified vehicle sales growth. In fact, half of all X3 nameplate orders in Europe are for the iX3.

When GM brought back the Chevy Bolt, the world cheered. It's affordable, Ultium-based EV was pitched as a major win for BEV adoption—but it's not long for this world. Here are the biggest changes you need to know about in case you want to pick one up before it's gone.

The new Hyundai Santa Fe will be electric, but not in the way you might think. It still keeps the gas tank, and that's because it's an EREV with over 600 miles of range. It comes in 2027 as part of an EREV boom.

If you want to hear more about the Santa Fe, Cybercab, and more, tune into this week’s Plugged-In Podcast.

Polestar feels burned. According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, the Chinese/Swedish EV brand still has no idea why it was kicked out of the U.S. despite its sister company, Volvo, cutting a deal to keep selling cars. Both Polestar and Volvo are owned by Geely, but only one got the boot. One New Jersey dealer is suing Polestar for $25 million in the fallout.

Rivian has a big name leaving its executive ranks. The automaker announced that its CFO is departing at the end of October. Here's what that means for the company's future.

Sales of the Tesla Cybertruck aren't doing so well. The truck could become an even harder sell thanks to a $5,000 price bump for the base model. The second round of price hikes this year made its cheapest model 25% more expensive since February.

BYD just launched it's 10,000th Flash Charging station. The automaker managed to double its charging network in just five months, and it's still averaging about 80 new Flash Charging stations each day.

Those ultra-fast charging stations raise a lot of concerns on the internet about long-term battery reliability. That's why an automaker decided to stress test an EV battery by fast-charging it 350 times over 9 days. Here's what it found out. 

Chinese researchers hit a major breakthrough in battery density. New findings have uncovered a way to stuff extra power in a cell, breaking the 600 Wh/kg barrier (that's more than double both Tesla's 2170 and 4680 cells).

Hyundai is entering the smart charging game to make EV ownership even cheaper. A new partnership will help EV drivers in the UK automatically charge while electricity rates are lower; plus, it's laying the groundwork for its future vehicle-to-grid tech.

Voltpost, the startup known for lamppost-based EV chargers, is expanding its product portfolio. This week it announced ceiling-mounted units for parking garages, plus a product for walls and posts.

Tesla's door handles are proving to be a big headache. Not only must it recall 3 million cars in China to meet new safety standards, but now a country in Europe is weighing whether or not it should take action.

You can get a drone delivery from Walmart, but did you know that you can get your auto parts dropped from the air as well? One dealership in Detroit is launching a new air-to-ground delivery service for car parts. Talk about PDQ.

One of Waymo's top executives took an indirect swipe at Tesla’s self-driving strategy in a blog post, and it has the carmaker’s fans peeved. According to Waymo’s vice president of onboard software, Srikanth Thirumalai, cameras alone "aren't enough" for autonomous driving. He also said improving a Level 2 driver-assist system until it reaches full autonomy is a “false summit” and that self-driving systems based on end-to-end AI “run the risk of black box failures.”

Speaking of Waymo, the Alphabet-owned robotaxi provider is coming to Europe. Waymo says it will target a 2027 launch in Germany, marking its first time on the old continent.

There’s never been more overlap between the robotics and auto spaces. Hyundai has Boston Dynamics. Tesla has Optimus. Rivian has Mind Robotics. It’s in that spirit that I bring you this video of a robot beating Usain Bolt’s 100-meter spring record during an event called the World Humanoid Robot Games.

I’ll give Bolt this, though. He can stop without smashing himself into a foam barrier.

Thanks for reading Critical Materials. See you next week!