… yes, you read that right. I thought I’d use this space this week to not bring you an offering from a partner, but rather one of our own.

You see, there’s actually a lot more to Tesla Space than this free newsletter I send you weekly. And I’m not talking about the videos.

Here’s what a Tesla Space Insiders win:

It’s true. Tesla officially added its third Latin American country!

Tesla didn’t stop there, though. Just today, Tesla’s PR in Europe sent me an email that they officially announced they are entering Latvia, with a pop-up store launching in Riga in August. Funnily enough, that’s the closest-ever Tesla launch to where I live, as the Latvian capital is closer to me than my local Estonian one.

🇺🇸 Per Cox automotive data (which I’ve found to be the most accurate and thorough for the US market), 247,226 battery electric vehicles were sold in the United States during the second quarter of 2026, with Tesla accounting for more than half of the market despite a year-over-year decline in deliveries.

Tesla delivered an estimated 124,800 vehicles during the quarter, giving it a 50.5% share of all U.S. EV sales. While Tesla’s deliveries fell from a year ago, no competitor came even close to matching its scale.

🇨🇳 The Tesla Model Y also took the top spot as China's best-selling passenger vehicle of any fuel type in June 2026, with 38,654 retail registrations, as per data from industry tracker Yiche.

The Model Y starts at 263,500 yuan (about $38,800) and tops out near 313,500 yuan ($46,100), making it by far the priciest model in the top 10. Every other entry starts under 250,000 yuan ($36,800), and four of them start under 100,000 yuan ($14,700).

🇩🇪 A camouflaged Tesla Model Y L prototype has been spotted testing again at Germany's Nürburgring, hinting at a European launch for the long-wheelbase, six-seat crossover SUV.

It's not the model's first sighting there. The Model Y L was first caught at the Nürburgring in August 2025, ahead of its eventual September China launch. Nearly a year later, it's back on the same track, lightly camouflaged at the front and rear with the middle of the body left exposed.

🌍 As promised last week, the 2025 Impact Report follow-up.

The report covers Tesla's full ecosystem, EVs, energy storage, solar, manufacturing, and AI, and leads with one number: Tesla says its customers kept nearly 37 million metric tons of CO2e out of the atmosphere in 2025 alone, roughly equivalent to the annual energy use of 5 million homes.

Model 3's rear-wheel-drive trim starts at $36,990, well under the $49,353 average price of a new car in the US, per the report. Tesla credits that gap to manufacturing at scale.

The Model Y RWD also undercuts mass-market gas SUVs on total cost of ownership over five years and 60,000 miles, including depreciation, insurance, maintenance, and fuel. As per Tesla, the Model Y RWD costs $0.77 per mile to run, while the Toyota RAV4 costs $0.81 per mile, the Hyundai IONIQ 5 costs $0.85 per mile, and the BMW X3 costs $1.15 per mile.

The report also puts real numbers on FSD (Supervised) safety for the first time: drivers using it see 8x fewer major collisions than the US national average:

FSD Supervised is also more efficient: Tesla sampled 65 million miles of real-world driving in 2025 and found FSD-engaged trips used 5% less energy than the same distance driven manually, with the efficiency gain peaking in the 25-55 mph range typical of city and suburban driving.

Cybercab is where the emissions story compounds. With full autonomy and maximized ride-hailing, Tesla projects Cybercab will avoid nearly twice the GHG emissions per mile of a Model 3 or Model Y. The logic, in addition to the actual real teardrop shape of the Cybercab, a personal car sits parked most of the time, Tesla puts average use at around 10 hours a week, while a Cybercab keeps working.

A new reaction injection molding process for Cybercab injects paint during the molding step itself, cutting cycle times from hours to minutes. Tesla says that cuts manufacturing and supply chain emissions for those parts by 35% and eliminates paint VOC emissions entirely.

On the energy side, more than 213,000 Powerwall units were enrolled in Tesla's virtual power plant programs by the end of 2025, delivering over 20 gigawatt-hours back to local grids, while Powerwall and solar owners saved over $1 billion on energy costs in 2025.

On the people side, Tesla says it has created nearly 135,000 jobs globally as of 2025. Its ASTM-standard injury rate dropped from 3.6 in 2021 to 2.3 in 2025, even as employee safety-suggestion submissions grew more than 15-fold over the same period, to roughly 758,000 a year.

I happened to stumble upon something really big last Saturday. I found, as I often do, someone on my network on LinkedIn that had shared a bit of an update.

Niche news but still interesting to Tesla geeks, I thought, and shared it on X with an explainer. 300k views later (and 500k on the quote posts like Sawyer’s), this news had spread through a lot of large media outlets, somehow especially much so in all of major Korean news. I should have made my article about it much sooner but somehow couldn’t see this blow up so much!

Then, James Kim deleted the post. It seems I blew it wide open and Tesla went and said “nuh-uh, keep it quiet please”. The same thing has happened with my reports before, too.

But we got what I think is confirmation that it was indeed correct info. Elon Musk himself liked my post on this:

Now, here’s what the post from James itself actually meant.

In April, Elon shared that Tesla has reached the milestone of AI5 design tape-out. That means the design is ready and clear, and can enter fabrication.

That chip, which Elon says will be one of the most-produced chips in the world (it’ll go into Optimus, Tesla datacenters, and likely into its vehicles too), will be produced simultaneously by TSMC and Samsung.

And that means each of these had to complete their own specifications for the design and create tape-out — which is what we now saw. So the AI5 is bound for volume production at Samsung's Taylor, Texas fab on the company's latest 2nm process.

Anyway, you are now the only people who know the backstory of that whole AI5 Samsung chip tape-out thing.

🇺🇸 Tesla told DC lawmakers on Monday that a wheelchair-accessible robotaxi is officially in the works, though the company gave no timeline for its arrival.

The confirmation came from Tesla Senior Policy Advisor India Herdman during a DC City Council hearing on a contested bill that would let robotaxi services operate in the District.

"We are in development for a purpose-built, wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle. […] We know that paratransit can be very difficult, and people who are confined to wheelchairs permanently should still be able to move around freely, so that is an active product being built by Tesla in Texas."
— India Herdman, Senior Policy Advisor at Tesla

🇺🇸 New Jersey's Senate and Assembly committees have advanced bill S.1677/A.3968, which would set new hardware rules for the state's first autonomous vehicle pilot program.

The bill states that any fully driverless robotaxi would need a camera system plus two more, physically distinct sensor types built to keep working if the cameras fail, on top of 50,000 supervised miles logged on New Jersey's own roads before a company could drop its safety driver.

Tesla's Cybercab and its current Robotaxi fleet run on cameras and artificial intelligence alone. That would make them illegal to run driverless in New Jersey under the bill as written.

🇪🇺 Tesla owners in the Netherlands, Estonia, Belgium, Lithuania, and Denmark have now driven a combined 50 million km (about 31 million miles) using FSD Supervised.

The jump is a big one.
Tesla's European FSD Supervised fleet crossed 20 million km (12.4 million miles) roughly 7.5 weeks ago. That means owners have added around 30 million km (18.64 million miles) in under two months, more than doubling the cumulative total in that stretch.

Stateside, FSD v14.3.5 is rolling out with software 2026.20.6.6, bringing the newest FSD build to the 2026.20 branch. The update adds dashcam clip encryption, parental controls that can block Browser, Theater, and Arcade, and a camera preview you can open at any time.

FSD Story: Tesla also shared the story of a 93-year-old owner who had started going out less on her tiring daily drives, and now takes herself to appointments, errands, and family road trips with FSD Supervised.

🇺🇸 Starship Flight 13 got all the way to T-0 on Thursday evening before the count aborted automatically, with four of the Super Heavy booster's engines failing to ignite. Two Raptors will be replaced, and the next attempt is expected early next week.

"Some of the engines didn't start, triggering an automatic launch abort. Now offloading propellant. Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days."
— Elon Musk, on X after the abort

The FAA had closed its review of May's booster mishap on Monday, clearing the flight. When it does fly, Flight 13 is the second Version 3 Starship, on 33 Raptor 3 engines, carrying 20 of the new Starlink V3 satellites. Six of those satellites carry cameras pointed back at Starship's heat shield, and some tiles have been painted white to simulate missing ones during reentry.

VIDEO TIP: While waiting for the retry, check out the episode #2 of SpaceX's Starship docuseries, with some really impressive engineering views.

SpaceX unveiled its Starlink V5 terminal: speeds of 375+ Mbps from a dish that is 48% smaller by area and 62% lighter than the V4, drawing just 35 to 50 W.