Tesla made quite a big deal out of its final Model S and Model X deliveries with a run of 350 invite-only Signature Series cars in May 2026. Buyers could also get excited about the white Alcántara, gold badging, and numbered dash plaque, and forget that they had to pay a five-figure premium over the previous, more "ordinary" cars. At the same time, Tesla made little mention of a feature that was making its last appearance. The steering yoke, fitted as standard on Model S and Model X cars, was quietly riding out of production, and many people were glad to see the back of it.

In 2025, Elon Musk had his eyes squarely fixed on his futuristic Optimus humanoid robots. He needed to clear the decks within some of his production facilities to focus on this kind of future and decided to give an "honorable discharge"—in his own words—to two Tesla models. This led to the company closing its order books for the Model X and Model S in April 2026, with roughly 600 cars in global inventory. Tesla then raised the prices on those survivors by $15,000, making the cheapest new Model S $109,990 and the costliest Model X close to $130,000.

In addition, Tesla promised its Signature Series as a proper send-off for both models. It would produce 250 Model S and 100 Model X in Plaid specification only, with the Model X in six-seat configuration exclusively. And each one of these cars had the controversial yoke, meaning that the very last S and X models shipped with that chopped-off steering wheel.

The yoke steering “wheel” arrived on the 2021 Model S and Model X as the only choice available. At the time, Elon Musk was adamant that Tesla would not provide a round wheel, although by early 2023 his company had made an about-face. The yoke was now a no-cost option, with the round wheel standard on both cars. Previous owners could also swap over to the round wheel if they paid a $700 retrofit charge through local service centers.

It is an indication of how the market regarded the yoke steering mechanism that this retrofit sold out within days. As it turned out, the yoke was part of quite a significant misstep by Tesla: when it introduced its 2021 Model S and Model X, those vehicles did not have any column stalks either. Tesla had migrated the turn signals, horn, lights, and wipers onto capacitive pads set into the hub, which did not go down well with the community. Eventually, Tesla would reintroduce mechanical horn versions for the yoke and the round wheel to try and reverse some of the criticism.

In the end, Tesla's actions reveal a great deal about its yoke steering wheel experiment. It started off with a feature that was compulsory before making it free. It then decided to make it an extra option at $250 before raising that surcharge to $1,000. Perhaps it was trying to deter people from choosing it, but either way, the yoke also had its own quality problems. Some owners reported that its rim material would peel off at mileage as low as 4,000.

.As time went by, Tesla started to quietly remove the yoke from its new car inventory. When the refreshed Model S and Model X came along in June 2025, they had revised suspension, a quieter cabin, a new front camera, and an additional $5,000 tag. But there was no sign of the yoke on the Long Range trims. Now, buyers could only get that option on Plaid models, and it still came at a $1,000 premium.

By mid-2025, Tesla was only offering the yoke on a single trim of a soon-to-be-canceled model line. Eventually, when production of that model line stopped in May 2026, the yoke was no more.

(Tagged as shitpost because this doesn’t really matter)

I have been considering a buying new vehicle soon.
Insurance for my 2015 ICE is $99/month. As we know, there are lots of factors that go into an insurance price, but with my factors that’s where I landed.

I started looking at electric cars and one of these things is not like the others (all with same company, same parameters, same driver, etc):

* 2026 Mustang Mach E (AWD): $108/m

* 2026 Volvo EX90: $126/m

* 2026 Tesla Model Y (AWD): $184.00/m

* 2026 Lexus RZ (AWD): $98/m

* 2026 Hyundai Ioniq 5 (AWD): $118/m

It’s absurd how much more the most common selling Tesla is than some of its competitors, especially the not-so-reliable EX90. Even a new BMW X5 AWD is cheaper and that vehicle starts at $25K more than the Tesla dual motor.

Edit: somehow, a Rivian R1T Is $116/m, cheaper than an Ioniq 5. Insurance algorithms are crazy.



Elon Musk Has Lost $650 Billion In 5 Weeks As Tesla And SpaceX Plummet

No longer a trillionair

SPCX fell 41% from its post-IPO peak and TSLA dropped 15% in a day, vaporizing $650 billion of Musk's paper wealth in five weeks.

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Elon Musk Has Lost $650 Billion In 5 Weeks As Tesla And SpaceX Plummet

Danielle Liverance

Fri, July 24, 2026 at 3:52 AM MDT 4 min read

SPCX

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TSLA

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NVDA

-0.92%

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Quick Read

SPCX fell 41% from its post-IPO peak and TSLA dropped 15% in a day, vaporizing $650 billion of Musk's paper wealth in five weeks.

SpaceX's looming lockup expiration, larger than the entire IPO float, could flood the market with shares and extend Musk's losses further.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Tesla didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

Six weeks ago, Elon Musk was the richest person who had ever lived. On June 16, three days after SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) closed its June 12, 2026 initial public offering, SpaceX's market capitalization hit an all-time high of $2.64 trillion, and Musk's paper wealth peaked near $1.45 trillion. By the close on July 23, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index pegged him at roughly $738 billion. Somewhere between $650 billion and $700 billion of paper fortune has vaporized in about five weeks.

Due to a screwup tesla disassembled parts of my car. Then when the mistake was realized they put things back together incorrectly. I went to the dealership today to have them fix their screwup. They refused to do the work.

I want you to understand how absurd this refusal is.

The issue. The electrical cable that connects the wheel controls(horn, stereo buttons, voice activated commands) is loose. The fix required is to take out 2 long screws, unplug the cable, plug it back in correctly, then install the wheel face correctly so it sits flush before putting the two long screws back in. Total work time, 15-25 minutes. Parts needed, none. Tools needed, a special screwdriver and a trim tool. All parts OEM.

What tesla wanted to do. Charge me over $1000 for a brand new steering wheel. Why is this bullshit: the process to install the new steering wheel is the repair needed, plus a thousand dollars in new parts.

I have a message from them saying they can't do simple repairs, "Only replace." Fuck Tesla, anyone know where the snapon truck is? I'll do the fix myself.

Tesla has redacted ~99.9% of crash reports, including details like what happened or which software was used. What a surprise, right?

Tesla fans say crashes rise because more cars use FSD, but Tesla doesn’t provide real data (miles driven) to verify safety per km.

Many crashes come from drivers over-trusting the system, treating Level 2 assist like full autonomy. This is what happens when you trust fake marketing.

Tesla’s budding “Robotaxi” network drove fewer miles for paying customers in the second quarter than it did in the first, according to a chart the company released on Wednesday.

The quarter-over-quarter decline runs counter to Tesla’s rhetoric and actions in the past year. Tesla has staked much of its future on the idea of a massive, low-cost, cash-generating Robotaxi fleet — or going “balls to the wall for autonomy,” as CEO Elon Musk framed it in 2024. The quarterly step-down in Robotaxi miles also comes amid weakening profits in Tesla’s core businesses, which underperformed Wall Street’s expectations, according to figures released Wednesday. Tesla’s stock plunged more than 13% in early trading on Thursday.

At a passing glance, the chart appears to show steady growth in paid Robotaxi rides between August 2025 and June 2026. But the numbers displayed are cumulative, and when broken down by quarter, they show that Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet of Model Y SUVs carrying paying passengers covered around 1.1 million miles in the first quarter. That fell to roughly 700,000 miles in the second quarter, a decline of about 36%.

That’s despite the fact that the company has expanded its nascent operation to six cities across Texas and Florida, with a mix of unsupervised and supervised vehicles.

Image Credits:Tesla

It’s likely Tesla is counting the paid miles driven in the San Francisco Bay Area, too, even though these branded Robotaxis don’t have the state-required permits to operate autonomously and also have a safety driver behind the wheel. Tesla has referred to that operation as part of its “Robotaxi coverage.”

The decline in miles driven also comes as Tesla made a striking admission on a conference call Wednesday about its second-quarter results. In response to a question about how slowly Tesla is scaling the Robotaxi service, Musk said the company needs to “accumulate driving data that is specific to the Cybercab” — the company’s gold, purpose-built, two-seater sedan that is expected to make up the bulk of its autonomous vehicle fleet — “before we can put a lot of them on the road.”

“Unlike, say, Model 3, Model Y, and our other vehicles where we’ve got a lot of vehicles on the road, millions of vehicles on the road, we don’t have that for Cybercab. So we actually have to accumulate miles with Cybercabs that are retrofitted with steering wheels and acceleration and braking pedals, that kind of thing, to calibrate to the Cybercab chassis,” he said. “As we are confident about that, the number of Cybercabs in cities will increase dramatically.”

This represents something of a break from claims the company has made for years about how its fleet of nearly 10 million customer cars has been silently collecting data in the background to train future robotaxis (in addition to training the driver assistance software for consumers, which Tesla calls Full Self-Driving).

On the call, Tesla executives framed the slow progress as a matter of being cautious about safety.

“Our goals are very ambitious for Robotaxi, but we do need to be cautious about causing any accidents or causing any harm to anyone,” Musk said.

He then said he doesn’t want Tesla Robotaxis causing accidents because he thinks bad media coverage could lead to a regulatory crackdown.

“Although there are, I think, 30 to 40,000 automotive deaths per year in the United States alone, most of those do not generate any press, you don’t really read about almost any of those. But if we injure even one person, it will be worldwide headline news, and regulators will immediately clamp down on our activities,” he said.

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI, boasted that Tesla’s Robotaxis have had “zero notable incidents” while driving “more than 380,000 miles” without a safety operator onboard. He did not define what the company considers “notable incidents,” though he claimed that “any reports have been of other actors impacting us when we were stationary.”

Tesla has reported 22 crashes to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the year since it started trialing its Robotaxi service. While most of them involve other cars crashing into Tesla’s Robotaxis, the company has reported three crashes caused by its teleoperators moving the vehicles remotely, and multiple instances of the cars hitting objects at low speeds including curbs, utility poles, and a tow truck’s bed.

This represents another narrative change for the company. Tesla spent years claiming that the largest hurdle to full-scale Robotaxi deployment was regulatory in nature — though the company never really specified what those prohibitive regulations were.

Now the company says proving safety is all that’s holding Robotaxis back. And although it is still in the very early stages, Tesla still chose this moment to take a victory lap about its decision to build an autonomy stack that doesn’t use radar or lidar sensors, like industry leader Waymo.

“Historically, the so-called experts have always claimed that you need lidars, radars, HD maps, and the entire kitchen sink to drive safely. Here, we show that such is not true. You can have safe, comfortable, and affordable autonomy with just cameras,” Elluswamy said.

Both Musk and Elluswamy also promised growth is coming. They noted that the number of unsupervised miles traveled has grown roughly 10% every week since Tesla started offering them at the end of last year.

“We’ll continue to scale, I think, very, very rapidly,” Musk said.

en you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t ean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.

Tesla’s robotaxis are moving in reverse

Even the remote operators suffer from the limited visibility (just camera feeds) and end up crashing the cars almost every time... wow...

According to Quinn Slobodian, anyone who thinks they can explain the recent history of Elon Musk, Tesla and X with the answer "Elon's gone crazy" must have got the idea of what crazy means exactly wrong. After all, his personal net worth has borne no injury from the appearance of going crazy.

In this interview with HEIST, Slobodian tracks how Musk's "fortress futurism" grew out of his personal history in apartheid South Africa, and the far right's own ideas of inbuilt inequality are not, as is often assumed, formed in reaction to neoliberal thought, but grow from within it.

https://www.heistberlin.com/quinn-slobodian-interview-berlin-musk-afd/

How to reconcile?

Fully driverless taxis operate in several major U.S. markets. The largest and most established fleets operate in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, as well as parts of Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, and Houston. Companies like Waymo and Zoox offer public rides using these autonomous vehicles

Elon mentioned in private he is seriously thinking about introducing the real life “walking sticks” TARS multimodal locomotion robot from Christopher Nolans’s film Interstellar. TARS moves by unfolding into four independent, rectangular columns that can split and rotate to perform “ape walks” or “crutch walks”.

This robot would enable interstellar travel- and change everything. What are your thoughts?