After 4 Cybertruck recalls in 5 months, Elon Musk’s Tesla may soon lose more of its luster

Tesla just can’t shake those quality problems with its Cybertruck.

The first recall came at the end of January, thanks to a warning-light font size that was too small, which could have caused crashes, though Tesla said there was no record of any happening. This was easily fixed with an over-the-air software update, unlike the next recall in April, when Tesla had to physically fix the vehicle because its accelerator pedal could—and did—get stuck, causing surprise acceleration.

But yesterday, Elon Musk truly spoiled his critics with not one but two Cybertruck recalls, both of the this-needs-to-come-in variety.

Tesla paused Cybertruck shipments a couple weeks back, with some reports saying there was a windshield wiper issue. Accordingly, one of the recalls is because “excessive electrical current can cause the front windshield wiper motor controller to fail…increasing the risk of a crash.” The wiper motor needs to be replaced. It’s not clear if there were any crashes because of this, but there were multiple reports of the wipers failing.

The other recall is because the Cybertruck’s sail applique—the long strip of plastic lining on top of the sides of the truck bed—was badly installed in some vehicles. The cosmetic piece fell off in at least two instances and had the potential to create a road hazard for people driving behind the truck.

That’s four recalls—three physical—in just five months. It’s only been seven months since people first took delivery of the thing. Like the Cybertruck itself, it’s not a good look. (Your mileage may vary; nearly 12,000 Cybertrucks have been delivered, suggesting plenty of people do like its early-PlayStation-graphics design.)

Tesla’s investors, who recently decided that Musk deserves a $50-something-billion pay package, remain very patient people. There was barely a blip in the rise of the company’s share price, which ended Tuesday up 2.6% and continued its ascent this morning (the stock is down over 30% this year.)

What’s likely to be of more interest to them is Tesla’s next overall shipment figures, which are expected to arrive early next week. Wall Street consensus has deliveries down to 440,000 from 466,000 last year, though some analysts say you could lop off another 20,000 or so.

On top of that, other carmakers will also soon report their Q2 shipments and, as Bloomberg reports, it is quite possible that Tesla will no longer be the electric car company that sells more in the U.S. than all its rivals combined. Its Q1 sales were already down 13%, while the likes of Ford and Hyundai soared.

That is not a favorable trajectory, but perhaps it is natural—in an expanding market, an early lead may not last forever.

More news below.

David Meyer

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NEWSWORTHY

Waymo accelerates. Waymo, Alphabet’s robotaxi outfit, has begun offering its services in San Francisco without a waiting list. As TechCrunch reports, this comes shortly after two Waymo software recalls. Meanwhile, GM’s Cruise robotaxi unit has a CEO again, after predecessor Kyle Vogt was felled in a serious safety scandal. The new CEO is Marc Whitten, who was a founding engineer in the Xbox team, and also an Amazon executive.

OpenAI delays voice assistant. ChatGPT’s voice assistant feature was supposed to be released about now, but OpenAI is delaying the launch while it improves “the model’s ability to detect and refuse certain content,” it said. Bloomberg reports that OpenAI also wants to get its infrastructure ready to handle what it expects to be heavy demand. Meanwhile, OpenAI suddenly cut off access to its services in China this week, and Bloomberg also reports that local rivals like Baidu and Alibaba are racing to scoop up OpenAI’s customers there.

Reddit vs AI bots. Reddit, which last month announced a partnership with OpenAI, doesn’t want other AI companies feeding off its users’ data. As The Verge reports, Reddit has updated its robots.txt file to tell most automated bots not to scrape data from its website. However, recent reports have suggested that several AI companies (Perplexity is a notable example) have been ignoring the anti-scraping requests in websites’ robots.txt files and siphoning off their data anyway.

ON OUR FEED

“It is true that we have ferocious competition with [OpenAI]. They are an independent company. We don’t own or control them. We don’t even have any board members. So they do entirely their own thing. But we have a deep partnership.”

—Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells delegates at the Aspen Ideas Festival that the two companies will partners for “many, many years to come.”

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The ‘move fast, break sh*t’ ethos of today’s AI startups is already coming back to haunt them—and us, by Jeremy Kahn

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Why the Pentagon’s overtures to the private space industry are good news for Europe, by Jeff Huggins (Commentary)

BEFORE YOU GO

Apple’s RCS push. One of the bonuses inside the upcoming iOS 18 is newfound support for the Rich Communication Services standard, which will let iPhone users send media-laden messages, with read receipts, to Android users (and vice versa, obviously.) 9to5Mac reports that some U.S. carriers have now enabled this in their infrastructure, so if you’re running iOS 18 beta 2 and you’re with AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon in the U.S., you should be able to turn on the functionality now.