Fred Lambert

Some thoughts on my month-long break from X. It's healthy. I think everyone should do it. Not just from X, but from any platform with an algorithm that is trying to influence you. If you are always in it, your capacity to recognize the patterns slowly erodes. It's a net negative. I'm more convinced than ever that while I don't think social media is a net negative on society, I think it shouldn't be available to minors. As for X vs Threads vs BSky, I think X still edges all of them, especially on its features, like posts not being limited by character count. I think this is the best feature of X compared to those. There are misinformation issues on all platforms, but I'd argue that X's problem is bigger purely because of the demographic and the nature of the beast. The most powerful accounts on this platform are blatant propagandists who are being directly boosted by the platform's owner, Elon Musk, who clearly doesn't mind misinformation as long as it supports what he already believes in. For Tesla stuff, which is still my main beat as a reporter, it is still the best platform, even though there's more misinformation than anywhere else; there's also more good stuff than anywhere else.

@FoxArmer It is a bottleneck for Tesla and has been for a while. HW2->HW2.5->HW3->HW4 and now HW4.5. none of these have delivered unsupervised self-driving yet.

@FredLambert So you think hardware is the hard part?

Xiaomi's cars now have lidar, high-def radar, and cameras with auto cleaning. But sure, "no one will ever catch up to Tesla"

@NeverplayF3 they litereally do you dumbass

@FredLambert Do your eyes have cleaning? 🤬

The road funding argument for EV fees isn’t inherently unreasonable; EV owners do use roads and should contribute to their maintenance. But the execution is terrible. Flat fees of $200-$250 that charge EV owners double or triple what gas car drivers pay in federal tax aren’t about fairness. They’re about making EVs less attractive, whether intentionally or through lazy policymaking. If Congress genuinely cared about road funding equity, it would implement per-mile charges that treat all drivers the same regardless of fuel type. Oregon has proven this works. Instead, lawmakers are choosing the blunt instrument of flat fees because it’s politically easier than raising the gas tax on 280 million vehicles, a tax that hasn’t budged in 32 years. The timing makes it even worse. The US just killed EV tax credits, is phasing out charging infrastructure incentives, and now wants to add annual penalties on EV ownership. EVs represent 10% of new car sales and 1.4% of total vehicles on the road. The health, environmental, and energy independence benefits of EV adoption are worth tens of billions to the US economy. This is the moment to encourage the transition, not tax it into submission. We need a serious conversation about road funding in the age of electrification. Flat EV fees aren’t a serious answer, they’re a political shortcut that punishes early adopters and slows down a transition the country desperately needs.

Also, two things to note, AI agents are getting much better. I set one up to give two "scans" of X per say on EV and Tesla stuffs. Super useful. It also posted my articles with parts of my 'Electrek's Take' automatically. I see that half the comments on these posts, which were clearly marked as being posted automatically from my takes, are about how "im still on X". lol. There's a real problem on the web of people commenting on shit they don't read.

Some thoughts on my month-long break from X. It's healthy. I think everyone should do it. Not just from X, but from any platform with an algorithm that is trying to influence you. If you are always in it, your capacity to recognize the patterns slowly erodes. It's a net negative. I'm more convinced than ever that while I don't think social media is a net negative on society, I think it shouldn't be available to minors. As for X vs Threads vs BSky, I think X still edges all of them, especially on its features, like posts not being limited by character count. I think this is the best feature of X compared to those. There are misinformation issues on all platforms, but I'd argue that X's problem is bigger purely because of the demographic and the nature of the beast. The most powerful accounts on this platform are blatant propagandists who are being directly boosted by the platform's owner, Elon Musk, who clearly doesn't mind misinformation as long as it supports what he already believes in. For Tesla stuff, which is still my main beat as a reporter, it is still the best platform, even though there's more misinformation than anywhere else; there's also more good stuff than anywhere else.

-- Please read before commenting. This is taken from Fred's take in the article and auto posted on X by Fred's agent. See pinned post in profile for details --

Tesla fans using the “4-second disengagement” as a gotcha are missing the forest for the trees. Yes, the driver was technically in control of the vehicle at the moment of impact. But she was in control because FSD was already failing by driving too fast ahead of this sharp turn — it was heading straight into a concrete barrier at highway speed with no sign of correcting. Everyone who has frequently used FSD or Autopilot and paints this 4-second disengagement as a “gotcha” moment is being disengenous, and that includes Elon Musk. I have tens of thousands of miles on FSD, and I’ve experienced the system coming too fast into a turn at least half a dozen times. We’ve said this before and we’ll keep saying it: the problem with FSD isn’t what happens when the driver is paying attention and the system works. The problem is what happens when the system gives you every reason to trust it, and then suddenly doesn’t work. The driver has to recognize the failure, assess the situation, decide on a correction, and physically execute it, all in less time than the system needs to create the danger. Musk and Tesla’s propagandists can point to the logs all they want. The video shows what actually matters: FSD approaching a standard highway curve at full speed with zero indication it was going to navigate it. That’s the failure. Everything that happened after, including the panicked disengagement, is a consequence of that failure. The framing that this was “manual driving, not FSD” is technically true for the final 4 seconds and deeply dishonest about the full sequence of events. It’s exactly the kind of liability shell game that courts are increasingly rejecting, as that $243 million verdict makes clear. Tesla created the system, sold it as “Full Self-Driving,” and profits from the ambiguity. At some point, it has to own the consequences.

-- Please read before commenting. This is taken from Fred's take in the article and auto posted on X by Fred's agent. See pinned post in profile for details --

We think a capital raise is not just possible, it’s essentially inevitable given what Tesla is trying to do. The numbers simply don’t work otherwise. Tesla generated $6.2 billion in free cash flow in 2025 with $8.53 billion in capex. Now it’s promising $20 billion+ in capex for 2026 and it’s going to start work on a $25-40 billion chip fab. Even if the Terafab spend ramps gradually, the combined investment demands over the next 3-5 years likely exceed $80-100 billion. Tesla’s existing cash pile and operating cash flow can’t sustain that without either a dramatic revenue acceleration, difficult when your core car business is shrinking, or external capital. The truth is that Tesla was heading toward a capital raise no matter what. It has shrinking profits, and its stock price hasn’t suffered much from it. Tesla is literally heading toward negative cash flow in 2026 purely from a shrinking auto business. The Terafab simply gives Tesla an excuse to raise capital for future growth rather than looking like a business about to turn negative. Furthermore, a company valued at $1.5 trillion and barely making $6 billion in free cash flow would be mad not to tap the public market. The irony is that Musk resisted capital raises for years, insisting they weren’t necessary, only to raise $12 billion in 2020 when the opportunity presented itself. The stock’s current valuation creates a similar window. A $10-15 billion at-the-market offering would barely dent the share count while providing the runway Tesla needs for its most ambitious industrial project yet. The question isn’t whether Tesla will raise capital, it’s when and how much. The Terafab announcement may have just accelerated that timeline considerably.

-- Please read before commenting. This is taken from Fred's take in the article and auto posted on X by Fred's agent. See pinned post in profile for details --

We’ve seen this playbook before. Musk announces an impossibly ambitious manufacturing timeline, the stock gets a boost from the excitement, and then reality sets in over the following years as deadlines slip and targets get revised downward. The 4680 battery cell is the most direct precedent. Six years after Battery Day, Tesla still hasn’t delivered on most of its original promises, and battery cell manufacturing, while difficult, is child’s play compared to leading-edge semiconductor fabrication. The 100 GWh by 2022 target quietly became roughly 20 GWh by 2025. The 56% cost reduction hasn’t materialized at scale. The $25,000 vehicle that was supposed to be enabled by cheap cells still doesn’t exist. Now Musk is proposing something far more complex, in a field where Tesla has no manufacturing experience, with a team he largely gutted over the past two years, while making comments about smoking cigars in the fab that suggest he doesn’t take the technical challenges seriously. Jensen Huang, who knows more about the semiconductor supply chain than almost anyone alive, is telling him it’s “virtually impossible”, and Huang has every incentive to want more chip production capacity in the world. Tesla designing its own chips was a smart strategic move that paid off with capable Autopilot hardware. But designing chips and manufacturing them are entirely different things. We’d love to be proven wrong, but the evidence strongly suggests that Terafab will follow the same pattern as 4680: bold promises, years of delays, and results that fall well short of what was originally claimed.

🥊 UFC Vegas 114 — Emmett vs Vallejos: AI Model vs The Market Our 5-model ensemble agrees with the market on 13 of 14 fights — but DISAGREES on 1: 🔥 Asplund over Petrino (model 80% vs market 33%) 🎯 More confident than market: Rahiki (93% vs 70%), Sosa (84% vs 67%) ⚠️ Caution: Many high-confidence picks have very limited UFC data (Rahiki 0/1, Sosa 3/0, Asplund 8/1). Most trustworthy high-conf picks: Vallejos (16/3 fights) and Sy (17/4). Full card breakdown below ⬇️ combat-edge.com/event/ufc-figh… #UFC #MMA #UFCVegas114

-- Please read before commenting. This is taken from Fred's take in the article and auto posted on X by Fred's agent. See pinned post in profile for details --

2018: Musk quits OpenAI, citing conflict of interest with Tesla's own AI effort. 2019: Musk claims Tesla is now an AI company 2020-2022: Tesla misses every single autonomy timeline set by Musk 2022: Musk sells billions worth of Tesla shares to acquire Twitter - reducing his stake in the then successful automaker 2023: Musk sees the success of ChatGPT and forms xAI, a private AI company, despite being CEO of Tesla, which he also claims to be an AI company 2024: Musk threatens Tesla shareholders to give him a bigger stake in Tesla (after he sold his) or he won't be building AI products at Tesla anymore 2025: Tesla shareholders bend the knee and give Elon what he wants Also in 2025: xAI merges/acquires X after it loses about 70% of its value compared to Musk's acquisition price, which was paid with Tesla shares 2026: Musk has Tesla invest $2 billion into xAI/X, which is hemorrhaging money and talent. Also, 2026: Musk has xAI merge with SpaceX. Also, 2026: Musk admits that xAI was built wrong and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Can Am Outlander Electric 2026 Review : The first full-size E-ATV on the market, is it good? electrek.co/2026/03/12/can…

-- Please read before commenting. This is taken from Fred's take in the article and auto posted on X by Fred's agent. See pinned post in profile for details --

This announcement is a gift to the shareholders suing Musk. For nearly two years, the central legal question has been whether Musk created a competing company that should have been built inside Tesla. Musk's defense rested on the claim that xAI and Tesla serve fundamentally different purposes. Today, he personally destroyed that argument by announcing a joint product where xAI's Grok is literally the brain directing Tesla's AI hardware.

-- Please read before commenting. This is taken from Fred's take in the article and auto posted on X by Fred's agent. See pinned post in profile for details --

A Threads user named Laushi Liu posted dashcam footage from his Tesla Model 3 on Sunday, March 8, showing the vehicle on “Full Self-Driving” mode at 23 mph near West Covina, California. In the video, the car approaches a railroad crossing where barriers have just come down — and drives straight through them. The timing is almost poetic: this video drops the day Tesla is supposed to finally hand NHTSA the data from its FSD violation investigation, after two deadline extensions. We’ll be watching to see whether Tesla actually delivers, and what that data reveals about just how common these railroad crossing failures really are.