EVwire newsletter #155: EVs break records — Uber invests in Lucid — Tesla Diner opens

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🇬🇧 The UK Government has launched a new £650 million ($871.5M) Electric Car Grant to make EVs even more affordable. (link) Some of the details around the grant:

Perhaps most notably, the document says “Emissions from vehicle production are assessed against the carbon intensity of the electricity grid in the country where vehicle assembly and battery production are located.”

This, in theory, might mean no Chinese EVs, now abundant in the UK market, can get the grant. Several Chinese makers have rolled out their own immediate subsidies in the same amount to reduce the confusion for customers and perhaps even win some.

In addition to the car grants, the gov also announced £63m in other measures to boost the EV ecosystem, like:

One niche but a welcome addition in legislation was that EV charging hubs can now be signed to from major roads.

Context: as for the EV sales situation in the UK, it’s something to watch: per our 2024 EV sales overview, 381,970 EVs were sold in the UK in 2024, growing by 21.4% year over year, with the EV market share going 16.47%→19.56%.

It also overtook Germany’s EV sales (380.6k) for the 2024 year, becoming the largest EV market by units in Europe, and third-largest in the world after China and the US.

Now, in the first half of 2025, Germany has surpassed it again in terms of units, but the growth is accelerating for UK still: EV sales have grown 34.6% to 224,841 units in H1 2025 over the first half of 2024, and fully electric market share of all car sales has gone from 16.6% → 21.6%. More about it all in our upcoming EV sales overview.

Not bad, UK. We love watching you go ⚡

🇮🇳 Tesla opened its first store in India, in Mumbai, last week. The world's 3rd-largest car market and the world’s most populous country.

It only offers Model Y for now, and at a high price due to the tariffs - expected to be lower soon. It has also started the Supercharging network rollout. (EVwire link)

Starting prices of the Teslas currently in India are:

Model Y RWD: ₹61,07,190 ($69,700)
Model Y LR RWD: ₹69,15,190 ($79,000)

Every new Model Y comes with a free Wall Connector.

Tesla has also added 8 “coming soon” Supercharger locations on its network map already, as it is common for Tesla to start building the SC network when starting deliveries in a new country.

I’m hoping they’ll wrap the first time as a proper milestone edition, but in the meantime, I managed to create quite a decent one with AI:

Here’s Anand Mahindra, the Chairman of Mahindra Group, welcoming Tesla to India - and sharing how he invited Tesla to the country to compete already back in 2017:

About the EV situation in India itself — I’ll resurface the statistics from my 2024 global EV sales analysis:

India: In 2024, there were 99,055 battery electric passenger cars sold,

+20.8% year-over-year growth,
1.99% EV share in all passenger cars sold.

The EV growth in the 3rd-largest car market in the world has been solid: EV sales doubled in 2023 (+114.3%), and in 2024 +21% on top of that. The EV market share went from 1.74% → 1.99% in 2024.

Now, the first half of 2025 has already shown new records in EV sales, and now with Tesla entering the market…

Meanwhile, Tesla’s auto business has shown a curve many of us didn’t really expect. Here’s Tesla’s market share of all vehicles by region, as shown in their Q2 Earnings Call on Wednesday:

Luckily, overall rEVolution hasn't stagnated as much.

It seems Tesla's role was to be the kickstarter of transition (succeeded), then keep its position (~succeeded, still 1st/2nd in the world in pure EV sales).

What’s next? EV share globally keeps rising, with every 7th car sold globally today being fully electric. Tesla’s focus has been on Full Self-Driving, AI, Energ,y and Robotics while maintaining its car business - will the latter come back into substantial growth as Tesla solves some of the former?

Every 7th car sold being fully electric means 6 out of 7 still need to be replaced. There’s plenty of room left to go, and we’ve got the front row seats to watch it all unfold.

Rimac Nevera R just went 0 - 400 km/h (248mph) - 0 in 25.79 seconds, beating the previous record by 2.04 seconds, and hit a peak speed of 431.45 km/h (268mph).
It set 24 performance world records that day. (video)
I especially like when the driver takes a casual phone screenshot at 431 km/h (at 01:43) 😂

Meanwhile, Lucid said its Air Grand Touring has been certified by Guinness World Records after travelling 1,205 kilometres (749 miles) on one charge in the US. (evwire link) The EPA range for the car is 516 miles. All these records always come with caveats like the actual drive speeds and routes chosen, but this is a significant result nevertheless.

Since the (autonomous) ride-hailing, or robotaxis, are ramping up worldwide and majority of it is already fully electric as they should be, I will be covering more of this overlap between of electric mobility and autonomous driving.

Uber has been solidifying its clear approach in the autonomous ride-hailing future: they bring the demand, and virtually all AV players provide the autonomous service.

This doesn’t rule out that Uber is going to develop its own robotaxi hardware/software product; in fact, I think it will do so to win the whole ecosystem on its side as the technology matures.

But for now, it is partnering with every autonomous player and their mom. So to speak.

On the latest news, Uber, Lucid Motors, and autonomous-tech firm Nuro have partnered to create a premium global robotaxi program for the Uber ride-hailing platform.

Uber will invest $300 million in Lucid and another similar investment in Nuro, while aiming to put at least 20,000 or more Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with Nuro’s Level 4 Nuro Driver™ on the road over six years, beginning with a US pilot late next year. Uber will own and operate those vehicles. And this doesn’t seem to be a random hopeful number either, as far as I could read out from the documents, this is a binding order.

I've covered Uber’s partnerships with May Mobility, Momenta, Pony .ai, WeRide, and Volkswagen back in May, which already built on some, most notably Waymo’s, partnership. The two offer a “Waymo on Uber” service in Austin and Atlanta. A further collab with Wayve was added just recently, as well as a partnership with the Chinese giant Baidu to offer robotaxi services outside China and the USA.

Naturally, Baidu wants to keep operating in its core robotaxi market, China, itself (which is actually very advanced compared to what we’ve got in the West).

Another full wild card I didn’t expect: Uber is reportedly in talks with its founder and previously ousted CEO, Travis Kalanick, to help fund his acquisition of the US arm of Chinese self-driving firm Pony AI. Pony AI is the first robotaxi player to have permits to operate fully driverless robotaxi services in all four of China's biggest cities.

Here’s my deeper dive on this and Uber’s latest partnerships: (evwire link) Uber has so far locked in 18 partnerships with autonomous vehicles companies, and has said it has an annual run rate of 1.5 million mobility and delivery AV trips on its network.

…on Uber’s and the robotaxi providers’ partnerships here: they are built to not last.

I understand the short-term benefits for these AV players in partnering with Uber - they get access to the demand, test out or scale up their fleets.

But this comes with a very strong danger as well, best shown in Waymo's case - you can only order Waymo through Uber's app within their partnership cities.

Now, if Uber adds more robotaxi providers - or eventually its own robotaxis (!) - do you think the customers will go and search for Waymo somewhere?

No, they will keep riding Uber and get on one of the other 10+ robotaxi providers, as Uber undoubtedly will create a robotaxi category soon.

That's also why you will never see Tesla's robotaxis join Uber's network.

So if any of the Uber robotaxi partners want to not just license their tech (for some, it is exactly what they want) and actually want to own the customer relationship as an autonomous ride-hail network in the near future... they better get out and start building their own exclusive order platform quite fast.

This coopetition can only last for a very short while.

... again, just my two Watts in this fast-changing robotaxi landscape. I’d love to discuss and hear your view. Comments are open on the online version of this newsletter (click ‘read online’ on the upper right corner to do so).

Tesla expanded its robotaxi service area in Austin by… to… well, just see it yourself:

With it, they naturally raised the fixed ride fee from $4.20 to $6.90. (evwire link) This elongated area meant going ~4mi² larger in service area than Waymo in Austin, to which Waymo quite quickly responded by expanding its service area in the city as well. Competition can be… good for us?

Waymo has scaled up a lot, now provides 250,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, and has reached 10 million paid trips total.

Just recently, Waymo also announced expansion to Philadelphia and is already collecting data in New York (while pushing to change the state law preventing driverless taxis).

I am also fairly certain Tesla is sandbagging the actual expansion area just to have the chance of making this picture happen. In fact, Musk nearly confirmed this on the Q2 earnings call on Wednesday: “Tesla's Robotaxi expansion is "going to get even bigger and longer, well in excess of the competition. It will be expanded in the next couple weeks."

If this were a different kind of newsletter, I would also tell you that Tesla has now expanded AI training compute with an additional 16k H200 GPUs at Gigafactory Texas, bringing Cortex to a total of 67k H100 equivalents. But, I’ll spare you.

Rivian launched the R1S and R1T Quad, their fastest trims and most off-road capable yet, with 4 motors, 1 per each wheel.

There will be special features this new drivetrain setup unlocks, like the Kick Turn coming in September as OTA (instant rotation, see video) and RAD Tuner (developed for racers, let’s you create your own drive modes setting wheel slip, torque balance, damping etc).

On July 16, Tesla launched the Model  Y L in China. It does seem overwhelmingly likely that we will see this launched in the US and Europe, too. The main differences seem to be in the seating layout (6 seats) and an extended wheelbase (+6’’), 9’’ longer overall than the current Model Y. See all details here.

While we’re on Tesla’s topics again, it reduced the Model Y prices in Canada by CA$20,000, bringing it back to the pre-tariff levels. Also, Transport Canada has ruled that there was no evidence of fraud after Tesla submitted 8,653 EV rebate claims for the country's iZEV program, and the funds were unfrozen.

I definitely do not say you should get a Tesla (any EV is better than ICE), but just noting that Tesla's CFO said on the earnings call that the company has already rolled out all of the vehicle incentives it plans to introduce in the US in Q3.

So, not expecting more, plus they will remove some of those incentives when nearing the end of the quarter. In case you missed it, all of this is due to the $7,500 federal tax credit ending on Sept 30th.

Actually, with any current EV ordering wish in the US right now, it is risky to wait until too late — to get the credit, the delivery must happen before Sept 30th.

I couldn’t fit more EV model news in today (literally, the email can’t fit it in size), but the EV industry isn’t sleeping. Consider joining the EVwire Insider to access 9 more model-related news just this week (link)

Resource: I was surprised to learn nobody had put together research on the world's largest fast-charging hubs so far. Just fragments here and there. So I went after it myself, together with our B2B partner, Eleport:
Deep dive: The Largest EV Charging Hubs in the World. (or see on LinkedIn: link)

Btw, if you’re interested in becoming a B2B partner of EVwire, reach out.

The top three largest charging hubs in the world currently include Shell Recharge x BYD with 258 fast chargers in Shenzhen, Tesla Oasis in California with 84, and the Tesla Diner in Hollywood with 80. Seed & Greet and ENBW Schnellladepark (love this word) in Germany follow.

I have already found hubs all across the world since that I want to add to the list, so expect a V2 sometime in the future. Speaking of the diner…

The Tesla Diner is now open: 10MW on-site, 80 V4 charging posts, 230 kW of solar canopies, and a futuretro dining experience. The site is open 24/7 for all EVs, dining from 6 am to midnight.

You can order your food ahead of time right from your Tesla's screen, or at the spot while watching movies on the two 66-foot LED screens. I put all the details we know and videos from the spot into one deep dive here:

There’s a lot interesting about the site, which ties together almost every piece of Tesla’s product offerings (even the Optimus humanoid bot is there, handing out popcorn), but I found two pieces outside the site itself interesting:

First, the level of integration: When you navigate to the Tesla Diner supercharger in your Tesla, the car will offer you to order your food ahead of time — you can choose from the full menu in the car, put together your order, and it will be charged on your card on file for Supercharging.

The other integration marvel comes from the movie screens — as soon as you get to the Diner’s wifi range, a Tesla Diner app appears on your Tesla screen (also in the rear screen if you have one), and you will see the same movie in sync playing in your car, along with the sound you need for the experience.

The second fun part to note is Tesla creating not just a food venture arm (which I assume they’ll outsource, Tesla doesn’t want to be in the food business), but also a subset there that has been in the works since 2018 — Tesla is now a candy company! Finally.

You can purchase Dog Mode Chill, Mango Bolt, and CyberBerry gummies on the spot, and I assume they’ll come to the Tesla merch shop soon, too. I resurfaced something from the past:

Okay, gummies aren’t what we came here for, even if they are shaped like a lightning bolt.

While it’s probably quite difficult to justify this Diner addition purely from the business perspective, it certainly adds flavour for the overall charging-station-as-destination concept. And it gives the Tesla fans a place to hang out (don’t downplay this perk).

Elon says, “If our retro-futuristic diner turns out well, which I think it will, Tesla will establish these in major cities around the world, as well as at Supercharger sites on long distance routes.”

PSU-Diner, anyone?

Hungry for more details on the diner? Find them along with the videos and pics straight from the site in my Tesla Diner Deep Dive. It even includes the video of the first Cybertruck lightshow there (always love those).

In the near future, you'll start finding EV chargers where you least expect them (link):

Yes, this is real and gaining traction — the Rheinmetall Curb charger (intro video here) is able to deliver up to 22kW, has integrated all that you’d expect from a charger (connectivity, auth via RFID, etc), and reliable operation in rain through encapsulated electronics (IP68).

Yes, it can handle a car driving over it, and it is easy to retrofit and maintain through a replaceable electronic module.

Inb4 “but we have piles of snow half a year” — yeah, we do too in good winters, but I can still see this working in a lot of use cases where a traditional AC post or mount wouldn’t work.

If you are interested in the Charging industry, find 15 charging-related news stories covered in our Insider Report this week: upgrade here.