EVwire newsletter #167: The EV industry roundup, from European EV incentives to ghost Supercharger stalls

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Porsche is reportedly planning to end Taycan production by 2030, which would give its first electric sports car a run of about a decade. Deliveries fell from nearly 41,000 in 2023 to around 16,000 last year, and just over 6,000 in the first half of 2026, with production repeatedly halted on weak demand. (link)

Porsche has not confirmed the timeline. CEO Michael Leiters said in late July there are no plans to drop the Taycan immediately, and the company keeps updating the model, 18 variants deep, including a €1,000 option that simulates gear changes with actual jolts.

We’ve also got a new compact hatchback entering the market in Europe:

🇪🇺 Hyundai published the first official European pricing for the new IONIQ 3 in the Netherlands. (link)

The compact hatchback starts at €27,995 ($32,400) for the Standard Range Select and tops out at €41,995 for the Long Range N Line Evo, with up to 497 km (309 miles) of WLTP range from the 61 kWh battery.

🇺🇸 Ford is recalling 86,543 Mustang Mach-E EVs in the US because the rear side quarter-window trim can detach from the car and hit another vehicle. (link)

Affected cars were built between February 17, 2023 and October 8, 2024.

The cause is oddly specific: glass supplier Saint-Gobain Mexico brought in a new assembly jig that cut the time available for the window trim primer to cure. The supplier added a 30-second timer in September 2024 to fix it.

Ford knows of 219 reports of loose or detached trim, and no crashes or injuries. Dealers inspect and replace the trim free of charge, under NHTSA campaign 26V487000.

🇪🇪 Tesla has handed over its first customer vehicles in Estonia, its first deliveries since officially entering the country in April. And yesterday, Tesla opened up shop in Latvia 🇱🇻 (link), completing the Baltics.

The Tesla Model Y L's European release looks imminent. References to the six-seat SUV, plus a product image in Stealth Gray, were found buried in the source code of Tesla's Norwegian configurator, spotted by our friend William, and the same code line has popped up in other markets like Germany. (link)

In case you missed it, we launched our EVwire EVents calendar last week.

In this section, we’ll start calling out the incoming events and any that we’ve added to the calendar since the last newsletter. I won’t do all 51 64 events here today. Yesterday, we looked at the next three, now I want to highlight the four after:

We also just added three events in Istanbul yesterday - thank you, Ahmat, for sending them to us!

🇺🇸 Tesla took roughly 55% of every new EV sold in the US in July, an estimated 42,435 vehicles, up 4.9% from June, per Cox Auto data. (link)

The whole US EV market did 77,266 sales that month (-41.55 YoY). The Model Y on its own took about 37% of all new EV sales, more volume than any other automaker's entire EV lineup, per Cox Automotive.

Used EV sales rose 10.1% compared to July last year.

🇯🇵 Tesla is opening four more delivery locations in Japan, taking its footprint there from seven to 11, a roughly 60% jump. (link)

It follows a record run: over 10,000 vehicles sold in Japan in 2025, then roughly 12,000 in the first half of 2026 alone, and about 4,000 in June, which made Tesla the country's No. 2 imported brand for the first time.

Tesla Japan president Richi Hashimoto on why: "The free-charging campaign and other factors caused a surge in demand, disrupting the supply balance."

🇩🇰 Denmark hit a new record: 97% of new cars bought by private customers in July were electric. If including the business buyers, EVs took 80.2% of the month's 14,562 registrations, per Mobility Denmark. (link) It now expects one million EVs on Danish roads by 2027, or about one in three cars.

Dwell on that for just a second. One in three cars of the whole fleet on the roads, fully electric by next year.

The catch: the reduced registration tax on EVs is currently set to phase out after the New Year, and parliament takes up its future this autumn.

🇨🇦 Canada put C$10.9 million (US$7.8M) into EV charging and education, about 400 new public chargers across 22 projects, with Hydro-Québec taking the biggest slice for roughly 100 DC fast chargers. Part of it targets residential charging (link).

Speaking of incentives, here is a resource for the European readers among us.

Together with our B2B partner Eleport (a large CPO in CEE region), I put together a guide to EV incentives across 31 European countries: purchase grants, tax benefits and charger-installation support, broken down country by country. (link)

The spread is wild. Cyprus offers up to €19,000 for some buyer groups, Italy and Latvia both top €11,000, while twelve countries offer no direct purchase subsidy at all. And the leaders, like Norway and Denmark, have moved past grants entirely and lean on tax advantages instead.

My favorite graph we made was about the ‘weird ones’ I found.

Like the fact that in Latvia, you can choose to receive the EV incentive bonus for scrapping your ICE… when donating the vehicle to Ukraine to help with war efforts instead.

PS, if you’d like a partner to build out this kind of EV research with, I’m your guy. Send me a message, we’ve got some room left to help EV companies win.

Ford's $2 billion overhaul of its Louisville Assembly Plant for the Fathom is on schedule. (link) If you don’t know what the Fathom is, you need to read yesterday’s newsletter first. 🙂

Fathom is the affordable EV truck that Ford is building on its Universal EV Platform. And for that platform, it needed to empty out the 3-million-square-foot plant completely in late 2025 to make room for what Ford calls the Universal EV Production System.

Instead of one line, an "assembly tree" builds three sections of the truck at the same time, a front clip, a rear clip, and a structural battery pack that doubles as the floor, then joins them together.

There’s actually pretty good visual explainers of their system on Ford’s site here.

Ford claims a 40% improvement in assembly speed over what Louisville builds today, and still 15% faster net after reinvesting part of that gain into automation.

The small numbers are the good ones here. Ford chief manufacturing officer Bryce Currie says the wiring harness came out "more than 4,000 feet shorter and 22 pounds lighter" than in the company's first-gen electric SUV, alongside an "84% reduction in reaching over the fender" for the people actually building it.

Prototype builds on production-qualified parts start in Q1 2027, with customer deliveries later that year.

Samsung SDI bought out GM's 49.99% stake in their SynergyCells joint venture, taking sole ownership of a $3.5 billion battery cell plant under construction in New Carlisle, Indiana. (link)

That gives Samsung SDI its first wholly owned factory in North America. The stated reason was blunt: "slower-than-expected growth of EV demand" since the venture was announced in April 2023.

The original plan was 27 GWh to start, 36 GWh eventually, and more than 1,600 jobs, with production in 2026. That has slipped to 2027.

And it will not build EV cells first. Samsung SDI will run the plant for energy storage batteries instead, pointing at how fast the US ESS market is growing. The two did sign a separate deal to co-develop next-generation prismatic cells.

This is the second battery cell venture GM has walked away from. It sold its stake in an unfinished Lansing, Michigan plant to LG Energy Solution in December 2024, and took a $6 billion write-down on its EV business in January 2026. Ford's BlueOval SK venture with SK On was dissolved in late 2025.

On the Q2 call, Elon Musk finally put a date on the autonomous Semi: Tesla turns its self-driving effort to the truck "around the end of this year or early next year," once the passenger-FSD push eases up. He called it "very important" for the trucker shortage, but said Semi volumes are still too small a slice of the fleet to split the autonomy team today. (link)

I feel like that’s been one of the core capabilities that Musk has sandbagged over time. Which is rare for Musk as he is usually not keeping the touchy subjects to himself, like, at all.
But here, I think he has managed to keep it in for a long while now.

It’s a touchy subject due to the truckers’ jobs involved, and you can’t really go through the FSD testing phase so publicly with Semis as it has done in passenger cars.

Autonomous trucking will be a very, very significant change in logistics, and there are now quite a few players in the US that are actively pursuing and running live on some routes already.

Einride is not waiting around either. The Swedish autonomous freight company and Dutch truckmaker DAF are putting Level 4 autonomy into DAF's electric trucks. (link)

Einride Driver goes into DAF's International Truck of the Year 2026 electric platform, with Dutch research institute TNO defining and testing the integration.

Interface testing runs through 2026, the software goes into an actual DAF truck in 2027, then functional testing and validation before anything touches a public road.

Yes, the same Einride that just ordered 500 Tesla Semis.

And as I said, Musk is not arriving at an empty field. Who is already out there:

Aurora is currently furthest along on public highways, with roughly 25 driverless trucks running lanes like Dallas to Laredo and Fort Worth to Phoenix, plus frac sand between Midland and Monahans. It logged close to 440,000 driverless miles through June 30 with no collisions attributed to its own driver, and it is aiming for 200 trucks by the end of this year.

Kodiak AI ended Q2 with 35 customer-owned driverless trucks and over 40,000 paid driverless hours, though those are hauling sand on private roads in the Permian Basin for Atlas Energy. Public roads are penciled in for early 2027, with a 100-truck target by mid-2027.

Behind them: Torc, Daimler Truck's autonomy arm, is targeting a 2027 commercial launch. Bot Auto has run a fully driverless hub-to-hub trip in Texas. And Waabi raised $1 billion in January to get its Volvo-built truck out (and apparently to expand into robotaxis).

Notice how much of that is Texas.

Meanwhile, the Port of Los Angeles launched a $75 million Zero-Emission Truck Purchasing Incentive Program, worth up to $300,000 per truck for carriers buying at least 10 battery-electric Class 8 rigs (read: Tesla Semi), and as much as $24M per fleet. Applications run through December 3. (link)

The obvious question, where do you charge these Beasts, is getting an answer too.

Tesla opened its first public Megacharger station in Bloomington, California, an hour east of LA: six stalls, up to 1.2 MW (1,200 kW) each, open to all Semi customers. (link)

And we also just reported that they opened the second one at the same stall and power in Vernon, California.

There’s a Megacharger network forming across the US, and as I track everything, I have also noticed Tesla has ramped up hiring for its Megacharging program, both in the US and also in Europe, actually.

Michigan is next in line. Tesla is bringing Semi charging to Metro Detroit, working with utility DTE Energy. Sites are already being surveyed, with no final location picked yet. (link)

🇸🇪 After nearly three years, Tesla's Swedish strike is done! (link)
IF Metall has called off its strike after Tesla bought out all of its remaining (<10 as far as we know) striking members.

If you want the whole arc through the 1,021 days that this lasted, Simon put together the full timeline of how it played out. (link)

It started in October 2023 with 130 mechanics walking out at seven Tesla workshops, and has since become Sweden's longest active strike in modern history.

Dockworkers blocked 55+ ports. Postal workers froze license plate deliveries. Electricians left 250 Supercharger stalls dark. Unions in Denmark, Norway and Finland joined in. Tesla still found a way.

It did cost real volume in sales in 2025, although in 2023 and 2024 the Model Y was the best-selling vehicle in the country. By March 2026, as the strike was starting to break up (we’ve been tracking it live with articles if you read our feed), registrations were up 144% year over year and the Model Y was Sweden's best-selling EV again.

This win against IF Metall set a large precedent in the country, as Tesla will now continue without the collective agreement that the union was pushing for and which Tesla argued against, as it deems its own reward systems more beneficial to its employees.

The first fruit of the peace comes fast: more than 250 finished Supercharger stalls across 20 Swedish locations, some sitting powerless as "ghost stations" since 2023, are now being connected as the unions' blockade lifts. (link)

That grows Tesla's Swedish Supercharger network by over 20% in one go. The first of such ghost stations, at Falköping, was brought alive just yesterday!

Before the charging news: don’t miss our EVwire Insider Report, the Flash Charging Report. It is a 22-page deep dive from me, with my own charts and all, into the next category jump in passenger EV charging: BYD's 1,500 kW Flash Charging push, now headed for Europe, with every rival effort mapped too.

Tesla filed plans for a 124-stall V4 Supercharger in San Francisco, one of the largest SC sites ever proposed. The permit shows 124 stalls, 14 power supply units and a small building with little more than restrooms and vending, a stripped-down layout that has the community speculating about a future robotaxi hub, though the filings never say so. (link) As we’ve covered in our articles, the filings have shown elsewhere in Tesla’s plans features like a “robocar carwash” and wireless charging… not the case here, or not disclosed.

Mercedes-Benz added off-peak "Power Hours" discounts to its fast-charging network. Plug in during a station's overnight window and the lower rate applies automatically, same up-to-400 kW charging. It is a pilot at about 21 stations across seven US states plus BC, with rates from as low as $0.19/kWh. (link)

And for the fun find of the week, here’s a question for you:

How do you test the function of a CCS charging station for the new electric passenger ship on Lake Zurich when it is mounted on a jetty (you know, that pier type of thingy?

You’ll get creative. This was Adrian’s solution: