The California Public Utilities Commission has approved Waymo to expand its driverless taxi service to 18 counties, covering the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles while adding Sacramento and San Diego. The company’s service area is now more than 1,400 square miles, supported by a fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles, and it has completed more than 20 million trips. Waymo is targeting 1 million rides a week by the end of this year. The approval stems from Advice Letter No. 4 filed on January 28, though the company has not yet deployed the expansion.

Tesla has asked a federal judge for emergency access to a supplier’s plant in Troy, Texas, to remove tooling it says is needed to keep building the Cybertruck. The automaker alleges supplier Angstrom Automotive Group is closing the site and refusing entry, leaving several thousand Cybertrucks promised to customers at risk. In its July 23 filing in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, Tesla said Angstrom also demanded $250,000 a week to keep the line running, according to the complaint first reported by Bloomberg Law.

The U.S. Department of the Interior has used the Judgment Fund to pay TotalEnergies, Invenergy and Duke Energy more than $2.7 billion in public money in exchange for canceling multiple offshore wind developments and redirecting investment toward natural gas and other fossil-fuel generation. The projects affected span lease areas off New York and New Jersey, California, Maine and the Carolina Long Bay area. Courts have previously ruled similar uses of the mechanism illegal, but the funds have already been disbursed. The moves mark a sharp shift in energy-policy execution that directly benefits natural-gas demand and provides indirect support for crude oil.

The U.S. Commerce Department has declined to authorize Polestar (Nasdaq: PSNY) to sell model year 2027 and later vehicles in the United States under the Connected Vehicle Rule that took effect in January 2025. The decision bars the Geely-owned Swedish EV brand even though the Polestar 3 is assembled in South Carolina, because the rule targets vehicles deemed to have a “sufficient nexus” to China. Polestar said it will continue selling existing inventory of the Polestar 3 and Polestar 4 and support current owners through its service network. The move increases pressure on profitability as the U.S. accounted for 6% of its Q1 2026 sales and the company reported a -3.2% gross margin.

Tesla confirmed that its Full Self-Driving (FSD) system was engaged when a fatal crash in Texas occurred, saying the driver pressed the accelerator to 100% and the car hit a home at 73 mph. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened a Special Crash Investigation and plans to independently retrieve event data recorder (EDR) data. The incident adds to pressure following a 2024 Florida jury verdict that found Tesla 33% responsible in a deadly Autopilot crash, heightening regulatory risk.

A Tesla crashed into a home in a residential neighborhood in Katy, Texas, killing a 76-year-old woman, after the driver said the vehicle was operating on Autopilot. That claim has not been independently verified. The incident comes as NHTSA conducts an engineering analysis into “Full Self-Driving” (Supervised) covering roughly 2.9 million Tesla vehicles, following a probe upgraded in March 2026.

In the first five months of 2026, utility-scale solar in California’s CAISO generated more electricity than natural gas on 82% of days, up from 21% in the same period in 2024 and 2025. Over that span, natural-gas generation fell 60% while gas capacity stayed flat at 29 GW. Battery discharges tripled compared with the same period in 2024, alongside higher hydropower inflows and a doubling of wind imports from New Mexico. The shift points to faster structural replacement across the region, directly weighing on demand for natural-gas fuel.

Ford has begun mass-producing LFP batteries in the United States for a $30,000 electric pickup slated for 2027, a mainstream model built on its UEV platform for the mass market. The automaker is using technology licensed from CATL and says the lower-cost chemistry enables more space and a lower cost of ownership than a Tesla Model Y. The move marks the first large-scale use of LFP batteries by a US automaker in a mainstream vehicle, putting pressure on mid-priced EV segments.