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Three months after ZEEKR launched its new 7X SUX in China, the EV automaker has opened up sales in select markets in Europe, its third model in the region. The ZEEKR 7X will start below 53,000 Euros, and early European customers can take advantage of free upgrade packages.

Chinese EV brand ZEEKR continues to expand quickly after hitting a production stride early in China. Its new model, the 7X SUV, provides no better evidence of ZEEKR’s rhythm as it is already going on sale in Europe.

We first caught wind of a new all-electric SUV model this past July when we saw some camouflaged images of what was initially called “the CX1e.” Two days later, ZEEKR confirmed the new model is called the 7X and will join the X SUV as another all-electric model to be sold globally. Shortly after, ZEEKR shared full-fledged images and news that the 7X will be its first model to feature its new LFP batteries that can recharge from 10-80% in 10.5 minutes.

At that time, ZEEKR shared that the dual-motor version of the 7X can accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h (0 to 62 mph) in four seconds. However, we soon learned that the 7X is faster than initially stated (0-62 mph in 3.8 seconds) and would begin rolling out to customers in China by the end of September.

At the time of its official launch in China, ZEEKR said deliveries of the 7X would hit global markets, such as Europe, within a year. Today, ZEEKR has opened up 7X reservations in three initial markets overseas, ahead of deliveries in Europe next year.

ZEEKR 7X Europe
Source: ZEEKR

ZEEKR 7X is now on sale in three markets in Europe

According to news from ZEEKR today, the 7X SUV is on sale in Europe now, beginning in The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. The new 7X joins the ZEEKR X SUV and 001 shooting brake in Europe and offers a family-friendly five-seat BEV with off-road capabilities and two powertrain configurations, all on a cutting-edge 800V platform.

The SUV was designed and developed by ZEEKR’s Design and Technology center in Gothenburg and supported by its European Marketing, Sales & Service HQ in Amsterdam. It is built atop the same SEA modular  vehicle architecture as its 001 and X siblings but offers the same amount of interior volume as a full-size SUV.

The SUV’s state-of-the-art digital cockpit features a 5G infotainment system and smart technologies. On the performance side, customers in Europe who opt for the dual-motor AWD Performance version of the ZEEKR 7X will be able to accelerate 0-100km/h in 3.8  seconds.

The single-motor RWD Long Range trim offers a range of around 615 km (subject to WLTP homologation). That’s about 382 miles. Premium models use ZEEKR’s cost-efficient “Golden battery,” which features a 75 kWh pack of its in-house LFP cells. Other 7X trims will utilize 100 kWh packs with NMC cells, chosen for greater energy density. ZEEKR Europe’s chief commercial officer, Lothar Schupet, spoke about the launch of the 7X:

Following the success of the  Zeekr 001 and Zeekr X, we are very proud to introduce our third electric vehicle to the European market. The Zeekr 7X will redefine expectations in the midsize family SUV segment, and with its exceptional range and ultra-fast charging capabilities, will make the transition to electric driving seamless and stress-free for our customers. This launch  represents another significant milestone in our commitment to customer-focused  technology and innovation and reinforces our strategic expansion: the Zeekr 7X will play a  key role in our mission to accelerate the shift to sustainable mobility in Europe.

Here’s how initial pricing will break down for the single motor premium trim of the ZEEKR 7X in Europe:

  • The Netherlands: €52,990 (incl. VAT) (~$55,600)
  • Norway: 539,900 NOK (incl. VAT)
  • Sweden: 579,000 SEK (incl. VAT)

ZEEKR also shared that at launch only, early 7X customers in Europe can benefit from Long Range RWD models with the Cockpit Package as a standard feature with a free upgrade to 20-inch wheels. Performance AWD models will receive ZEEKR’s Comfort and Cockpit Packages as standard.

The 7X is on sale in those European markets now, with initial deliveries expected to begin in the summer of 2025.

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BYD overtakes Tesla as China’s EV giants dominate global sales

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BYD overtakes Tesla as China's EV giants dominate global sales

China’s EV automakers have surged ahead of the competition in global EV sales, and a new report shows just how far ahead they are.

The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) just dropped its third annual Global Automaker Rating, showing that Chinese carmakers dominate the zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) space. China now accounts for over 11 million EVs sold annually – over half of global EV sales.

Its massive domestic market has helped Chinese automakers build serious momentum. They’ve scaled up, improved tech, and are now setting the pace globally. Companies like Geely and SAIC have already hit 50% EV sales share, meeting their 2025 targets a full year early. In fact, Chinese automakers took the top five spots for ZEV class coverage, and five out of the top six for EV sales share.

Meanwhile, automakers in the US and Europe are trying to catch up. But they’re facing a dual challenge of falling behind on tech while navigating shaky regulatory environments.

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The report also confirmed a big milestone: In 2024, BYD officially surpassed Tesla in global battery electric vehicle (BEV) sales for the first time. BYD’s BEV sales jumped 25%, and its combined BEV and plug-in hybrid sales climbed an impressive 47% year-over-year. Still, both BYD and Tesla remain in the “Leaders” category.

Automakers boosted energy efficiency, charging speed, and driving range thanks to newer, high-performance models.

“Our assessment revealed widespread improvement in BEV technology performance across the industry,” said Zifei Yang, ICCT’s global passenger vehicle lead. “GM and Honda made significant advancements by introducing high-performance models to their previously limited offerings, while companies like Geely, Chang’an, and Chery improved substantially with new high-performance EV lines.”

India’s Tata Motors also hit a turning point. For the first time, it graduated from ICCT’s “laggard” group to “transitioner,” thanks to new EVs and big moves on battery recycling and repurposing. While Japanese and South Korean automakers are still lagging behind, Honda and Nissan are inching forward. Honda launched its first US BEV, and Nissan finally clarified its ZEV targets.

One newer addition to this year’s report: a green steel metric. Since steel is the second-largest source of emissions in vehicle manufacturing (after batteries), ICCT now tracks which automakers are cutting emissions in the supply chain. European brands like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and VW earned high marks for sourcing renewable-powered green steel.

ICCT’s CEO, Drew Kodjak, summed it up: “The rapid evolution of the EV market in China has created technological and manufacturing advantages for companies there. For the wider global auto industry, this is no longer just about meeting future goals – it’s about remaining competitive today in a market that’s charging up.”

The full Global Automaker Rating, covering 21 major automakers, is now live on ICCT’s website.

Read more: EV prices dipped in May – and Tesla Model Y led the slide


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Bloomberg just released the most embarrassing report about Tesla, Waymo, and self-driving

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Bloomberg just released the most embarrassing report about Tesla, Waymo, and self-driving

Bloomberg has just released an embarrassingly bad report about the self-driving space, in which it claimed Tesla has an advantage over Waymo by misrepresenting data.

There are currently many eyes on Tesla’s imminent launch of its “robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas.

We have just published a new report today to highlight how the launch is a game of smoke and mirrors, meant to reframe the optics of Tesla’s self-driving effort following years of broken promises.

At the same time, Bloomberg Intelligence released its own report, claiming that Tesla is ahead in self-driving technology, but the firm misrepresented data to support its claim.

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The report compares Tesla’s and Waymo’s self-driving efforts, going so far as to claim that “Tesla is closer to vehicle autonomy than peers.”

Here are the two main charts that Bloomberg circulated from the report:

The problem is that the report is misleading by comparing completely different data.

Steve Man, the Bloomberg Intelligence analyst behind the report, based his report on Tesla’s own quarterly misleading “Autopilot Safety Report.”

The report is widely considered to be unserious for several main reasons:

  • Tesla bundles all miles from its vehicles using Autopilot and FSD technology, which are considered level 2 ADAS systems that require driver attention at all times. Drivers consistently correct the systems to avoid accidents.
  • Tesla Autopilot, which is standard on all Tesla vehicles, is primarily used on highways, where accidents occur at a significantly lower rate per mile compared to city driving.
  • Tesla only counts events that deploy an airbag or a seat-belt pretensioner. Fender-benders, curb strikes, and many ADAS incidents never appear, keeping crash counts artificially low.
  • Finally, Tesla’s handpicked data is compared to NHTSA’s much broader statistics that include all collision events, including minor fender benders.

All these facts combined render the comparison between Tesla’s accident rate using “Autopilot technology” and NHTSA’s US average completely useless.

Yet, Bloomberg decided not only to use it but also to compare it to Waymo’s data to claim that “Tesla is 10 times safer”:

The problem with this is similar to the comparison with the US average, as the Waymo data includes all police-reported incidents, which is a much wider net than Tesla’s data, in addition to the previously mentioned issues.

To highlight how big a potential discrepancy there is in the data, NHTSA underscored in a report last year how Tesla is not aware of many crashes involving Autopilot and that only 18% of police-reported crashes involve airbag deployment:

Gaps in Tesla’s telematic data create uncertainty regarding the actual rate at which vehicles operating with Autopilot engaged are involved in crashes. Tesla is not aware of every crash involving Autopilot even for severe crashes because of gaps in telematic reporting. Tesla receives telematic data from its vehicles, when appropriate cellular connectivity exists and the antenna is not damaged during a crash, that support both crash notification and aggregation of fleet vehicle mileage. Tesla largely receives data for crashes only with pyrotechnic deployment, which are a minority of police reported crashes. A review of NHTSA’s 2021 FARS and Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) finds that only 18 percent of police-reported crashes include airbag deployments.

Knowing full well the comparison is not fair and completely misrepresents the situation, the usual Tesla stock pumpers on X widely shared Bloomberg’s misleading report positively, and even CEO Elon Musk shared the misleading data:

Electrek’s Take

This is embarrassing for Bloomberg. It’s such a blatant error and misrepresentation that it is suspicious. They should issue a correction right away.

Tesla fanboys are now pushing this to try to prove that Tesla’s robotaxi is safe to launch amid Tesla doing everything it can to hide its self-driving crash data ahead of the launch. This is a dangerous report from Bloomberg.

Additionally, it’s not just the primary claim regarding the accident rate that is misleading. The report also contains several glaring errors.

In this chart, Bloomberg claims that Tesla is at “3 billion miles of data collected since launched”:

It looks like they simply use Tesla’s “cumulative miles driven with FSD (Supervised)”, which includes driver supervision, and the driver remains responsible for correcting FSD at all times.

In comparison, they talk about 22 million miles for Waymo. It looks like Bloomberg only used Waymo’s rider-only mileage in San Francisco, which is currently at 22 million miles, but when accounting all markets, Waymo is currently at more than 71 million miles:

It’s not clear why they would only use mileage in San Francisco for Waymo when they used Tesla’s global customer FSD mileage for Tesla.

Again, these are also “rider-only” miles, which means that there are only people riding inside the Waymo vehicles, compared to Tesla’s mileage being completely supervised by customer-drivers at all times.

We simply don’t know how many “rider-only” miles Tesla has, since it only started with one or two cars in Austin over the last few weeks. It is likely to have no more than a few hundred or a few thousand miles.

Regardless, it’s completely nonsensical to claim that Tesla is “ahead of its peers” in self-driving, especially Waymo, based on this report.

Tesla is currently only trying to launch something that Waymo has been doing for years.

The other argument the report attempts to make is that Tesla’s “self-driving” vehicles are approximately 7 times cheaper than Waymo’s.

Again, the problem is that Tesla’s vehicles are not self-driving. Tesla has yet to prove that, and that’s why it is using “plenty of teleoperation” in this launch in Austin. Mapping, optimizing for geo-fenced area, and teleoperations are the real limiting factors here. Not the cost of the vehicles.

Suppose Tesla has anything less than a 100-to-1 vehicle-to-teleoperator ratio. In that case, its system is not profitably scalable and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a 1-to-1 ratio for the foreseeable future – at least on its current hardware.

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CNBC Daily Open: The Israel-Iran conflict continues but markets seem unfazed

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CNBC Daily Open: The Israel-Iran conflict continues but markets seem unfazed

Smoke billows from an explosion at the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) building in Tehran on June 16, 2025.

AFP | Getty Images

The U.S. stock market rose and oil prices retreated amid news that Iran wants a ceasefire with Israel. As early as the first days of Israel’s strikes, Tehran reportedly asked several countries to persuade U.S. President Donald Trump to call on Israel for an immediate ceasefire, NBC News reported, citing a Middle East diplomat with knowledge of the situation.

When asked at a news briefing Monday about the prospect of a ceasefire, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated he was not interested in one, according to NBC News. Netanyahu said Israel is “not backing down” from eliminating Iran’s nuclear program.

Regardless of how negotiations — or the lack thereof — play out, it’s clear that countries are placing renewed emphasis on defense. The U.S. Defense Department is turning to artificial intelligence to bolster its forces, announcing on Monday a one-year contract with OpenAI “to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains.” 

Amid the Monday developments regarding armed conflict and defense considerations, the Trump Organization announced a mobile phone plan called Trump Mobile and a smartphone, clad in gold and emblazoned with an American flag, dubbed “T1.” Putting aside iffy ethical issues about the sitting U.S. president lending his name to consumer products, their unveiling seemed ill-timed and tone deaf. Perhaps the reception over Trump Mobile was spotty.

What you need to know today

Markets recover on hopes of containment
U.S. stocks rose Monday on news that Iran is reportedly seeking a ceasefire with Israel. The S&P 500 was up 0.94%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.75% and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.52%. Europe’s Stoxx 600 index added 0.36%. Some analysts, however, are warning that global investors may be underpricing the impact of a conflict between Israel and Iran.

Safe-haven assets dip
In another sign the markets are shrugging off the Israel-Iran conflict — which continued for the fourth consecutive day — both safe-haven assets and oil prices dipped Monday. At the end of the trading day stateside, spot gold prices fell 1.03%, while the dollar index dipped 0.07%. Meanwhile, U.S. crude fell 1.66% to settle at $71.77 and international benchmark Brent lost 1.35% to close at $73.23 a barrel.

‘Golden share’ in U.S. Steel
Shares of U.S. Steel rallied 5.1% Monday after Trump issued an executive order on Friday that allowed the firm and Nippon Steel to finalize their merger so long as they sign a national security agreement with the U.S. government. U.S. Steel said Friday that the agreement, which both companies have signed, includes a golden share for the U.S government, which would give it veto power over many decisions.

OpenAI wins contract from Defense Department
OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million one-year contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools, the latter announced Monday. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website. In December, OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”

Trump Organization enters telecommunications
The Trump Organization, a company owned by the current U.S. President, on Monday announced a mobile phone plan and a $499 smartphone set to launch in September. The company’s new foray into telecommunications mainly comprises a licensing agreement. On Friday, the president reported that he had made more than $8 million in 2024 from various licensing agreements.

[PRO] What would it take for markets to react?
Equity and energy markets appeared to shake off concerns of a wider conflict in the Middle East on Monday, reversing some of the moves from late last week. Such a response to geopolitical conflict is not unusual, according to one strategist, who explained what it would take for markets to feel the effects of the hostilities.

And finally…

U.S. President Donald Trump raises a fist as he steps off of Air Force One upon arrival at Calgary International Airport, before the start of the G7 summit, in Alberta, Canada, June 15, 2025.

Dave Chidley | Afp | Getty Images

As G7 leaders meet, allies ask: Is Trump with us or against us?

As leaders of the world’s largest advanced economic powers gather in Canada for this year’s Group of Seven summit, ongoing trade instability and turmoil in Ukraine and the Middle East are set to dominate talks.

With uncertainty over those major issues largely arising from the White House’s economic and foreign policy, allies are likely to ask whether Trump stands with them, or against them on major geopolitical points.

Asked if he planned to announce any trade pacts at the summit as he left the White House on Sunday, Trump said: “We have our trade deals. All we have to do is send a letter, ‘This is what you’re going to have to pay.’ But I think we’ll have a few, few new trade deals,” in comments reported by The Associated Press.

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