Tesla has put up a webpage allowing TSLA shareholders to register for early Cybertruck delivery, as long as they fit certain criteria. It could give us a hint as to how Cybertruck deliveries are going.
But now Tesla is adding another method for Cybertruck reservation holders to jump in front of the line – or perhaps an incentive to enhance the seeming exclusivity of the model.
The Cybertruck reservation must be in the participant’s name and have been made prior to March 1st, 2024
The participant has not yet taken delivery of a Cybertruck
Each participant must provide brokerage statements showing that you owned TSLA shares on Feb. 28, 2021 and owned at least 500 TSLA shares on Feb. 29, 2024
The brokerage statements for Feb. 29, 2024 must show that you owned at least 50% of the TSLA shares that you owned on Feb. 28, 2021
Brokerage statements proving shareholdings must clearly show first/last name, statement date, and Tesla shares. All other information may be redacted.
These steps must be taken by Friday, March 22, 2024 11:59 PM CT CDT in order to hop the line, and can only be done once per customer and only in the US or Canada (where it’s coming soon).
As a result, even if a shareholder reserved a Cybertruck after initial deliveries began, they could still hop to the front of the Cybertruck line as long as they’ve held a significant amount of shares for some time.
Could this move also give us a sense of how Cybertruck deliveries are going?
Originally it was rumored that the Foundation Series would encompass only the first 1,000 vehicles. Later, rumors said that this number expanded to 20-25k. The company has not confirmed how many Foundation Series Cybertrucks will be made (which…would certainly be relevant information for collectors to know before spending a $20k premium).
Tesla has claimed that it currently has annual production capacity to produce 125,000 Cybertrucks per year – a number that wasn’t all that believable from the get-go. So, a quarter of a year into production, this would mean that Tesla should have been able to make 30,000+ Cybertrucks by now.
But if the company is just starting to offer early delivery to shareholders, either this means they’re going to produce tens of thousands of Foundation Series trucks, or they’re nowhere near 125,000 production capacity. We’re going to guess it’s the latter.
This move could also signal that the take-rate for Foundation Series invites has been disappointing. Customers may be waiting so they can avoid the $20k premium (they did reserve a $40k truck, after all, so $120k could certainly inspire sticker shock), or may be waiting until early production snags get ironed out. Even reports of a Cybertruck selling for $244k might not entice would-be flippers, given that Tesla has threatened and then followed through on punishing early owners who resell their trucks for profit.
Regardless, we might have expected Foundation Series to be done delivering by now, given that the truck has been out for months already, and given that these invites just went out today which means there are at least several more weeks of Foundation Series deliveries left to go (current order confirmations seem to be getting a March-May delivery timeline).
This is simultaneously a quicker and slower pace than previous Tesla rollouts. For the Model 3, Tesla’s first deliveries started in July of 2017, but those cars only went out to employees and the first big wave of deliveries to the general public only started in late December (that’s when we got ours).
Meanwhile, for the Tesla Semi, those seem to have seen effectively no deliveries since the first trucks were released in December 2022. We still haven’t seen any reports of Semis owned by anyone other than Pepsi or Frito-Lay, though Tesla said in October that about 70 trucks have been built – about double the amount we know are owned by PepsiCo.
But with Cybertruck, members of the general public did start receiving trucks within weeks of the delivery event – which is quicker than both of the above. Though months later, it seems like the delivery numbers may still be coming in a trickle, rather than a flood.
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Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging and Starbucks have officially opened their first DC fast charging hub together, off the I-5 in Red Bluff, California.
The 400 kW Mercedes-Benz chargers are capable of adding up to 300 miles in 10 minutes, depending on the EV, and every stall has both NACS and CCS cables – they’re fully open DC fast chargers.
Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, a joint venture between subsidiaries of Mercedes-Benz Group and renewable energy producer MN8 Energy, first announced in July 2024 that it would install DC fast chargers at Starbucks stores along Interstate 5, the main 1,400-mile north-south interstate highway on the US West Coast from Canada to Mexico. Ultimately, Mercedes plans to install fast chargers at 100 Starbucks stores across the US.
Mercedes-Benz HPC opened its first North American charging site at Mercedes-Benz USA’s headquarters in Sandy Springs, Georgia, in November 2023 as part of an initial $1 billion charging network investment. As of the end of 2024, Mercedes had deployed over 150 operational fast chargers in the US, but it hasn’t disclosed an official number of how many chargers are currently online.
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Andrew Cornelia, CEO of Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, is leaving the company at the end of the month to become global head of electrification & sustainability at Uber.
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The race for autonomous driving has three fronts: software, hardware, and regulatory. For years, we’ve watched Tesla try to brute-force its way to “Full Self-Driving (FSD)” with its own custom hardware, while the rest of the automotive industry is increasingly lining up behind NVIDIA.
Here’s a table comparing the two chips with the best possible specs I could find. greentheonly’s teardown was particularly useful. If you find things you think are not accurate, please don’t hesitate to reach out:
Feature / Specification
Tesla AI4 (Hardware 4.0)
NVIDIA Drive Thor (AGX / Jetson)
Developer / Architect
Tesla (in-house)
NVIDIA
Manufacturing Process
Samsung 7nm (7LPP class)
TSMC 4N (custom 5nm class)
Release Status
In production (shipping since 2023)
In production since 2025
CPU Architecture
ARM Cortex-A72 (legacy)
ARM Neoverse V3AE (server-grade)
CPU Core Count
20 cores (5× clusters of 4 cores)
14 cores (Jetson T5000 configuration)
AI Performance (INT8)
~100–150 TOPS (dual-SoC system)
1,000 TOPS (per chip)
AI Performance (FP4)
Not supported / not disclosed
2,000 TFLOPS (per chip)
Neural Processing Unit
3× custom NPU cores per SoC
Blackwell Tensor Cores + Transformer Engine
Memory Type
GDDR6
LPDDR5X
Memory Bus Width
256-bit
256-bit
Memory Bandwidth
~384 GB/s
~273 GB/s
Memory Capacity
~16 GB typical system
Up to 128 GB (Jetson Thor)
Power Consumption
Est. 80–100 W (system)
40 W – 130 W (configurable)
Camera Support
5 MP proprietary Tesla cameras
Scalable, supports 8MP+ and GMSL3
Special Features
Dual-SoC redundancy on one board
Native Transformer Engine, NVLink-C2C
The most striking difference right off the bat is the manufacturing process. NVIDIA is throwing everything at Drive Thor, using TSMC’s cutting-edge 4N process (a custom 5nm-class node). This allows them to pack in the new Blackwell architecture, which is essentially the same tech powering the world’s most advanced AI data centers.
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Tesla, on the other hand, pulled a move that might surprise spec-sheet warriors. Teardowns confirm that AI4 is built on Samsung’s 7nm process. This is mature, reliable, and much cheaper than TSMC’s bleeding-edge nodes.
When you look at the compute power, NVIDIA claims a staggering 2,000 TFLOPS for Thor. But there’s a catch. That number uses FP4 (4-bit floating point) precision, a new format designed specifically for the Transformer models used in generative AI.
Tesla’s AI4 is estimated to hit around 100-150 TOPS (INT8) across its dual-SoC redundant system. On paper, it looks like a slaughter, but Tesla made a very specific engineering trade-off that tells us exactly what was bottling up their software: memory bandwidth.
Tesla switched from LPDDR4 in HW3 to GDDR6 in HW4, the same power-hungry memory you find in gaming graphics cards (GPUs). This gives AI4 a massive memory bandwidth of approximately 384 GB/s, compared to Thor’s 273 GB/s (on the single-chip Jetson config) using LPDDR5X.
This suggests Tesla’s vision-only approach, which ingests massive amounts of raw video from high-res cameras, was starving for data.
Based on Elon Musk’s comments that Tesla’s AI5 chip will have 5x the memory bandwidth, it sounds like it might still be Tesla’s bottleneck.
Here is where Tesla’s cost-cutting really shows. AI4 is still running on ARM Cortex-A72 cores, an architecture that is nearly a decade old. They bumped the core count to 20, but it’s still old tech.
NVIDIA Thor, meanwhile, uses the ARM Neoverse V3AE, a server-grade CPU explicitly designed for the modern software-defined vehicle. This allows Thor to run not just the autonomous driving stack, but the entire infotainment system, dashboard, and potentially even an in-car AI assistant, all on one chip.
Thor has found many takers, especially among Tesla EV competitors such as BYD, Zeekr, Lucid, Xiaomi, and many more.
Electrek’s Take
There’s one thing that is not in there: price. I would assume that Tesla wins on that front, and that’s a big part of the project. Tesla developed a chip that didn’t exist, and that it needed.
It was an impressive feat, but it doesn’t make Tesla an incredible leader in silicon for self-driving.
Tesla is maxing out AI4. It now uses both chips, making it less likely to achieve the redundancy levels you need to deliver level 4-5 autonomy.
Meanwhile, we don’t have a solution for HW3 yet and AI5 is apparently not coming to save the day until 2027.
By then, there will likely be millions of vehicles on the road with NVIDIA Thor processors.
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Velotric’s Black Friday Sale switches gears with up to $750 increased savings and new lows starting from $999
Velotric has switched its Black Friday Sale into a higher gear with increased savings, new low prices, and expanded bundle packages on its e-bike lineup for a short-term window through Cyber Monday – plus, the option to save 30% on three accessories. One notable expanded package is the Velotric T1 ST Plus Lightweight Urban e-bike, coming with a FREE range extender battery ($400 value) for $1,299 shipped. You’d have to pay $1,649 for the e-bike on its own without any discounts, with that extra battery running that price up to $2,049. The brand’s early Black Friday deal only offered $350 savings (with the bundle being a rear cargo rack), but for this short-term change-up, you’re getting $750 in total savings that returns the tag to the lowest price we have tracked in 2025. Head below to check out the full lineup of Velotric’s expanded Black Friday Sale savings.
One of my favorite options from Velotric’s lineup, the T1 ST Plus e-bike, is a lightweight commuter that weighs only 39 pounds, and if you’ve read any of my e-bike reviews, you know I often lean towards models that can be easily handled up and down my rather large stoop. It brings a more European-style minimalist elegance to your travels, though keep in mind this model doesn’t possess a throttle, so it’s all PAS action. The 350W rear hub motor (with a 600W peak) is paired with a 352.8Wh battery for up to 70 miles of assisted travel at up to 20/28 MPH top speeds, depending on your local laws. What’s more, with the range extender battery, which connects right to this bike’s frame, boosts your pedal-assisted travel up to 100 miles in total, giving you serious commuting power.
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It comes with a nice lineup of features, too, but of course, I have to shout out the Apple Find My inclusion for the added peace of mind. From there, you’ll also be getting double hydraulic disc brakes, puncture-resistant tires, an 8-speed Shimano derailleur, an integrated LED auto-on headlight, a 3.5-inch LCD screen for setting adjustments that also has a USB port to charge up devices, and more.
EcoFlow Black Friday flash sale drops DELTA 2 Max power station to new $799 low ($600 off) + other bundles from $698
As part of its phase 3 Black Friday Sale event, EcoFlow has launched a 24-hour flash sale that is taking up to 61% off four offers, with a notable deal on the DELTA 2 Max Portable Power Station at $799 shipped, which beats out Amazon’s pricing by $100. While it carries an $1,899 MSRP, you’ll more often find it going for $1,399 these days, with the discounts we’ve been seeing in the latter half of 2025 regularly dropping things lower between $999 and $899. Now, for only 24 hours, you can pick it up $100 lower than we’ve ever tracked, giving you a total $600 off the going rate ($1,100 off the MSRP) for the lowest new price we have tracked.
***Note: some of these flash sale offers might start at higher prices, but for this 24-hour period, they have been given automatic discounts to these rates that activate in your cart.
Upgrade off-road commutes and adventures with Lectric’s XPeak 2.0 e-bikes and up to $583 in FREE gear from $1,499
As part of its ongoing Black Friday Sale, which is starting to show models running out of stock from the offers of up to $893 in savings across e-bike bundles. During this sale, Lectric’s XPeak 2.0 Long-Range Off-Road e-bikes are seeing the largest bundles of the year with $583 in FREE gear joining your purchase at $1,699 shipped. You’ll also find Lectric’s standard XPeak 2.0 Off-Road e-bikes coming with $434 in FREE gear at $1,499 shipped. These packages would normally cost $2,282 and $1,933 in full if not for the discounts on the bundles, which are the largest we’ve seen for the long-range models. The standard e-bikes come with a rear cargo rack, fender set, Elite headlight upgrade, a suspension seat post, a bike lock, and a phone holder, while the long-range counterparts get those, as well as a 5A fast charger that “is 250% faster, allowing you to power up in approximately 4 hours or less.” Head below to more on these all-terrain e-mobility solutions.
Lectric XP4 Standard Folding Utility e-bikes with $326 bundle: $999 (Reg. $1,325)
Lectric XP Lite 2.0 Long-Range e-bikes with $449 bundles: $999 (Reg. $1,448)
Heybike Mars 2.0 Folding Fat-Tire e-bike with Black Friday gift: $999 (Reg. $1,499)
Heybike Ranger S Folding Fat-Tire e-bike with Black Friday gift: $999 (Reg. $1,499)
Best new Green Deals landing this week
The savings this week are also continuing to a collection of other markdowns. To the same tune as the offers above, these all help you take a more energy-conscious approach to your routine. Winter means you can lock in even better off-season price cuts on electric tools for the lawn while saving on EVs and tons of other gear.
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