EV

Seven Million Cars Recalled Over Hidden Door Handles While Robotaxis Get the Green Light

China's regulators triggered the country's biggest auto recall in recent memory this week, forcing Tesla, Xiaomi, Geely, Leapmotor, and Xpeng to file recall plans covering more than seven million vehicles over a single shared flaw: emergency door releases that are too hard to find in a crash. Tesla alone faces two separate Chinese recalls totaling nearly six million vehicles, one for door escape risk and another requiring camera-based eye-tracking to strengthen driver monitoring on its assisted-driving system. The irony runs deep. The very week regulators are demanding cars be safer for humans to exit in an emergency, Nevada opened its doors to thousands of paid robotaxi rides, giving Tesla, Waymo, and Uber the green light to charge passengers in the county that includes Las Vegas. Waymo simultaneously rolled out its Zeekr-built Ojai robotaxi to all riders in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, making it one of the only Chinese-manufactured EVs Americans can currently ride in, even if they can't buy one. Tesla, meanwhile, told JPMorgan that FSD v15 is a meaningful step forward, that today's HW4 hardware can handle unsupervised driving, and that its Optimus robot could go on sale to outside buyers as early as the second half of 2027. The collision of a mass safety crisis and an accelerating autonomy push captures the central tension in the EV industry right now: the baseline hardware is still being perfected at the same moment the industry is betting billions that software can make human driving obsolete.