Tesla’s Senior Manager of Cybercab General Assembly at Gigafactory Texas, Jody Kerns, is leaving the company to become Rivian’s Director of General Assembly for the R2 in Normal, Illinois.

He’s the second Cybercab launch leader to leave Tesla this year. The head of Cybercab new product introduction walked out in April, before the vehicle ever carried a paying passenger.

A new defect petition accuses Tesla’s Robotaxis of speeding through active school zones, and NHTSA has opened a file to decide whether to investigate. The agency puts the affected fleet at about 1,000 vehicles, Model Y and Cybercab.

It’s the third federal action aimed at Tesla’s driverless fleet in about five weeks, after an audit query and a Special Order over how the Cybercab was certified.

A Tesla Cybercab was involved in a crash in Philadelphia this week, and it came out of it missing the entire outer panel of its driver-side door.

We don’t know who was at fault or whether Tesla’s software was driving. But Tesla has no permit to run automated vehicles in Pennsylvania, and that narrows down what this car was doing on Broad Street.

A Nasdaq-listed company worth about $2.4 million says it wants to buy 500 Tesla Robotaxis. KIDZ AI, formerly an online coding school for kids, announced today that it sent Tesla a “procurement inquiry” for the vehicles and plans an “Autonomous Fleet Operations Strategy.”

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, the playbook should. Tesla’s Robotaxi is turning into what bitcoin treasuries were for failing micro-caps in 2025: a buzzword you bolt onto a dying business to get the stock moving.