Enlarge (credit: JC Olivera / Stringer | WireImage )

While Musk has spent much of today loudly criticizing the Apple/OpenAI deal , he also sought to drop his lawsuit against OpenAI, a court filing today showed.

In the filing, Musk's lawyer Morgan Chu notified the Superior Court of California in San Francisco of Musk's request for dismissal of his entire complaint without prejudice.

There are currently no further details as to why Musk decided to drop the suit.

Enlarge / It will probably be a while before you see these on the road, but some Tesla stores now have display Cybertrucks. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

On Thursday afternoon, Tesla delivered the first 10 production Cybertrucks to customers at an event livestreamed on X, Tesla CEO Elon Musk's social media network. A demo video featured shots of the Cybertruck negotiating barren wildernesses, including one that was meant to look like Mars. Musk, who has mostly made headlines in recent weeks for endorsing virulent antisemtitic theories on his social media platform , took to the stage almost half an hour late, initially delivering his presentation from the back of a truck with his face hidden in shadow.

Musk claimed the Cybertruck is better than any other truck but also more of a sports car than any other sports car, made of a "special Tesla designed steel alloy" that he claimed will never rust and which cannot be stamped but which can also be produced in volume.

Mindful of the window-breaking debacle during the truck's debut in 2019 , Tesla designer Franz von Holzhausen came on stage to throw baseballs at its windows. Unlike last time (when presenters used metal balls), the allegedly bulletproof glass did not shatter. Musk made a point of the fact that in a crash with another vehicle, the Cybertruck—which weighs 6,603–6,843 lbs (2,995–3,104 kg)—will destroy the other vehicle.

Enlarge / When the Acura ZDX goes into production next year, the cars will feature CCS ports. But Honda and Acura EVs launched from 2025 onward will feature NACS ports instead. (credit: Honda)

On Thursday morning, Honda became the latest automaker to announce that it is switching away from the Combined Charging Standard port for fast-charging its electric vehicles. Since May of this year, beginning with Ford, multiple OEMs have signed on to the North American Charging Standard, which uses a plug of Tesla's design.

Perhaps more important than the plug itself is the fact that Honda has negotiated access for its customers to use Tesla's Supercharger network. These are far more numerous than CCS fast chargers in North America, and they're far more reliable—although much of that reliability is down to the tightly integrated Tesla ecosystem , and there are no guarantees that third-party vehicles will find the process as friction-free.

That's particularly true since some of those vehicles—including Honda EVs—will have to use a CCS-to-NACS adapter. Each automaker announcement has followed the same pattern, with NACS ports only appearing on cars from 2025 onward. EVs built before then will need adapters, which are supposed to be available sometime in 2024.

Enlarge / Your car's maker can collect data on you from many different sources. (credit: Getty Images)

Today, the Mozilla Foundation published its analysis of how well automakers handle the privacy of data collected by their connected cars, and the results will be unlikely to surprise any regular reader of Ars Technica. The researchers were horrified by their findings , stating that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy."

Mozilla looked at 25 car brands and found that all of them collected too much personal data, and from multiple sources—monitoring not just which buttons you push or what you do in any of the infotainment system's apps but also data from other sources like satellite radio or third-party maps. Or even when you connect your phone—remember that prompt asking you if you wanted to share all your contacts and notes with your car when you connected it via Bluetooth?

While some gathered data seems innocuous or even helpful—feedback to improve cabin ergonomics and UIs, for example—some data is decidedly not.

Enlarge / A Tesla charging station on February 18, 2023, in Union City, New Jersey. (credit: Getty Images | VIEW press )

Tesla has consistently exaggerated the driving range of its electric vehicles, reportedly leading car owners to think something was broken when actual driving range was much lower than advertised. When these owners scheduled service appointments to fix the problem, Tesla canceled the appointments because there was no way to improve the actual distance Tesla cars could drive between charges, according to an investigation by Reuters .

In mid-2022, Tesla started routing range complaints to a "Diversion Team" that fielded up to 2,000 cases a week and "was expected to close about 750 cases a week," Reuters reported.

"Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles' potential driving distance—by rigging their range-estimating software," the article published today said. "The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers 'rosy' projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts."

Enlarge / Elon Musk at the Viva Tech fair in Paris, France, on Friday, June 16, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Elon Musk plans an appeal to the US Supreme Court after losing an attempt to terminate a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Musk claims violates his First Amendment rights. The 2018 settlement over Musk's false "funding secured" tweets required Tesla to impose controls on his social media posts.

"Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, confirmed on Tuesday that Musk plans an appeal to the Supreme Court," according to Reuters .

In April 2022, Musk's attempt to get out of the settlement was rejected by a judge in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Musk appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, but the ruling against Musk was affirmed unanimously by a three-judge panel.