Hungary now gets a bigger share of its electricity from solar than any country on earth, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about a place with Bavaria's weather and none of Spain's sunshine. That story leads this week, and it comes with a warning the whole industry is starting to hear: the panels were always the easy part. Also in here, a full charging curve on the Rivian R2, Tesla's stretched Model Y, and a tiny electric truck claiming it can tow 8,000 pounds. And yes, this is landing on a Tuesday. Our upload decided Monday was optional. We've spoken with it, it feels terrible, and it has agreed to think about what it did.
THE WEEK'S BEST STORIES
Hungary is nobody's guess for where Europe's solar boom is happening. It gets less sun than Spain, its government spent years publicly dismissing EU climate policy, and until recently it had almost no grid-scale battery storage. It also draws a larger share of its electricity from solar than any other country in the world. Ember's Global Electricity Review 2026 put Hungary's solar share at 27 percent of generation in 2025, up from 24 percent the year before, ahead of Spain, Greece, and Chile. DW Planet A visited a 450 megawatt site east of Budapest that will supply around 106,000 households, nearly twice the size of Hungary's current largest solar park. It spent four years in planning before excavators arrived in September 2025. Here's the part that matters beyond Hungary. This park has no state funding and no long-term buyer for its output, so the developer carries the price risk alone. That's where European solar is drifting as subsidy schemes wind down, and it's why on-site batteries stopped being optional. The bill is already arriving: DW reports no new grid connections have been granted to large solar parks for three years, and this developer is building its own connection point and handing it to the transmission operator free. The panels face east and west instead of south, which spreads output across the day rather than dumping it all at noon, and 160 batteries are planned on site to push power into the evening peak. Hungary went solar for reasons that had nothing to do with emissions, which is exactly why the model travels. Cheap land, a dislike of imported gas, and a workable price signal will do it. Build panels faster than you build grid and storage, though, and you end up with midday power worth almost nothing and a three-year wait to plug in.
State of Charge recorded a full zero to 100 percent charging session on the Rivian R2, and the shape of the curve tells you how to use the car. Peak was 225 kW, power held near maximum to about 36 percent, and 80 percent arrived in roughly 30 minutes from empty. Then it falls apart. Eleven minutes to go from 80 to 90. Another eleven to reach 95. Forty-six more for the final five percent. Total time flat to full: one hour and 38 minutes. Half the battery went in during the first 14 minutes. The engineering reason is the R2's 400-volt architecture. Most manufacturers chasing fast charging moved to 800 volts; Rivian instead gave the R2 the ability to pull more than 600 amps to keep the price down, which the host estimates saved one to two thousand dollars per car. He thinks that was the right call. The practical catch is that very few public chargers actually deliver that much current, and the channel had to travel to find one. Worth remembering that most owners do most of their charging at home overnight, where none of this applies. Peak DC figures decide how a car behaves on a handful of long trips a year. The session wasn't clean, and the host says so: an adapter overheated around 30 percent and triggered a thermal derate, which is exactly what a certified adapter should do, so he swapped it and restarted, costing about a minute. The number to actually worry about isn't the curve. It's the 264 miles the channel got in its own 70 mph highway test against an EPA combined rating of 307. Plan around real range, treat anything above 80 percent as an emergency measure, and this is a perfectly good road-trip car.
Tesla's Model Y L Reaches North America With Six Seats and One Awkward Row
Out of Spec Reviews
The stretched Model Y has landed in North America, and Out of Spec went through it at Tesla's Los Angeles launch event. The Model Y L is seven inches longer on a six-inch longer wheelbase, with a bigger battery built from four long Panasonic modules instead of two, which raises pack voltage along with capacity. Tesla quotes more than 325 miles, though it hasn't been EPA rated yet, plus 4.4 seconds to 60, 496 peak horsepower, 250 kW charging, and 3,500 pounds of towing. Deliveries start in September, with the launch edition just above $60,000. The odd part is the seating. The Model Y L is six-seat only, while the shorter, cheaper standard Model Y offers seven. A car positioned as the family option carries one fewer seat than the one it sits above. Two things buyers should note: curb weight and payload put it under 6,000 pounds gross, which rules out the Section 179 deduction some business buyers rely on, and that 325-mile figure is a manufacturer estimate, so ordering now means committing before an independent rating exists. Most of the engineering is invisible. A second-generation thermal unit adds roughly 15 percent more cooling capacity, and Tesla's own glass division supplies a solar-reflective coating on the roof and hatch that the hosts found genuinely convincing in a side-by-side heat-lamp demo. The consistent criticism: the second row tilts but doesn't slide, so reaching the third row means going down the middle. If you were already buying a Model Y and you have kids, this is the one. What it isn't is the large three-row electric SUV people keep asking Tesla for. That's still the Rivian R1S and Lucid Gravity's territory.
Solar's constraint stopped being the panel a while ago. It's the ground underneath, which is also wanted for housing, roads, ecosystems, and food. DW Planet A works through three ways around that: panels over farmland, panels floating on water, and panels in orbit. Two of those are being built now with measurable results. The third is a serious engineering program with a serious cost problem. On agrivoltaics, the video reports tomatoes and chili peppers doubled their yield under partial shade, since too much sun stresses the plants, and that irrigated soil under panels stayed wet for two days instead of two hours in one researcher's trials. A Department of Energy study found 95 percent of tested modules survived hail undamaged. The drawbacks are real: wheat and millet want full sun, investment costs run more than double ground-mounted panels, and the mounts themselves eat between 1 and 12 percent of the field. On water, a Jordanian study found floating panels cut evaporation by 42 percent, and ocean-sited panels can generate up to 13 percent more because the water cools them, at a cost premium of 2 to 20 percent. Singapore has a reservoir array supplying around 16,000 flats; a Chinese project is five times that. Space solar gets the longest odds, geostationary satellites around 1.7 km across at roughly $3,000 per kilogram to launch. Here's the angle the video moves past quickly: agrivoltaics and floating solar aren't competing with rooftop panels on cost, they're competing with a queue. Where grid connections are the scarce resource, a reservoir next to an existing substation beats a cheaper field with a long wait to plug in. Space solar deserves research money and none of the hype. The dull answers win here.
TELO Raises the MT1's Tow Rating to 8,000 Pounds
TELO Trucks
TELO has raised the tow rating on its compact electric pickup to 8,000 pounds, well past the 6,000-plus target it originally staked out. The announcement comes from co-founder and CTO Forest North on the company's own channel, so read it accordingly. His reasoning is that TELO has now towed enough with the truck to know what it can do, and he points at a specific market driver: a new class of travel trailers arriving with their own battery packs and regenerative braking, many sitting in the 6,000 to 8,000 pound range. A 6,000-pound ceiling would have left those out. For a truck TELO says weighs a little over 4,000 pounds, that's a striking ratio. For scale, Autoblog lists the far larger Porsche Cayenne Electric at around 7,716 pounds maximum towing, and InsideEVs describes the MT1 as roughly the length of a Mini Hardtop. North's case rests on braking rather than pulling power. His argument is that a four-wheel-drive electric truck able to accept very high charging power can also absorb very high regen power, so it can hold speed down a long grade for miles without touching the friction brakes, which he frames as the harder part of towing safely. He also notes the hitch sits close to the rear axle, giving a shorter lever arm so trailer weight disturbs the front of the vehicle less. North flags his own limit too, saying a large diesel is still the better tool for long-distance towing and the MT1's case is shorter trips. Tow ratings from companies that haven't started production are statements of intent as much as engineering, and this one should be read that way until an MT1 is on a customer driveway with a trailer behind it. The number TELO still hasn't given publicly is range while towing. Get that out and 8,000 pounds becomes useful.
The week is yours. See you next Monday. Actual Monday, this time.
Jacob Hunka, Founder nexusEVnews.com
P.S. Know someone who follows the auto industry and ignores the electric side of it? Now is a good time to fix that.