Joey Klender
Joey Klender is a journalist at Teslarati who covers electric mobility with a tight focus on Tesla and the wider Elon Musk ecosystem. He tracks how vehicle technology, regulation, corporate decisions, and space infrastructure intersect, turning company moves into clear stories about impact on drivers, investors, and the industry.
Tesla, Elon Musk, and corporate flashpoints
Klender’s core run of work follows Tesla and Elon Musk through their most contested moments, rather than routine product news. He covers anti-Musk protests and their spillover into owner risk, including Tesla’s consideration of new vehicle features aimed at deterring vandals targeting cars and facilities. His reporting on Musk’s business disputes, such as plans to countersue Twitter over the terminated acquisition, spells out the financial stakes and legal posture without leaning on opinion. In covering the “funding secured” trial over Musk’s 420-per-share tweet, he concentrates on courtroom testimony, regulatory scrutiny, and what the case means for Tesla’s governance. Across these pieces, he is consistently interested in flashpoints where Musk’s decisions collide with markets, regulators, and public sentiment.
Regulation, safety, and Full Self-Driving
Self-driving technology and its boundaries are a recurring thread in Klender’s coverage. He reports on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving subscription rollout, framing it around timing, pricing, and how the subscription model changes access to advanced driver-assistance features. In covering major pushback against Full Self-Driving in Europe, he focuses on regulatory objections, safety concerns, and the gap between Tesla’s software ambitions and the rules governing road use. His work in this area tends to draw out concrete regulatory actions and their implications for Tesla’s roadmap rather than treating autonomy as a purely technical story.
Production, markets, and global operations
Klender follows Tesla’s factories, production plans, and market signals in detail. His reporting on Tesla China’s denial of rumored output cuts at Gigafactory Shanghai concentrates on official statements, local demand conditions, and what sustained production means for Tesla’s global supply. When he covers investor moves such as ARK offloading more than 139,000 Tesla shares, he links large trades to sentiment around the company’s performance and prospects. He also writes about emerging products like the Tesla Cybercab, treating sightings at sites such as Giga Texas as indicators of development progress and timing rather than mere hype. Taken together, his work on production and markets presents Tesla as a global industrial and financial actor, with particular attention to how factory decisions and investor behavior reflect on the company’s trajectory.
Vehicle technology, owner experience, and Starlink
On the vehicle side, Klender writes closely about how Tesla’s features behave in real use. His analysis of a Tesla Model 3 relying on regenerative braking to avoid being stranded breaks down how the system works, what distinguishes it from conventional setups, and how these technical details matter in practical scenarios. He frequently revisits software features, updates, and the way they change daily ownership, aligning technical explanations with concrete outcomes for drivers. Beyond cars, he extends his beat to SpaceX and Starlink, chronicling launches such as the Falcon 9 mission that carried the 7,000th Starlink satellite and quantifying Starlink’s share of active satellites in orbit. In these pieces he treats Starlink as infrastructure, focusing on scale, deployment, and the implications for global connectivity rather than only the spectacle of launches.
Klender has been reporting on electric mobility for Teslarati since August 2019, building a steady archive that blends breaking news with follow-through on legal cases, regulatory debates, and major product initiatives. His work is grounded in company filings, court proceedings, factory developments, and on-the-ground incidents, and he consistently frames Tesla and related Musk ventures through the lens of technology’s real-world impact on users and markets.
4 more automobile journalists.
Aarian Marshall
Aarian Marshall is a staff writer at WIRED who stands out for covering how cars, software, and policy collide. She writes on transportation systems and cities, from the auto industry to broader mobility systems. Before WIRED, she reported on cities and urban policy for The Atlantic’s CityLab. Her beat runs from electric vehicles, fuel prices, tariffs, and car-buying decisions to autonomous vehicles, robotaxis, and software-defined cars. She reports with a systems view, linking policy shifts, technical failures, and urban life to what happens on streets, in repair shops, and at the pump.
Adrian Leung
Adrian Leung writes engineering-led coverage of Chinese electric vehicles and performance cars for CarNewsChina. He focuses on new energy vehicles, battery systems, powertrains, electric platforms, high-end domestic brands, and track-ready models, and he explains technical details in plain language for non-specialist readers. His reporting treats new models as hardware and systems stories, with precise figures on range, battery capacity, chassis layout, motor outputs, weight, and acceleration. He also covers the Chinese auto industry’s finances and technology roadmap, including sector profits, vehicle volumes, and solid-state battery timelines. His background in Electrical and Computer Engineering shows in the way he writes about vehicle electronics and battery management.
Al Pefley
Al Pefley is a television news reporter for CBS12 News whose work centers on how laws, law enforcement and local decisions shape everyday life for drivers and other residents. He reports in a general assignment role but returns often to transportation, public safety and pocketbook issues, treating driving as a point where policy, disability and policing intersect. His coverage includes driver-focused laws, fuel and tax policy, crime, policing and internal affairs findings, with a consistent focus on accountability and concrete consequences for people’s wallets, safety and trust in institutions. He explains county gas tax debates, campaign positions on teacher pay, property crime and retail theft in short, clear segments. Pefley works primarily on the scene, using live or recorded field reporting and interview-driven pieces to show what happened, why it matters and what comes next.
Aliza Savira
Aliza Savira focuses on the hidden financial costs of owning modern cars, especially how insurance can undermine expected savings. She writes about automobiles for MSN, looking at new technology and electric vehicles through everyday ownership rather than showroom appeal. Her work highlights the gap between promises of cheaper running costs and the full financial picture of owning a vehicle. In electric vehicle coverage, she treats insurance premiums as a key ownership problem that can erode long-term value. She stays close to practical questions drivers face, such as which recurring costs matter most after purchase. She reports on how insurance structures and premium levels interact with new automotive technology. Her beat is consumer-focused automobile reporting, with a clear, utilitarian lens on ownership experience, recurring expenses, and risk, rather than lifestyle or performance.