Tesla Finally Goes To Trial For Racism In Its Factory

Happy Monday! It's September 21, 2026, and this is The Morning Shift — your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you'll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning's edition, we're looking at the trial against Tesla for alleged racism in its California factory, as well as U.S. fears of Chinese cars. We'll also look at Volkswagen's accelerated plans to downsize, and the death of the U.S. EV market. 

If you'd like a recap of the latest auto news sent to your inbox each weekday, you can sign up for Jalopnik's free Morning Shift newsletter here.

Tesla has long been accused of racist practices in its original Fremont factory — practices ranging from "doing nothing about graffiti'd slurs" to "actively suppressing wages for Black workers" — and the legal pushback against these practices has been going on for years. Now, finally, everything's actually going to a judge. From Reuters:

Sept 21 (Reuters) – A California agency's lawsuit accusing Tesla ​of allowing rampant race discrimination at its flagship assembly plant is set to go to trial ‌on Monday, one of a series of similar lawsuits being faced by the electric vehicle maker.

Lawyers for Tesla and the California Civil Rights Department will square off in Oakland before state Superior Court Judge Peter Borkon, who has scheduled the trial to run until October ​30.

In the lawsuit filed in 2022, the California Civil Rights Department claims Black workers at Tesla's Fremont, California ​plant were subjected to pervasive harassment by other employees, including racial slurs and graffiti, and ⁠Tesla failed to prevent or stop it. Tesla is also accused of paying Black workers less than others and ​depriving them of opportunities for promotions.

Judge Borkon has ruled on Tesla's side in the past, but he's also an openly gay man who may well have faced workplace discrimination himself. What does this mean for the case? Who knows!

President Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping soon, where the two will talk over plenty of international trade specifics. Those specifics are set to include BYD, the Chinese automaker that hopes to get a foothold in the U.S., and this has scared pretty much everyone in the States. Dealers, suppliers, automakers, no one wants BYD here. From Automotive News:

A broad coalition of automakers, suppliers and dealers is calling on President Donald Trump to keep Chinese cars out of the U.S., stepping up the plea ahead of a planned summit between the countries next week that could include a role for Chinese electric-vehicle giant BYD Co.

In a letter to Trump that was seen by Bloomberg News, the coalition said the existing barriers that effectively ban China from the U.S. auto market are crucial to maintaining fair competition. The group outlined security risks and economic threats to the U.S. posed by subsidized Chinese automobiles and connected vehicle technology.

"Allowing them to open a domestic facility would provide a foothold in the U.S. market at the expense of manufacturers operating here," according to the letter. "Localized Chinese production will not advance the administration's manufacturing jobs and national security agendas."

I've spent the past few days in a press car from a U.S. company, and I say let BYD in. If a Chinese company, paying U.S. workers U.S. wages to work in a U.S. factory, can make better and cheaper cars than the domestic competition, that's the domestic competition's fault. The labor is the same, where's the rest of the vehicle's cost going?

Volkswagen, occasionally the largest automaker in the world, has decided it's bored of being that. Now it wants to be the most profitable automaker in the world, so it's going for lower volume and lower costs. It's also going for those goals as soon as possible, to keep the shareholders happy. From Reuters:

FRANKFURT/BERLIN, Sept 21 (Reuters) – Volkswagen will ramp up its restructuring programme, the head of its core brand said on Monday ‌as German auto workers staged nationwide protests less than three days after the company's profit warning highlighted sectoral challenges from high costs and fierce Asian competition.

The protests at Volkswagen, BMW and parts supplier Bosch are in response to painful job cuts, possible production relocations and even ​plant closures for Germany's most important industry in a crisis that was also reflected in the result ​of two state elections on Sunday.

"I had hoped that the measures agreed in 2024 would ⁠already be sufficient. Unfortunately, that has not been the case," Volkswagen brand head Thomas Schaefer told a staff meeting ​at the company's Wolfsburg headquarters.

This continues to strike me as a short-sighted business move that keeps quarterly profits up at the cost of long-term gains. What company wants to sell less of its product? Volkswagen isn't some single artisan selling handmade jewelry, it's a massive international corporation. Cutting costs is a fast way to make the numbers look good, but cutting investments in your company's future is just a death spiral with better branding. 

The Trump administration is openly and proudly anti-EV, and it's encouraging both automakers and buyers to shift back to internal combustion vehicles through every lever it can pull: Cutting of subsidies, rollbacks of emissions regulations, and a general loathing of anything it deems too futuristic. As such, the EV market is struggling. From Automotive News: 

The U.S. electric vehicle market is struggling to recover nearly a year after the repeal of the federal EV tax credit sparked a buying frenzy followed by a deep slump.

With the tax credit gone and the Trump administration relaxing fuel-economy standards and emissions rules, automakers are shifting back to combustion engines, including V-8s, while accelerating development of hybrid models for fuel-conscious consumers.

"The death of the internal combustion engine has been greatly exaggerated," said Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iSeeCars. "The biggest thing that's happened in the last year is manufacturers embracing the reality of how little market demand there is for EVs."

They say regulations are written in blood, and fuel economy standards are written in the blood of everyone who's ever choked on smog or died in a climate change-fueled natural disaster. The goal of these regulations isn't to follow consumer preference, but to drive it — pushing people into cleaner vehicles the same way we were all pushed into buying bread without sawdust in it. Market demand is the problem, not the target. 

According to History's "This Day In History" page, this is the only historical event to ever happen on September 21. I'm going to need one of you beautiful people out there to do something really cool today, so I have something else to reference next year. 

I actually paid for gas yesterday, for the first time in a while, and yeesh. 

Do you remember?