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2014 – The Year of the Tesla Model S

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Model S by lake2014 has been a year of amazing experiences one of which is my journey with owning a Tesla Model S.

I entered 2014 researching and thinking about purchasing a hybrid car to replace my aging high mileage Acura MDX but ended up buying a Tesla Model S. I couldn’t convince myself that having two separate power systems in a hybrid actually made sense plus the improvements in MPG was marginal at best. My quest to purchasing a new car turned out to be something much larger than I expected.

After benchmarking cost of ownership of a Tesla versus a new MDX, I was convinced that I could afford the Model S. That was the beginning of a wonderful journey to come.

Tesla Model S Ownership

Like many potential buyers, I was nervous about buying a crazy-expensive car from a high-tech startup that was a new player in the automotive world. While researching everything I could I encountered the Tesla Motors and the Tesla Motors Club forums and found an active and vibrant community of early adopters and potential owners. The Tesla community eased many of my fears and answered a lot of questions which ultimately helped me cope through the painful waiting phase until the day I took delivery of my Model S.

As I went through the process I realized that researching, buying, taking delivery and owning the Model S was going to be quite a different experience and adventure so I decided to document my journey by writing about it.

Tesla Lifestyle Community

Owning Model S e-bookI created a starter WordPress site and wrote my first “Hello World” post in March before test driving the Model S. Fast forward nine months and here I am with well over a 100 posts. I started actively engaging on Twitter via @teslaliving and made many friends along the way. I started this adventure as a small fish learning to swim in this great big sea, but 1,500 tweets and more than 1,000 followers later, I’m getting the hang of things and starting to find my niche as a voice within the Tesla community. This I find amazing.

As I continued to learn more about owning the Model S I wrote candidly about both the good and the bad. And despite being a a huge fan of Tesla and the Model S, I believe that constructive feedback helps people improve and get better with time (ie. shuffle anyone?).

By the end of the year I was writing independent product reviews (my leather jacket was seen in a coat hook ad!), writing joint posts and collaborating with other well known voices within the Tesla community such as Nick Howe and the TeslaOwnerBlog.

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Engaging with the Tesla community has been an amazing experience. As time went on I realized that there was an even larger community out there, that of Electric Vehicle (EV) owners that are coming together to help educate and change the auto industry as a whole, and it’s been exciting to be a part of that larger community.

Giving Back

Auburn MA SC TweetI felt a need to help the growing Tesla community beyond my writing.

There wasn’t a good way to keep track of all of the new developments of Tesla Motors so I decided to develop a Tesla monitoring system which emails and tweets as new Superchargers, Tesla Stores, Service Centers, and Model S versions are released. I’m actively working with a number of groups to help integrate these notices into their own initiatives and am excited to be a part of that.

I look forward to the day when Tesla opens up its APIs to third party developers so applications like VisibleTesla and dash apps such as Tesla Apps can take things to the next level.

The Future is Bright

Solar InstalledHaving just finished my solar installation project, the future is looking bright. Between my new Solar City installation and the new local Auburn, MA Supercharger location my electric bills should drop significantly.

I’m looking forward to measuring and reporting on my experiences with the Model S as I continue down the road of ownership and graduate from being a new owner to an experienced Model S owner especially having notched several Tesla road trips, services, and other experiences under my belt.

Tesla has made mind-blowing improvements to the Model S in 2014 with the announcement of autopilot, all wheel drive rounding and 691hp to an already amazing vehicle. Tesla’s rapid growth of the Supercharger network (over 330 Superchargers worldwide at the time of writing) has been impressive to watch and as a Model S owner and investor I truly believe the company has unlimited growth opportunity ahead.

2014 was an exciting year and certainly the year of the Model S but I’m equally excited about the upcoming year of the Model X.

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I wish you all a Happy New Year and thank you for following along in my adventures.

Happy-new-Year-2014-Wallpapers-Images-3

"Rob's passion is technology and gadgets. An engineer by profession and an executive and founder at several high tech startups Rob has a unique view on technology and some strong opinions. When he's not writing about Tesla

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Lifestyle

Watch Tesla’s “guardian angel” FSD feature take over for collision evasion

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Tesla’s Automatic Collision Evasion feature can be seen in one of the first owner videos of it in action.

Tesla owner Spencer (@scotsrule08) posted on Monday that the feature “worked flawlessly,” saying FSD reengaged itself just as he was about to hit a curb. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla’s AI team, shared the clip and wrote, “A guardian angel always looking out for you.”

The video arrives in the middle of a staged rollout. Tesla first shipped Automatic Collision Evasion with FSD (Supervised) v14.3.9 in software update 2026.27.6 earlier this month, which Teslarati covered as it reached cars. Update 2026.27.10, which began going out on September 19, carried the feature improvements with FSD v14.3.10, according to release notes tracked by Not a Tesla App. The newer 2026.27.11 build is now reaching another wave of vehicles.


The feature only runs on HW4 vehicles, and it requires an active FSD purchase or subscription with both FSD (Supervised) and Automatic Emergency Braking enabled. HW3 owners receive FSD v14.2 Lite in the same updates, but that build does not include collision evasion.

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Tesla’s release notes describe two triggers. The first is an imminent frontal collision that braking alone may not prevent, in which case the car can activate FSD to steer, brake or accelerate around the hazard. That scenario is limited to highways below 85 mph, with no pedestrians or cyclists detected and no slippery road surface. The second covers a driver who appears inattentive, such as reaching into the back seat, or who seems to have switched off FSD by accident. Spencer’s curb clip appears to fall into that second category.

Tesla plans big safety improvements for Full Self-Driving v15

Once the system takes over, the accelerator is muted and light brake input will not cancel the maneuver. Drivers need to apply firm, deliberate steering force to take back control, and the car chimes to hand control back once the danger has passed.

Elluswamy recently noted that earlier hazard prediction, faster reaction time and better collision avoidance would arrive with FSD v15, the next major version.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig

Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.

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Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”


The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.

This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.

What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.

That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.

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Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production

Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.

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Concept rendering of Tesla Optimus in mass production

Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.

Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.

Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.

New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point

Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.

Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.

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