Lifestyle
A road trip without Tesla Autopilot is akin to torture
I’ve recently returned from a family beach vacation that required about 600 miles of road travel. As an avid enthusiast and follower of the developments of Tesla, I am very aware of Autopilot’s capabilities and limitations and I hope it is one of the last times I have to cover such distance without its assistance. At the time of this writing, the current abilities of the system would have made the drive immeasurably better. 600 miles may not seem like a huge journey to some people, but compared to my regular travel diet, it may as well have been a million.
Let me set the tone. It has become an annual tradition for my in-laws to invite my family along to their beach vacation. The travel portion alone is a 1-2 day micro-convoy, typically lead by the father-in-law. Starting around Hershey, Pennsylvania, and enduring a passive Civil War history lesson on our way to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It always amazes me how regional diction can vary so much with a slight change in latitude. The normal traffic volume obstacles generally steal years from your life around Washington DC and Richmond, Virgina if you choose to take the I-95 straight shot down. Stopped traffic with no exit in sight is not a good match for our tiny-bladdered precious cargo. Therefore, we take the long way around and hope for thinner crowds.
In my younger years, before children, corrective lenses and normal bodily wear and tear, I would go as far to say that I enjoyed the long drive. My undivided attention to the road and surroundings must have added a layer of control and ease that I no longer feel. Now I am responsible for more lives. Ironically, the same lives that I am constantly trying to protect are also unintentionally adding sensory distractions, exponentially diluting the focus that needs to be dedicated to the road.
“Holding onto the wheel as you generally progress in a straight line forward seems more akin to torture.”
I still enjoy driving, but I hardly consider highway travel to be true driving. Holding onto the wheel as you generally progress in a straight line forward seems more akin to torture. Winding local roads that provide constant stimulation and driving dynamics are much more enjoyable. I’m not sure what the statistics would say, but I am a safer, more alert, driver on roads like this.
While the task of following the leader may seem incredibly simple on the surface, a deeper evaluation reveals why the assistance of Autopilot would excel in all the areas that a human might struggle. Attention, fatigue, refined control, and response time are common weaknesses that every person has to some extent. This type of driving can be quite dangerous, and it’s important to not lose respect for that.
It is extremely difficult to devote complete attention to the road for the entirety of 600 miles. There is a pretty good chance that most drivers will find themselves looking around occasionally. We passed a couple of crashes along the way and observed a few near misses from people rubbernecking. Even if you had unbroken focus, unexpected events can happen during a quick blind-spot check.
Autopilot cannot see infinitely in all directions, but it is still able to constantly maintain its views in normal traffic. It won’t look away for a moment. As a machine, it’s programmed to perform its given task and cannot be distracted or break focus.
Fatigue is a very real risk that grows more dangerous with every mile. It can seemingly creep up and at any moment. While it helps to have company in the vehicle, if conversation wanes, things can get dicey.
Again, Autopilot cannot grow tired over time. There is no way that it can fall asleep.
I think it is safe to assume that nearly everyone has wandered onto the rumble strips on the edge of the lane at some point – often causing a slight overreaction to correct. Or maybe you just seem to drift along within your lane, visiting each side from time to time. I have to admit, despite my acknowledgment of drifting, it sometimes seems that a conscious effort to correct it is temporarily not effective. I don’t want to quickly veer back into alignment in a big action that would seem like I lost control or attention, but my attempts to make a slow move back to the middle of the lane are not working. Can I blame the car or the road for this? Perhaps it’s the trend of the car in front of me and my mental ‘autopilot’ is just following the same path. Maybe I’m being hypnotized and lured in by the rhythmic dashed lines sweeping by. Whatever the cause, soon the neighboring semi’s graceful forward stampede gets a bit too close for comfort and I snap out of it as my heart goes into momentary adrenaline mode. A good anxiety recipe for the travelers around me. It is important for people like me to admit that we are crappy drivers. At least I’m not the moron that is too lazy to flick the turn signal wand for lane shifts.
As Autopilot matures, so does its ability to stay centered within a lane. As soon as I get assistance from Autopilot, the road and people around me will become that much safer. Like a train fixed to a track, it can’t be hypnotized or anxious through my own or neighboring human error. And it certainly will not shift from one to another without the driver initiating via a signal.
Among the most important benefits of Autopilot has to be the response time. The scenario that comes to mind is sudden deceleration events. Maybe your eyes are focused on a roadside sight or the neighboring lane when the vehicle in front of yours begins to slow. Even if you catch it in time to slow before a collision, a sudden slowing of your own vehicle reduces the reaction time for the drivers behind you. It gets exponentially more dangerous for a driver to the rear and often ends in contact. Reaction time circles back to the fact that autopilot is always paying attention.
My travels would have been far less stressful if I had the aid of Autopilot. The closest experience I had to an Autopilot environment took place while I was in the passenger seat while my wife drove. I was able to take in some truly breathtaking views that I may have missed if I were safely focused on traffic. Who knew that the Virginian Appalachian mountains were so beautiful? A scenic overlook that could easily be missed since the highway wound around bends in a clearing.
Full autonomy will be the ultimate protection against me and my driving tendencies. For now, the beta Autopilot can serve as the perfect supplement to my inadequacies.
Not to undersell the importance of safety, but I want to be able to enjoy a long road trip again. I want to feel comfortable enough to pry just one hand off the wheel so that I can annihilate a can of Pringles while the kids are too engrossed in Finding Nemo to notice I should have shared. I want to feel like I’m no longer terrorizing my wife and the drivers around me with my inexplicable tendency to grind and ping pong the edges of my lane.
I fantasize about this incredible sense of ease that Autopilot would add to a trip of this sort. The desire for more frequent and further road trips may find welcome. Road travel once defined an era of adventure and exploration. It powered local tourism and small business economies. Before highways became monsters and gas pumps robbed us of our planet’s future in addition to hard-earn money, there was a sense of unbound geographical freedom. It sparked the imagination of the children in the back seat while giving adults conquered goals. I want that. I need that. I need Autopilot.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk talks Tesla Roadster’s future
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Elon Musk
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.
SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.
The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.
Elon Musk teases crazy outlook for xAI against its competitors
Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.
For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.
The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.
The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.
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