Lifestyle
Life after my Tesla 30 day Autopilot Trial ends: Where do I go from here?
As I lament the end of my 30 day trial of Autopilot, I thought a summary of the features would be helpful to those not yet familiar with the technology.
I bought my Tesla S70D in November of last year as an inventory model with nearly every feature I would have selected on line including the color. At the time, all of the hardware for Autopilot was included in the build but the software had not been installed.
I travel around New England for my work and had an opportunity to show a business associate, who happens to be a big “car guy” from Dallas Texas my new Tesla. I alerted him that I didn’t have the famous Autopilot that he had been watching in videos on line, but the car was still beautiful and thrilling to drive. I picked him up at the airport late and headed to the hotel before customer visits the next day. When we came out to the car in the morning, there it was! A software download overnight giving me a 30 day trial of Autopilot! The timing couldn’t have been better!
First thing we did, stood in the parking lot and summoned the car out of the spot. After all, there’s no reason to ding your car doors for the very first time when you can open them wide in a place just 15 feet back from where you parked!
Next, we got on the highway and pulled the cruise control stalk one time. I felt the accelerator hold where we were so I took my foot off and relaxed a bit. Slowly creeping up on the car in front of us, the dash showed me the silhouette of the car in front getting closer. I’d have to push the stalk down to reduce my speed in the past, but as we got within 2 car lengths, I saw the MPH start to go down as we tracked perfectly behind the next car at a constant distance. Cool! Traffic aware cruise control! When the guy in front slows down, you slow down without a thought and even if he comes to a stop, when he takes off, you take off maintaining the set car length distance.
Next, pull back on the stalk twice. The steering wheel goes stiff and takes over keeping the car right in the middle of the lane. With decent lane lines on both sides, the steering was better than I would have been on my own, right down the center. Even in bends in the road, the vision system looks far enough ahead to anticipate the turn and keep you right in the center of the lane.
We got to our first appointment and entered the parking lot. I drove slowly by a spot and not seeing any others close by I put the car in reverse and to my surprise, the center screen showed the spot on my left and a button to “Auto Park” I pushed the button and the car started backing up, then the steering wheel started turning very fast on its own to back me into the spot. We were a little close to the lane before starting the process so we couldn’t quite make it in the first go, but no intervention necessary, the car went into drive, wheel turned the opposite way, we pulled forward a bit, then continued backing right in the middle of the spot. Perfect!
-
Getting the hang of Autopilot on the highway, I decided to try it out long distance for my trip from Central Connecticut all the way to Boston. I didn’t need to touch the wheel, accelerator or break except when we were exiting the Mass pike. Even in stop and go traffic on Storrow Drive, the car stayed in Autopilot and performed flawlessly.
After dropping my associate off at the airport, I travelled the rest of the way home to Southern New Hampshire again “no hands, no feet”! I did keep a finger on the wheel just in case, but I got confident enough with the system that I know I could have let go all together. The car does, however remind you to keep a hand on the wheel with a notification on the dash and by turning the radio volume all the way down until you grab the wheel.
The next day, I went back to Boston with my wife to pick up my daughter at the train. We were to park outside the train station and wait for her to arrive. Slowly pulling up the street, we passed an open parking spot (actually a fire hydrant location, there’s no open parking spots in Boston!) but we’d be sitting in the car so no problem. Again, as soon as I put the car in reverse, the parallel spot showed up on the center screen with a button to auto park. Again, the car took over turning the wheel and reversing right into the spot with perfection. My wife told me to pull out and do it again so she could video this time!!!
Over the weekend, it was time to wash the Tesla. I did a thorough job on the exterior and vacuumed and wiped all surfaces on the interior. Now I’ve got to put the car in the garage, but, I just cleaned everything and if I get in the car, I’ll probably drag in and deposit sand or small pebbles on the rug! No worries! Autopilot allows you to stand along the side of your car, and using the key fob, park it in the garage and close the garage door with one tap of the fob! Amazing!
Now, I’m not that compulsive about my rugs, so I’ll probably not need to use the “Auto park in my garage” feature, and I’m still parking at the far end of parking lots away from other potential dings so I have no problem opening my doors, but if I had to park in a very tight spot, Autopark will be an awesome feature to have.
Auburn Massachusetts Supercharger
For the most part, my daily travel is a few miles from home to the office on town roads but frequently I am on an extended road trip somewhere in New England. I’ve gotten over the range anxiety with a number of strategically placed Supercharger stations available and having used Plug share in a pinch a couple times. I definitely see using Autopilot on the highway allowing me to relax a bit but also keep me safer on the trip than if I were driving myself!
Do I take the plunge and plunk down $3k to keep this going or not? I still have a few days left to figure it out. Maybe Elon will just “forget to turn it off”?
-
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
-
The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
-
It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
Firmware
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla’s Summer Update lets owners join Google Meet, Teams, and Discord calls via cabin camera.
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, which just began rolling out to customer vehicles, now links the built-in web browser with the in-cabin camera feed and microphone input, thereby letting owners join video calls on nearly any browser-based service instead of just Zoom.
The change appears in Tesla’s own release notes for software version 2026.26 under “Web Browser,” which states that the vehicle can now use its interior camera and cabin microphone when a website requests access, with permission granted the same way a desktop browser handles it. As NotATeslaApp notes, this feature opens the door to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and other webcam-enabled sites to activate the in-car cabin-facing camera. The feed automatically crops and zooms to center the driver in frame.
Tesla has offered in-car video calling before, but only through a dedicated Zoom app that launched at the end of 2022, a stripped-down browser preloaded with Zoom’s own web client and gated behind Premium Connectivity. Opening the full browser to any camera-requesting site removes that walled garden. Elon Musk first called video conferencing “definitely a future feature” back in 2020, when the pandemic pushed remote meetings into daily life, so this update effectively finishes something Tesla has been promising for six years.
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
The feature keeps the same restrictions that applied to Zoom on Tesla vehicles. It only works while the car is parked; shifting into Drive disables the camera feed, according to the release notes. It is also limited to vehicles running Tesla’s AMD Ryzen infotainment hardware, meaning older Intel-based Model S and Model X units, along with early Model 3 and Model Y builds, don’t get it.
Turning the browser into a general entry point for the in-cabin camera, rather than routing everything through one local app, widens the number of third-party sites that can ask for access, even though Tesla’s permission prompt.
With the Summer update only days into its rollout, be sure to stay with us on TikTok and X to see the latest video demonstrations.
-
Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors: Morgan Stanley
SpaceX AI investment gamble will make it a big winner, firm says
