Lifestyle
Tesla’s latest referral program prize includes Tesla Semi unveiling event invitation
Tesla introduced yet another referral program today, the company’s ninth since its July, 2015 inception date. In an email sent to existing Model S and Model X owners, and through a posting on the company’s website, Tesla revealed that participants of its most recent referral program who refer 5 or more vehicle sales will have the opportunity to attend the Tesla Semi unveiling event that’s slated for September 28, 2017.
According to the details outlined in Tesla’s latest referral program, existing owners also have the power to gift free unlimited Supercharging to their choice of five friends that are looking to purchase a Model S or Model X. Other prizes include Radio Flyer’s Tesla Model S for Kids, early access to Tesla’s Solar Roof, and a Founders Series Powerwall 2.
“As a thank you, we will send you a drivable Tesla Model S for Kids with your first referral. With two referrals, you will receive early access to Solar Roof. Tesla owners with three referrals will receive a set of four 21” forged‑aluminum Arachnid wheels. Other awards include a Founders Series Powerwall 2 and a VIP invitation for two to our Tesla Semi Truck Unveil Event.” says Tesla through email.
Today’s program overlaps with the previous referral program which is set to end on June 15, 2017. Because of the overlap, Tesla says that referrals obtained in the last program will also count towards current awards in the new program.
We’ve provided the full details of the newest Tesla Referral Program below. Model S and Model X buyers looking to save $1,000 off the purchase price and receive free unlimited Supercharging, for life, are welcomed to use our referral code.
REFERRAL PROGRAM (May 19 to Dec. 31, 2017)
Starting May 19, 2017, Tesla owners can give five friends free unlimited Supercharging and a $1,000 credit toward a new Model S or Model X with their personal referral code. As a thank you, owners will be eligible to receive exclusive Referral Program awards, including:
1 Qualifying Referral: Founders Series Tesla Model S for Kids
Share the Tesla experience with your kids, with this miniature drivable electric Model S – including working headlights, a sound system, and a charge port, just like yours.
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2 Qualifying Referrals: Early Access Token for Solar Roof
Be one of the first to get Solar Roof with this early-access token for priority scheduling of a Solar Roof installation. If you do not use this award, the token may be given to a friend.
3 Qualifying Referrals: 21” Arachnid Wheels
Enhance the performance of your Model S with exclusive 21” forged-aluminum Arachnid wheels in silver. These are not available to the public and will be available for installation in August for winners in this program.
4 Qualifying Referrals: Founders Series Powerwall 2
Store energy for future use and provide backup power with this red, limited-production Powerwall 2 home battery. This edition is not available to the public and will be available for installation starting Fall 2017 for winners in this program. Installation charges may apply.
5 Qualifying Referrals: Tesla Semi Truck Unveil Invitation
Experience the official unveil of our semi truck on September 28, 2017. Your VIP invitation is valid for you and one guest.
Ludicrous P100D Model S or Model X and Private SpaceX Tours
Each qualified referral gets you one entry into our Referral Program drawing. The next drawing will take place on June 30, 2017.
Ludicrous P100D Model S or Model X + Private SpaceX Tour: One referrer will win a Ludicrous P100D Model S or Model X as well as a private tour for four of the SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles, including travel and accommodations. SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. SpaceX headquarters is not open to the public.
SpaceX Tour: Five referrers will win a tour for four of the SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles, including travel and accommodations.
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Thank you for helping to accelerate our transition to sustainable energy.
Limits
Related order must be placed between May 19, 2017 and December 31, 2017. Owners with one or more referrals in the previous phase between March 16, 2017 and May 19, 2017 will be eligible for both updated and previous phase awards until June 15, 2017. Referral order vehicles must be actually delivered to qualify for awards. Pre-owned vehicles are not eligible. Model 3 orders are not eligible. Limit of 5 referrals per owner. Referral code must be applied at the time of order and cannot be added after the order has been placed. Free unlimited Supercharging will only apply to the original vehicle owner and only for the duration of original vehicle ownership.
Must be at least 18 years old to be eligible for awards. No entry fee, payment or purchase required for the drawing. A random drawing will be held on or around June 30, 2017 to determine the winners, who will be contacted thereafter. Awards are non-transferable and not redeemable for cash. The customer is responsible for all taxes and local requirements and fees. Customers are responsible for their own travel and accommodations unless otherwise specified. SpaceX tours are subject to the visitor meeting facility entrance eligibility criteria. Program and awards are conditional on and subject to local laws and regulations. Unfortunately, Ohio and Virginia residents are not eligible for awards.
The customer may not be an employee, legal representative or partner of Tesla or any Affiliate of Tesla. Nothing in the Referral Program shall be deemed to create any kind of relationship between the referrer and Tesla or any of Tesla’s Affiliates. The referrer has no authority to represent or bind Tesla. Terms and conditions are subject to change. Some awards including the Semi Unveil Invitation may be updated on or after August 15, 2017.
Good Faith
We introduce programs such as these in good faith and expect the same good faith in return. Please note that we may withhold awards where we believe customers are acting in bad faith or otherwise acting contrary to the intent of this program. To be clear, commercializing or otherwise selling referral codes is not appropriate, and we will not honor such codes. We cannot cover every nefarious scenario, nor will we attempt to, but we do promise to be fair and reasonable.
Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
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
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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.
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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.
Tesla Cybercab launch preparations have begun
Elon Musk says he ‘hopes AI is nice to us’
