Lifestyle
2 Teslas, the Pan-American Highway, and an extreme adventure
Driving an electric vehicle down the Pan-American Highway is no easy feat but a team in two Teslas is doing just that. Life is a journey and sometimes we find ourselves in the most interesting places. This is literally true for Electric Americas Foundation founder, Martin Canabal. Martin is driving the Pan American Highway and has a team filming a documentary on the adventurous road trip. I interviewed Martin for CleanTechnica earlier this summer just after he started his trip from Alaska. This is a follow-up to that interview.
When we spoke, Martin was in Mexico and we talked about some of his adventures along the way from Alaska to Mexico. The team is taking two Teslas down the Pan-American Highway, the world’s longest motorable road. Although it starts in Alaska and ends in Patagonia, there will be a portion of the trip where they have to ship the cars across the Darién Gap, an area where the highway does not exist due to political and environmental reasons.
So far, Martin and his teams have endured flat tires, bad roads, heavy rain, and Mexican speed bumps. Martin explained that the speed bumps in Mexico are extremely huge and that he has to modify the tow hitch due to the speed bumps.
“We have taken the cars to places that I didn’t think we could be able to take them on this trip,” he said. One of those places is Punta Abreojos, Baja California. a remote fishing village in the Pacific.
“We slept in off-the-grid cabins with solar power (so no charging!), no charging stations in town. We could barely charge in some homes using the 110/12A mobile charger. We had to change tires, and we had to wait some days for them to arrive, so we could not reach our next charging station. The tire shop had a welding machine, but we did not have the correct plug, so we had to improvise.”
Bahia de Todos los Ángeles was another place Martin and his team visited in Baja, California. He told me they drove off the main roads to see shark whales and barely made it back in time to charge.
“We thought we could charge for some hours, but the voltage of the town was not enough, so no charging at all!”
In Cabo Pulmo, the roads were so bad that Martin had a flat tire and the two cars had become separated. And the bad roads ended up damaging their tires.
“We used a tire fix and had to put air on the wheel using a bicycle pump from someone who stop to help us. We had an electric air pump but it was on the other car, that had to leave the day before to replace the other tires. After that, we made a rule: we will not drive separately! After all of this, we were able to get replacement tires, replacement wheels, and everything we needed to repair and replace the tires, but we also added more weight and this affects our range.”
The team had to change their schedule and timings of the trip to replace all of the tires for the Model X, which had also gotten a flat tire.
“It was a challenge. In the end, we were able to buy old tires and continue our trip to Cabo San Lucas where we bought new tires. This story ended in Guadalajara where we were able to go to Tesla Service and were able to change the other two tires.”
Another extreme place that Martin and his team visited is El Peñon, a paragliding spot near Valle de Bravo.
“You get there driving countryside roads, and dirt roads. But the place is majestic, and it is one of the best paragliding/Hang Gliding in the world!”
Martin’s last Tesla Service appointment took place in Mexico City where they looked at the cars to make sure that any repairs were done. After Mexico City, there will be no more Tesla Service Centers for the team as they continue along the Pan-American Highway.
“We have road service in Mexico but in a week after we leave the country, we won’t have any support from Tesla. That will be a challenge if something happens. We also had our last Tesla Supercharger in Puebla, Mexico.”
While Martin was chatting with me, his car was at a local Nissan dealership that had charging stations. As for charging along the rest of the trip, Martin was prepared to be creative.
The initial plan didn’t include charging stations past certain points, however, Martin emphasized that the EV charging landscape has changed and he’s seeing this along his trip.
“I planned this trip in 2020 and we’re supposed to charge between several days. There were no charging stations. Now we are in Puerto Escondido and we’re going to be here for four days. We have to film for the documentary and we have to charge. Normally it was going to be slow with no chargers.”
“Now, we can find chargers so our situation is much better now. I think things have improved a lot in two years. When I did my research, there was not a lot of charging stations for our route from Mexico to Argentina. And now I see more. And that’s incredible.”
“On the other hand, we were supposed to charge using the normal outlet. But we found out that this isn’t possible all the time. In several places, we tried to charge it and the Tesla didn’t charge because it sensed that the grid was not okay.”
Martin and the team expect that this will be a common occurrence for the rest of the trip. One unexpected surprise was that they didn’t have to pay for Supercharging in Mexico.
“Since Tesla isn’t able to charge for Supercharging in Mexico, hotels were incentivized for installing destination chargers which were great for us.”
Martin noted that soon, Tesla would be charging for Supercharging in Mexico but for his trip, however, he didn’t have to pay for Supercharging. He and the team also had hotel adventures. Some were expensive, some were reasonable, and some, he said with a laugh, were difficult to explain.
As Martin continues his journey across the Pan-American Highway, he plans to keep me updated on his progress. And when he does, I’ll be sure to share his stories here.
Your feedback is important. If you have any comments, concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1
Elon Musk
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The Boring Company’s Prufrock MB2 is commissioned and ready to mine beneath Nashville’s streets.
The Boring Company’s second tunnel boring machine, Prufrock MB2, is officially ready to dig in Nashville. The company confirmed the news on X, posting: “Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here. Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start? And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August!”
MB2 arrives with meaningful improvements over its predecessor. Lessons learned from the launch and operation of MB1 have already been applied to MB2 to improve efficiency and prepare the machine for launch.
Traditional tunnel boring machines operate in a stop-and-go cycle, digging roughly five feet, halt, erect precast concrete segments to line the tunnel wall, then resume. That repeated interruption is one of the main reasons conventional tunneling is slow and expensive. Prufrock is designed to install the tunnel liner simultaneously with mining, eliminating the need to stop every five feet. The machine also skips the need for excavated launch pits. Prufrock arrives on a truck, tilts down, and launches into the ground within 24 hours. And when the tunnel is complete, it emerges from the ground and drives to its next launch site on a trailer, eliminating the need for expensive cranes or pit excavation. The machine is also fully electric and runs with zero people in the tunnel during normal operations, controlled remotely from a surface operations center.
Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here.
Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start?
And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August! pic.twitter.com/TTrMql2aRg
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) June 17, 2026
It won’t be long before we hear of another major update on The Boring Company’s Music City Loop project – a planned underground transit network beneath Nashville that would move passengers in electric vehicles through a series of tunnels at highway speeds, and bypassing surface traffic entirely. Nashville was selected in part because of its strong rock conditions that suits the Prufrock machines well, and relatively less regulatory hurdles.
Progress has been steady on multiple fronts. All 37 permits and approvals required ahead of tunneling have been obtained, out of 45 total. Key wins include a fully executed TDOT tunnel permit authorizing 25 miles of tunnel, unanimous airport authority approval for a Nashville International Airport station, and the city’s first residential station agreement serving downtown tower residents.
With MB1 already tunneling, MB2 now commissioned, and MB3 shipping in August, Nashville is becoming something of a live proving ground for scaled tunnel boring. The broader ambition is not limited to one city. The Boring Company’s stated goal is to make underground transportation a practical alternative to surface roads across major metro areas. Nashville is one of many cities, including a successful Las Vegas tunnel system, where that idea is being put to the test at real speed.
Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.
While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure
The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.
Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.
As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.
Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
Elon Musk
SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app
SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.
SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.
Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.
Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.
Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.
Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.
Tesla Cybercab launch is imminent after latest sighting at Giga Texas
Elon Musk says this part of Tesla ‘makes no sense’
