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
How to use Grok Bot to block spam calls and texts
Musk told users to ask Grok Bot to scrub their phone numbers from spam lists.
Elon Musk has a new use case for Grok Bot, and it is the spam call. On Thursday he replied to an X user named Arash with a short instruction: “Ask your @Grok @Bot to remove your phone number from spam call & text lists!” Arash had said he got tired of the calls, had an AI bot find his number on listing sites and file removal requests, and packaged the process as a free skill for others.
The skill is called Spam-Call Scrubber, which is described to find a phone number on people search sites and data brokers, submits the opt outs, completes the confirmation emails those sites send back, and rechecks on a schedule the user picks. Using it requires the Grok Bot app. The pitch is time saved, since most broker opt outs sit behind separate forms on separate sites.
Ask your @Grok @Bot to remove your phone number from spam call & text lists!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 15, 2026
Musk said Grok Bot now gives each bot its own email address, and that it can detect scam emails. On Thursday he also said SpaceX would make users whole if the bot botches a purchase or leaks a card, then told users to shop away from Amazon after the retailer blocked the agent, as Teslarati reported. The terms of service we reviewed at the time put responsibility for what an agent does on the user.
For Tesla owners, Grok Bot is not just a phone app. Tesla brought Grok Bot into its vehicles on September 22, and we argued earlier this week that the Cybercab’s real advantage may be the errands it runs during a ride. Every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y Robotaxi fleet has it enabled. The more routine tasks like this one become, the more a rider has reason to hand over something personal in the back seat.
The new Spam-Call Scrubber skill can be downloaded for free and works on sites that honor removal requests, while noting that listings can reappear, and illegal robocallers do not check any registry. Whether Spam-Call Scrubber cuts anyone’s call volume is something the first wave of users will find out, and Musk’s endorsement guarantees that wave is coming.
For a century, the car has asked the same thing of its owner, which is basically to pay attention. Even the best ride-hailing app like Uber or Lyft only moved the problem into someone else’s hands. You stopped driving, but you still sat in a stranger’s car, while half listening, and wondering whether to take a phone call in the car without being rude. The Cybercab has no wheel, no pedals and no driver. With Grok @bot now live inside it, it becomes something else entirely, and I think that matters more than the fleet count that everyone is tracking.
Grok @bot is an agent, not a voice assistant. A rider signs in once, and from then on can say what they need and watch it happen. Order dinner from a favorite restaurant. Fill the grocery cart. Move money, answer email, adjust a calendar, push a work project forward. Tesla engineer Yun-Ta Tsai confirmed it is enabled across every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y fleet, and Tesla’s own pitch is that Full Self-Driving handles the commute while Grok handles the errands.
Think about what that does to a thirty minute ride. Uber sells you a trip, while Waymo sells you the same trip in a more private setting. Tesla is selling the thirty minutes themselves, returned to you with an assistant attached. Errands that used to eat a Saturday get done between pickup and drop off. The ride stops being dead time between two places and becomes a place of its own.
Tesla integrates Grok Bot into its vehicles for the ultimate personal assistant
Best of all, your Bots follow you into any Cybercab, and presumably your own Tesla, then logs you out automatically when you step out. Anyone can bolt a chatbot onto a screen, but much harder to own the vehicle, the autonomy stack and the assistant at once. It also quietly ties SpaceX’s Super Intelligence business to Tesla’s fleet, after Tesla converted its xAI stake into SpaceX equity. The relationship between those two companies is getting harder to describe as separate.
This is also where the hard questions start, because an agent that can spend your money in a vehicle other people also ride in needs some answers. How does it handle a voice it shouldn’t trust? What gets recorded, who can see it, and for how long? What happens when a rider leaves halfway through a task?
If Tesla gets those answers right, the scoreboard changes. We have been counting Cybercabs and wait times. The more telling number may be what riders accomplish per trip. That is data almost no one else will ever have, and it is the real reason to watch Grok @bot.
What do you think? Leave me a comment.
Lifestyle
Tesla’s mirrorless Cybercab will give riders a visibility upgrade
Tesla engineer confirms Cybercab update letting riders pull up rear and repeater cameras on demand.
Tesla is working on a Cybercab update that would let passengers pull up the vehicle’s rear and side cameras on demand, and the request came straight from a rider.
The exchange played out on X late Friday. Cybercab rider Dan Burkland shared photos of the two-seater’s cabin screen after an evening ride, praised the UI team’s work, and left one request: let riders open the rear and repeater cameras whenever they want, “especially for peace of mind.” Tesla UI software engineer Evan (@CarCoder) answered with two words: “In development.”
The Tesla UI team absolutely crushed it with the infotainment software. Nicely done @CarCoder!
One feature request: Allow folks to pull up the rear & repeater cameras on demand. This would be great especially for peace of mind. https://t.co/mNAOSLx6pE
— Dan Burkland (@DBurkland) October 10, 2026
The idea fits a pattern Teslarati has tracked since public rides began. Days after paid Cybercab service opened in Austin, Tesla sent riders a survey that asked them to rate the touchscreen, the app and the cabin, and to pick the features they wanted most. We reported on that survey in September, and a camera view is the kind of small software change Tesla can push quickly if riders keep asking.
It also speaks to something unique about the vehicle. With no steering wheel, no pedals and no driver, passengers have no mirror to check and no way to see behind them. The hardware is clearly built for camera awareness, from the repeater cameras to the rear camera. Letting a passenger look through those same cameras would give a nervous first time rider a way to confirm what is around the car.
The timing matters because the fleet is growing fast. Tesla’s Robotaxi account said on Saturday that more than 300 Cybercabs are now serving Austin, an eightfold increase in 30 days, and Tesla AI chief Ashok Elluswamy named Dallas as the next city. More cars and more cities mean more people riding in a driverless vehicle for the first time, which is exactly when small trust features carry weight.
For now, the feature is confirmed only as in development. If Tesla follows its usual pattern with Cybercab software, riders could see it appear in a point release without any announcement, and Teslarati will watch for it.
The Starship moon landing number NASA and Elon Musk can’t agree on
Tesla’s secretive “Project Crystal Sun” gets a big green light in Texas
